A POLITICAL party for men ... I just laughed when I saw that story.

Let Mike Buchanan have his Justice for Men and Boys Party if he wants to – that’s half the electorate out of the window before he starts!

But his politics has obviously touched a nerve with last week’s letter writer Ann Gig Gonni.

Poor Ann sounded at the end of her tether, cooking, cleaning, getting abuse and having to put up with low paid jobs.

To be fair to our menfolk Ann – I don’t think we can generalise that the male of the species abuse their partners.

Although sadly there are a few wife beaters around, look at last week’s horrific story about the abuse Barbara Yates put up with during her life.

But in the battle of the sexes we have made some progress although there’s more work to be done.

Ann is right though that generally women earn less than men. The gender wage gap is going in the wrong direction. Last year women working full-time earned just 80.9 per cent of what men earned a week.

When I first went in to journalism, women were very much in the minority – at least on local papers.

It was a very male dominated environment and women were tolerated. I’m sure my editor at the time thought I should be at home cooking tea for my husband rather than trying to forge a career.

There weren’t any family-friendly policies like there are today, you had to work twice as hard to prove you were just as good as anyone else.

Thankfully those days are over but as an editor I’m still in a minority. At a recent editors’ conference there were only five women editors out of about 60 delegates.

And politics is still very male dominated.

Among those tributes to Margaret Thatcher it was reported she didn’t promote other women, she preferred the company of men. Today just one in five MPs is a woman.

Labour’s all-women shortlist policy helped change this to some extent with the Blair Babes. Many of them had not expected to be elected, even in the event of a Labour victory. The more unwinnable a seat was, the more likely it was to have been fought by a woman.

Even now the media will often comment on what a woman MP is wearing rather than her policies .

Look at Home Secretary Theresa May – as well-known for her trademark kitten heels as her political career.

So Mr Buchanan – do you really need a party for men when your sex still dominates politics?