WAYS OF THINKING about women and men usually stall in a ‘maze of false dichotomies’, poet Adrienne Rich said many years ago.[i] So let’s delay entering the maze and remain here for as long as we can instead, in the open sunlit fields of dispassionate discussion.

One way is to, for the moment, take the labels off those emotionally charged categories, ‘women’ and ‘men’, and talk instead about two groups of roughly the same number, ‘Q’ and ‘P’, which together constitute the species ‘QP’. Let’s consider how three different groups of analysts – economic, environmental and security – might evaluate that species.