Sonnet Stanfill is a curator in textiles and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It’s an important position, but it’s not the director of the museum, which gives rise to her gripe:

In 2015, the world’s top 12 art museums as based on attendance — what I call the “directors’ dozen” — were all led by men. When Frances Morris became the director of the Tate Modern in April, she became the first woman to join the club. This gender gap extends from Europe to North America, where only five of the 33 directors of the most prominent museums (those with operating budgets of more than $20 million) are women, including Kaywin Feldman of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Nathalie Bondil of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It’s the leaders of those big-budget institutions who set the tone for all.

Simple statistics have become proof of gender discrimination, which makes perfect sense if one assumes, ceteris paribus, male and female (excluding, as Stanfill does, the existence of other underrepresented genders) to be equal. There can be no other explanation, because any other explanation is inherently sexist. Sexist discussion is not allowed.

The top three art museums have never been run by a woman. The Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are treasure-filled, international destinations.

This isn’t possible, under permissible discussion, except as a product of discrimination. And it’s not for lack of qualified candidates.

Many women work as curators. In American art museums, about 70 percent of curators are women; where I work, at the Victoria and Albert, also known as the V&A, the figure is about 75 percent.

One might note that more women than men study art history, for example, priming them for the position. And that serves to emphasize their absence at the top. While in other occupations, there may be a dearth of women out of self-selection, that’s not the case with museums.  Indeed, if this goes to show anything, it’s that 70% of directors should be female. Two of the big three should have female directors, while they’ve never had even one.

The numbers are stark and, in this instance, strongly suggest Stanfill is on a strong foundation. But then, she adds in one additional detail.

The report also asked whether some women simply aren’t applying for the top jobs. As a curator at the V&A for 18 years, and not on an executive shortlist, I’ve seen firsthand that for the women who aim to balance an arts career with a life outside the institution, reluctance to throw their hats into the ring may be linked to the international travel and all-consuming nature of a directors’ dozen role. For many, the most productive work years coincide with child-rearing years.

Biology rears its ugly head.* Women don’t apply for the job because they want to “balance career with life.” That’s certainly a fair desire. But it raises some issues that Stanfill seeks to circumvent rather than confront:

If they don’t apply for a job, how can you complain that they don’t get it?

If they are not entitled to a job they are unwilling to perform.

The polemic is a rhetorical argument against discriminating against women based on the ultimate fact of biology, that women give birth to children. There are side dishes to the main course, that women are saddled with the duties of child-rearing, whether by nature or nuture, and that women are forced to make a choice of work/life balance that men are not.

Mother Nature is a bitch. No amount of rhetoric will change the fact of biology, which is certainly ripe for a Ph.D. thesis on how childbirth through the feminist lens is misogynistic (yes, I’m sure there are hundreds of such scholarly papers, beside those about icebergs and volcanoes).

When second-wave feminism was in vogue, women recognized the limitations imposed by reality. Nature, physics, fashion all figured into their choices, and yet they confronted them in terms of reality rather than to pretend it didn’t exist and rhetorically argue one’s way around it, daring males who might raise unpleasant facts to be labeled sexist.

Third-wave feminism demands that biology be damned, you shitlord. If childbirth is in the way, then they deserve special accommodation for it. Nothing should stand in the way of their version of equality. The solution is redefining equality to mean equivocating.

Should there be women directors of major museums? Sure. Why not?

Should there be women directors of major museums who refuse to perform all the duties of the job? No, of course not.

Is it unfair that women are burdened with biology,** whether the physical act of childbirth or the desire to balance work with child-rearing? Yes. It is unfair. Why should men leave their job, give up their future as a museum director so that their spouse can be freed up to do so? A very good question.

But it raises the next question: why don’t women who want men to be that guy, the house-husband, marry that guy? The rhetorical answer is that society is to blame, creating men who suffer from toxic masculinity and refuse to sublimate their maleness to women’s desires for equality. That’s what sensitive professors are trying to teach their male charges, that it’s good for males to be house-husbands, to give up their dreams so women can fulfill theirs.

If that’s why guys want to do, then they should. And if women who desire to become world leaders, whether at museums or otherwise, seek the freedom to function that males who will dedicate their lives to supporting their dreams provide, that’s great. There is no reason in the world that males who would prefer to stay at home, bake cakes, wipe tushies and tears, should not be able to do so.

Some women might not find such males attractive and desirable. If that’s the case, then they have only themselves to blame. Some males might not want to stay home and bake cakes, even if they’re properly indoctrinated to believe that’s how they can best serve as allies to women. That’s great too, because no one is obliged to sacrifice their desires for someone else’s.

If it’s because males have some biological need to go out and hunt that can’t be trained out of them, then we have a problem, because that doesn’t fit the narrative. But biology cannot be denied, no matter what your gender.

But if the end game is to achieve a post-gender society, it’s not going to happen by denial of biology. Whether biology is just a stumbling block or a wall that can’t be overcome is the question that needs to be answered. Rhetorical denial won’t resolve it any more than screaming misogyny every time someone refuses to acquiesce to facile demands for special treatment.

Stop complaining that women aren’t represented in proportionate numbers and do something about it. But stop lying to yourself. If you ever hope to achieve equality, then deal with reality, with biology, and come to grips with the fact that choices have to be made because nature is unfair to women. It sucks, but that’s reality. Calling biology names won’t change anything. Biology doesn’t give a damn.

*See Geduldig v. Aiello, noting that pregnancy discrimination was not sex discrimination, because not all women have, or want to have, children.

**There was a protest at Duke University over the “stigma” of menstruation. While it’s obviously a natural biological function, and most adults are aware of it, the notion is that it should be celebrated rather than hidden. Why remains a mystery, as not every bodily function needs to be put on display.