Modern feminists are obsessed by the interests of their own kind. Most leading feminist columnists are still getting worked up about the so-called pay gap. But this simply should not be an issue when there are so many other, more pressing problems, such women and domestic violence. Where was feminism on female genital mutilation? For years the headline feminists were just utterly uninterested in it. There was a complete lack of interest in girls in care homes too. We’ve known for years that these awful events were taking place, and did the feminist movement pick up on it? No. It was The Times that hung on in there, male journalists at The Times who uncovered that story. Where was the Fawcett Society when that broke?

Today’s feminists need to realise that it makes less and less sense to talk about women as if they were a single group or indeed, as if they were a group that have the same interests and priorities. That used to be the case when all women’s lives were determined by whether or not they got married and whether they had children. Now there is increasing difference between highly educated women who are, in most respects, more like men, and other women who are still much closer to that traditional pattern. The world is dominated by an elite which remains largely male: just because some women have succeeded in this world, doesn’t change life for those at the lower end of society.

Feminism really was one of the last great democratic revolutions. Feminism was based on the idea that you should be treated as an individual, that you shouldn’t be treated in a particular way because you are a woman, because you are gay, because you are white, or conversely you shouldn’t be treated in a particular way because you couldn’t walk. These ideas are tied up with democratic values, with the idea of ‘one person, one vote’.

A tension has emerged, however, between this idea that people should make their own way – be judged as individuals, be taxed as individuals – and the idea that individualism is the best way to run an economy. What this means is that values based around self-interest have been great for the top 10-15% of women, the alpha-females, but not for everybody else.