Which is rather like saying that horses are faster than hills. Challenged on this by a panellist, he explained: "Men are more nerdy, on average, and may be a bit better at sums and engineering."

A bit? Is that the best a Professor of Psychology and Dean of Research at Trinity College Dublin can do? Bright men are not a bit better at engineering and mathematics than women, but entire continents better. Next time you watch a space-shuttle launch, count the number of controllers who can remember people's birthdays.

Next time you see a roll-out of an Airbus, count the number of aircraft engineers who make their beds before checking out of a hotel.

Next time you see a grand masters chess tournament, count the contestants who can tell the difference between taupe and beige.

Baffled? Ok: pay attention.

Men's brains don't relate to emotions the way that women's brains do, which is why People With Ovaries remember birthdays. Men's brains don't prompt them to be homemakers, hence the bed-tidying instincts of PWOs.

Men don't see colours the way women do, because we have fewer colour-sensitive cones in our eyes. And, most of all, men's brains enable them to become space controllers, aerospace engineers and chess players in far vaster numbers than do women. (Name me a top woman chess player. Go on. Please. Just one - please?)

The Prof knows this: and he knows something else, too. When the PWO are university academics they are inclined to have a good cry if someone says something they disagree with, and then they go seeking blood.

This has been the story of the evolution of intellectual enquiry in campuses across the English-speaking world over the past three decades. Thus, those who dissent from the ideological orthodoxies of the feminist agenda do not get tenure, or can even lose their jobs, as the president of Harvard, Laurence Summers, famously did. Why?

Simply because he said women and men have different brains, with male brains more likely to exhibit a higher variance in innate abilities. Bang! And a career bit the dust.

The central cretinism of the feminist cause is at its most tragically acute where logically it should be at its weakest: in university campuses. Because, if you inhabit a world of intellectual enquiry, the differences between men and women should be a fascinating subject of study.

Men rape, men tow sleds to the Antarctic, men build colossal bridges and go to the moon, men invent things. Women do none of these things: a woman didn't even invent the tampon.

These differences are all pretty obvious - yet it is now almost a heresy to dilate on these differences, and instead we have to pretend that men and women are the same (except when it comes to domestic violence, when suddenly men have a monopoly, prompting special laws and quangos to banish them from the family home).

So, barely had the Prof uttered words we all know to be true before he began to recant, spreading apologies all over Trinity like a crop-duster. "I didn't realise what I'd said," he gibbered in terror. "It's obviously nonsense and I immediately set about retracting the statement and I have now written to my colleagues in Trinity to apologise."

There we have it, almost like in a Stalinist show trial, a respected academic suddenly retracting, letter-writing and apologising, as he frantically scoops the rashers out of the pan before they burn alongside his career: that is, saving his bacon. And no doubt getting his contrition in before the Berias of feminism struck was a sound move, for the gulag of academic obscurity too easily awaits the intellectual dissident these days.

Not that we in the fourth estate have much to boast about in this regard: The Sunday Times headlined the story Rumpus Over Sexist Slur. Sorry, I know subs have to attract readers' attention, but please: there was no rumpus, thanks to the Prof's pre-emptive capitulation.

Moreover, what he'd said, in a brief moment of lucidity before a protective cloud of abject timidity enveloped his career, was neither sexist nor a slur, merely the truth. However, once a newspaper headline states that something is a 'sexist slur', then a sexist slur it becomes in that wretched and credulous abstract, the popular imagination.

It is certainly not a sexist slur to adumbrate the difference between the sexes. The Prof knows better than any of us about the many variables between men and women.

These were brilliantly - if unintentionally - represented some years ago in a hilarious drawing in The Guardian, which showed a politically correct stone-age community. In the foreground of the sketch, the men are minding the children around the camp fire, while in the distance, a hunting party of women are hurling spears at some game.

Which is why, with nothing whatever to eat, apart from some incinerated infants, this particular branch of mankind rapidly became extinct.