Sexual equality still a work in progress

Just the same, Mr Murphy, should it be he, will continue to operate in the southern political hemisphere until he works his passage to Holyrood. And the two candidates for deputy leader are also female, so a woman, probably Kezia Dugdale, will follow temporary chief inquisitor Jackie Baillie into the government bashing slot.

Women are not quite on top, (the gender balance has slipped since the heady days of the first reconvened Scottish parliament). But with a 50/50 split in the Sturgeon cabinet you can't call them marginalised. (And didn't you just love Herald cartoonist Steven Camley's take on it yesterday, where Her Maj suggested the boys went off to powder their noses whilst she and the new FM did some business?)

However those of us who predicted a new era of sweetness and light should women ever dominate the parliamentary setpieces will probably not get a gig when Mystic Meg hands in her crystal ball. First Minister's Questions have hardly lacked sharp exchanges of late. Neither Jackie nor Ruth Davidson could stand accused of soft pedalling and when Johann Lamont was flying the Labour flag sweeties rarely came nippier.

Only the blessed Bella, Annabel Goldie, seemed to remember the sharpest of stillettos can best be inserted with the addition of humour. There is nothing more wounding than well aimed mockery.

Ask Harriet Harman, who did her turn at the Westminster dispatch box this week in a catchweight contest with the luckless Nick Clegg. When he couldn't or wouldn't answer a question about female victims of coalition policies, Harman went for somewhere rather lower than the jugular, asserting that where women and numbers were concerned the Deputy PM wasn't usually so reticent.

It was a sly reference to an ill-advised interview he once gave in a men's mag admitting to having slept with 30-plus women before making a European union with his stylish Spanish wife. And you have to say that had Mr Clegg risked any reference to Ms Harman's sex life there would have been all hell to pay with the sisterhood.

So current evidence that the female of the political species is more cuddly than deadly is a bit thin on the ground. Part of this is down to Henry Higgins syndrome. "Why can't a woman be more like a man?", sang the baffled Professor . And in truth when women enter the Commons, and battle their way up the ranks, being more like a man sometimes becomes the default position.

In private they can and do make common cause across the party lines in an attempt to counter the relentlessly masculine Whitehall culture. But on their feet in the bearpit they're obliged to man up.

It's not just a parliamentary phenomenon. You find the same atmosphere in a boardroom where there is typically a preponderance of men and one or two females.

The latter have to be pretty strong to resist the group think when a posse of pinstripes are in pack mode. It's why you'll find so many older female executives dressing in black suits to blend, though happily the younger breed are just as likely to be ladies in red.

Meanwhile, older boardroom men don't quite know what to do with female recruits to the team (sic!). Recently I sat on a selection panel chaired by a venerable veteran of Scottish business. He looked round the table and wondered aloud if there would be a problem having more women than men. Not in a zillion years would a majority of men have attracted his anxiety.

So it seems to me the thing which can bring real cultural change is simply a numbers game. Getting to a stage in politics and business where the legislature or management team more accurately reflects the society it operates in. Norway did it by having a 40 per cent female quota by law in boardrooms.

Critics get antsy about any form of quotas, but the 300 group set up in 1980 to improve the gender balance in Westminster, can still only boast just over a fifth of MPs. But here's the thing; what has boosted Labour to 33 per cent of their intake was women-only shortlists in winnable seats. Meanwhile, the Tories are languishing at half that, and the LibDems at a miserable 13 per cent.

Not all the opponents of engineering change are men. Historically, across the spectrum from Betty Boothroyd to Anne Widdicombe, women who managed to scale the greasy pole were scornful of "getting elected on anything but merit" conveniently forgetting all the meritorious women who never got a sniff of a safe seat.

It was because of Margaret Thatcher grabbing the top job that the 300 group was born in 1980 (on September the 18 incidentally!). The pioneers hadn't quite grasped that the future Baroness was a stranger to feminism.

Yet there has been progress, though not always in conventional forms. Just as the miners strike politicised a whole raft of women, and Greenham Common famously lured some implausibly douce grannies, so too did the Scottish Referendum energise local groups anxious to grapple with important issues.

Many of them rejected formal politics of any kind, but related to lower key, less hierarchal forums where listening to people with different views tended to be respectful. Good cake helped.

When Women for Independence held their first big meeting in Perth post-September they had to change venues twice to accommodate everyone. There were 16 year olds still basking in the afterglow of a first vote, and octogenarians reminiscing about their own engagement with the political process. What they wanted, it seemed, was to take that energy and commitment into community causes.

And these events have undoubtedly impacted on party politics at national level. While we may have some way to go to alter the style of parliamentary exchanges, there's change afoot in the substance.

Nicola Sturgeon's first outing in her new role found her promising to put equality at the heart of everything she did.

Both she, and her Labour counterparts, have put affordable childcare at the top of the policy shopping list. That reflects the knowledge that without it, no significant progress is possible in workplace opportunities .

Of course men, especially younger hands-on dads, get that too. But it's still the case that the bulk of child care - the bulk of any kind of family care and family budgeting - is still down to wives and mothers. Old demographics die hard.

Thus did Ms Harman also use one of her rare outings at Prime Minister's Questions to ask a series of questions about persistent inequalities.

Mind you, the same day R4's World at One contrived to have a panel of four politicians all talking over and interrupting each other. Plus ca Change you might think.

Except that they were all women. Ah well. It's a work in progress.