The Orange Prize for women's fiction, traditionally judged by an all-woman panel, is this year to have an all-male panel, too, to see if they choose different books. This suggests that men and women do have a different viewpoint - a notion rejected by the Law Lords, who last week refused the campaigning Fawcett Society's request that a female be included in the final panel of judges that will decide the balance between the rights of a male accused of rape and the victim's right to privacy.

Both cases raise the question of whether women's and men's viewpoints inevitably differ, or whether their brains actually do function in the same way. They certainly don't, in the physical sense: we now know that a man and a woman can come up with the same solution to a problem, but that the woman will have used two bits of her brain where a man will have used one. Women's brains are on average smaller, too, but the idea that size matters (a male obsession) has not stood up for a long time. Remember that elephants have the biggest brains of all (presumably entirely devoted to Never Forgetting).

Women have often, though, spat at any idea of the sexes thinking in different ways, simply because blokes have always assumed that different means inferior. We've said that insisting you have to be male to think like Plato was as daft as saying you have to be Greek. But nearly 20 years ago, Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice made it plain that a woman's thinking could be both different and better. In the classic case of the boy who had to choose between stealing or letting his mother go without medicine, women were deemed deficient because they wouldn't come up with an either/or answer - they insisted on trying to find an actual practical solution. But this, far from meaning they were deficient, showed they were after something subtler and more useful.

But do men and women read the same things? Virago made its name and its money in the 70s by realising that what women readers (perhaps middle-aged and suburban) wanted to read bore no relation to what male London publishers thought was the latest trend. But the better the books, I suspect, the less difference there is - women do read Hornblower, men do read Jane Austen. It's which kind of lousy books Mars and Venus cuddle up with - space battles or love-ever-after? - that really shows the difference. Which is not, we hope, what the Orange judges will be chewing over.

As for the law, you would think that after Helena Kennedy's searing Eve Was Framed, no one could deny that the law, however unconsciously, has been biased in favour of the gender making it. To take just one example, look at our conviction that we all have an immemorial right to be tried by a jury of our peers - no woman was tried by a jury of her peers until 1919, when they allowed women on juries for the first time. Yet still there is this assumption that the male viewpoint is the viewpoint and it is only when the wimmin try to suggest something different that gender comes into it.

The case for having a woman advising on anything connected with rape trials is not only that a woman would Understand How It Might Feel but also that she might actually be a lot better placed than a man to tell when another woman is lying - in which case her presence would serve the best interests of a man wrongly accused as well. There is a basic inequality, anyway, in a man being allowed to bring up a woman's past sexual history - and a woman's view ought surely to be represented on any panel trying to decide how these things in equity should go.

Some women may be wonderful at cars - the late, great Baroness Denton was a round-the-world rally driver; some women are intrigued by military stratgey - TV producer Cate Haste is a whizz on Clausewitz; Muriel Seibert, the first woman on Wall Street, sucks in financial pages the way some of us read agony columns. But you wouldn't say a woman had been given equal access to reading if all that was on offer was Motor Sport, Battle Formations of the Napoleonic Era and the Wall Street Journal. Equality, as in "the same", is not the whole story: we must be allowed to read different things.

I am reminded of the jape in one of those greeting cards. A harridan on the front saying: "What's all this I hear about young women wanting to be equal to men?" And inside it says: "Have they no ambition?"