Was Sir Alan Sugar’s decision to pick an affable bloke instead of a “rottweiler” (her words) woman as his apprentice last week a sign that he, and by extension the business world in general, is dinosaurishly sexist and retrograde? It has certainly been read that way by any number of female commentators. I find this old chestnut of a theory unbelievably tedious. Why are women so keen always to be seen to be victimised, even when they clearly aren’t victimised at all?

Sugar picked the right two finalists in Lee McQueen and Claire Young. The latter, a mouthy, bossy, go-getting sort with no humility, poor interpersonal skills and no sense of her own shortcomings, was a brilliant saleswoman - but also, as was amply demonstrated over 12 weeks, a piece of work. She wasn’t a piece of work because she was a woman - she was a piece of work because she was a piece of work.

Much was made in the series of the “amazing” progress that she had made personally by, er, learning to pipe down every now and then. This apparently constituted a “journey”, ergo she should have won.

If there was sexism in the programme this is surely where it lay: in the idea that knowing when to shut up was such a big ask of any member of the female race that Young should have been garlanded with a £100,000-a-year job for managing to wait her turn and not interrupt. Granted, you’d praise your toddler to the skies for learning to wait his or her turn at circle time, but we’re talking about an adult woman who had been explicitly told that gobbiness would probably result in her being fired. It’s really not that impressive, is it?

Sometimes - often - the best person wins and it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with gender. McQueen, also a brilliant salesman (as he demonstrated when asked, on the hoof, to sell a ballpoint pen to Karren Brady, the managing director of Birmingham City football club), clearly had the edge in that a) he’d never been brought back into the boardroom, thereby proving that he worked consistently hard and was liked by his teammates; and b) by showing a very endearing mixture of talent, enthusiasm and, it turned out, insecurity about his abysmal education record, which he lied about on his CV.

“I’ve got a chip on my shoulder about my education because I didn’t do very well at school,” he said last week. “I also once worked for four years as a catering manager at Harrow school, which was full of posh kids getting a great education. I think that might have something to do with my insecurities.”

(When he won anyway, despite having been caught lying and saying things such as “We was consciously appealing to the female genre”, my teenage sons immediately launched into a heartfelt rant about the utter futility of education and the utter rightness of leaving school immediately and running a stall in Camden market.)

McQueen is a sort of everyman, the kind of bloke you might bump into on any given night in any given bar and who’d make you laugh and entertain you without in any sense making you feel uncomfortable. This is, after all, the man who managed to sell a shedload of thongs at a bridal fair with charm and brio, but without ever overstepping the mark - easily done with an overfriendly bloke and women’s underwear.

He’s a nice, easy person, ambitious, keen, rough around the edges, likeable, determined - perfect Apprentice material. Why then does the “Claire Young was robbed” lobby feel that Sugar somehow has it in for women?

He doesn’t - but, incidentally, you could hardly blame him if he did. The female candidates in this year’s show spent their entire time bitching, backstabbing, bullying, scheming, lying and passing the buck. The men got on with it and managed to get over whatever petty arguments they had by the end of each episode. The women simply wouldn’t let theirs drop: some are continuing months after filming ended. This female trait is conveniently ignored when women complain of being overlooked or underpromoted, as if their gender exempted them from behaving decently.

In my experience, women are far harder to work with than men. Men don’t give you a crap task because they’re jealous of your shoes or mistrust you for months because you have good highlights or stand about “nursing her wrath to keep it warm”, as Robert Burns put it. Sometimes women don’t get jobs because they’re not very nice.

Anyway, let’s cut to the chase because there’s so much guff written about this. I’ll tell you what the issue is with women in business or women and work. It is extremely simple. It is not to do with sexist dinosaur male bosses or with male-dominated industries crushing our genius. It is not to do with glass ceilings. It is to do, very straightforwardly, with the number of hours we are prepared to put in. If you’re happy to work a 16-hour day and never see your children, you too can become a master of the universe. Simple as that, as McQueen might put it.

Men have been doing this for generations and the common interpretation is that they don’t mind, that there is no emotional cost, that they can just do it, guiltlessly, because they have a penis. It’s complete nonsense: ask any man who works impossible hours. There is a vast emotional cost. There are health costs. There is often a marital cost.

Why do we assume that men feel perfectly happy and breezy about never seeing their kids, living a truncated version of family life and claiming that it causes them no anguish? It clearly does but they do it anyway. Ask a woman to do it anyway and you’re a sexist pig. Why?

Few women are prepared to make that kind of sacrifice. This is entirely their right and good on them. However, it is surely both dishonest and intensely stupid to apportion blame - in the form of so-called corporate discrimination - to what is essentially a completely personal choice: power versus being there at bath time, conferences versus the park, business trips versus getting home in time for homework, giving “110%” versus sleeping more than five hours a night.

Why blame somebody else for a subjective decision? If you’re a woman who wants to run the world, giving up the things that everyone else in your position has also given up, go right ahead. If you don’t want to give the things up, do something else and stop whining. And if you’re Lee McQueen, good luck to you.

Nice guys finish first - something that not-so-nice women might do well to notice.

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