Among the many examples CT Wong gave about why women "can't afford" to do things that men do, I was hard-pressed to find anything that was not the product of social conditioning and sexual bias ('Need a spider move around like a fly?' Nov 2).

CT Wong also wrote: "There is really no point in competing, or by affirmative action equalising, in areas where the respective gender's strength is not inherently equal, or circumstances, same."

This bespeaks a profound ignorance of variation within each sex, compared with variation between sexes. If men are said to be physically stronger than women, does that mean that 'all' women are physically weaker than 'all' men?Not by a long shot, and you can extend this to every other field of human endeavour, regardless of which sex is dominant.

Of course many things flow from the trivial fact that women can give birth and men can't. But not nearly as many as the writer thinks, and certainly not enough to justify misogynist stereotyping.

The writer exposes his - I assume it's a "he" rather than a self-hating woman - true colours with the grudging statement that "many modern women expect equal educational and employment opportunities".

Am I reading this right? Is the writer implying that women should 'not' be given those opportunities? If somebody is capable, do you deny them because of their sex? I thought we were living in the 21st century, not the 19th.

Let me quote Stephen Jay Gould from The Mismeasure of Man (WW Norton & Co, 1981): "Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within."

Fighting avoidable, unfair tragedies lies at the heart of all anti-discriminatory endeavours. Perpetuating the status quo is all too 'affordable' for the privileged and uncaring.