Summers aims to demonstrate, among other things, that Gillard would have a valid claim for ‘sex discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying’ if she were an employee. This provides a powerful framework for her argument. How disappointing it is, then, that she so often falls back on flawed rhetorical strategies. Most troubling, perhaps, is the reduction of the complex questions of work versus family that are faced daily by so many people to an implicit insistence that all women should not only be able to but want to work full time. Agreed, economic equality is a vital goal, but surely this can be achieved by means other than both people in a domestic partnership spending forty hours per week in the workplace regardless of their other responsibilities. Why should not a father, for example, work part time as well as a mother?

One of twenty-four items on an only partly facetious online list, ‘Thou Shall Not Commit Logical Fallacies’, is ‘the fallacy fallacy’: ‘There are few things more frustrating than watching someone poorly argue a position that one holds.’ I too am continually irked, outraged, and depressed by endemic casual sexism. Unfortunately, Summers’ book will not change anything. It will only persuade those already inclined to agree with her.