Speculation on what the world would be like if run by women will remain just that - mere speculation.

WHAT WOULD it be like if women ruled the world? Over the past 10 days, the question has been put by newspapers and broadcasters to all sorts of people - and all sorts of answers have been provided.

If women ruled, they variously declared, there would be fewer meetings. Things would run more efficiently. There would be no more wars. There would be no more jokes, either. It would be just as nasty as a male world. It would be a kinder place.

Superior childcare would be free. Expense accounts would be slashed. The world would be safer and saner. It would be dull.

There would be more teamwork. Botox, not baseball, would be discussed over lunch.

The question was prompted by the extraordinary photo of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's new cabinet in Spain, which showed the prime minister surrounded by nine women. They were not just any old women, but glamorous, pregnant, long-haired, elegant, proper women. More like the cast of Desperate Housewives than the ersatz men in ill-fitting, garish jackets that were Blair's Babes in 1997.

Looking at the picture, I felt that being a senior politician might be rather nice, a thought that doesn't cross my mind on seeing Ruth Kelly or Jacqui Smith, let alone desperate, dogged Hillary Clinton.

So in a Spanish-style brave new world entirely run by pregnant women in floaty tops inspecting the troops in Afghanistan (just as Carme Chacón did a few days ago), what would it really be like?

We all think we know the answer to this question - the conflicting replies above were all offered confidently. After all, women aren't exactly strangers to us: we know lots of them.

In fact, half of us are them.

But, in truth, we don't have the foggiest idea what life would be like if women ran the show. So far we have only isolated, untypical examples and no control experiments. No big companies are entirely run by women.

Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, has a female chief executive in Marjorie Scardino, but she has slotted into a job created by a man, and most of the other senior people in the company are men, so her example tells us nothing.

Some charities are entirely run by women, and I dare say some may be quite egalitarian but, then, the sort of women who go into charities aren't representative.

The only other professions that are predominantly female - hairdressing and nursing - are almost as hierarchical as the army, but they aren't representative either.

Various Scandinavian countries are dominated by women, but the general weirdness of Scandinavia outweighs the general weirdness of women, so that doesn't tell us much, either.

An article in the spring issue of London Business School's journal argues that there is little evidence to support our favourite female stereotypes. For a start, it says 91 per cent of women don't particularly like pink - a fact that should be pointed out to Silvio Berlusconi, who complained that the Spanish cabinet was "too pink".

Even the stereotype that women managers tend to be interested in childcare and flexible working turns out to be incorrect. Fewer than half of women team leaders in the UK have children, whereas 96 per cent of male team leaders do.

Stereotypes concerning differences in ability also turn out to be unfounded. There are some differences in spatial awareness, but the article says these can be offset by sitting a woman down at a computer for a 10-hour stint playing computer games.

The only difference that the author Elisabeth Kelan is prepared to countenance is the way women explain their success. If you talk to a man and a woman doing identical jobs, the woman is likely to talk about luck and coincidence. The man will congratulate himself on his skill. Does this mean a world run by women might be nicer? On the contrary: everyone would be endlessly having to shore up each other's flagging confidence and say that no, your bum does not look big in that. There would be much anti-boasting, with everyone competing to run herself down. One might quickly feel nostalgic for the vain strutting of the male leaders.

If women were in charge, they would probably snap out of the hopeless-me act. But there is an even more tiresome act that I don't think women can snap out of. And that is complexity.

Men are emotionally transparent and easy to please in fairly reliable ways. Women are not. Complicated, devious and capable of being nasty in silent and deadly ways.

My guess is that the main difference if women were in charge is that office politics would be more subtle, and far more lethal.

There is one other thing worth pointing out about women ruling the world. It won't happen. At the risk of falling for the biggest stereotype of them all, men want power enough to hang on to it and women don't want it enough to make them let go.

- (Financial Times service)