Michael White on feminism

But this amounted to hand-to-hand combat.

It may have been that Harriet Harman, one of many cabinet ministers busy not plotting against Gordon Brown, was briefly in charge at Number 10 while the boss was in Southwold, even though one of TheTimes' pundits was promoting her - no irony - as "the British Hillary Clinton" to take over the prime minister's job.

Hattie, whose multitasking jobs include being minister for women and equality, published her annual progress report Women's Changing Lives - covering everything from equal pay and childcare to the way women are treated in prison.

She also unveiled proposals to rebalance the historic bias towards men in the laws on domestic violence. No more "crimes of passion" defence: murder will be murder. The Daily Mail was pleasingly outraged: "Go soft on the killer wives" was its interpretation.

But Ms Harman's report reminds readers that domestic killings of women by men run around five times the reverse rate, that reported rapes have doubled to 13,780 since 1997 - not that this means a rape epidemic, only a greater willingness to report such attacks.

Violence against women

A photo of a young man punching a young woman in a park was conveniently published next day: she had squirted him with fizzy drink. But NHS staff don't need to be told where most (not all) aggression starts in hospital: with chaps. Most (80 per cent) of NHS staff are women. It didn't stop there.

Coincidentally, as HSJ reported last week, the Court of Appeal ruled against a bonus scheme paid to men in a northern local authority as part of a transition towards "single status" terms of employment.

That could lead to more legal claims against NHS employers of the kind trickling through because the awkward fact remains that, more than 30 years after Barbara Castle's Equal Pay Act, women in full-time work still earn 17 per cent less than men. In part-time work the gap is twice as wide.

Agenda for Change was designed to address such problems, as will Ms Harman's proposed Equality Bill this autumn - intended to make it easier to discriminate in hiring on, say, gender or ethnic grounds to correct imbalances.

It may not satisfy The Daily Mail, but I distinctly remember Ms Harman reassuring the Commons that, yes, primary schools will be able to hire a similarly qualified male teacher because they suffer a notorious shortage of men. Yet we know what Americans call "affirmative action" is rarely popular with the majority.

Role models

Oddly enough, it is the lack of male role models - in the home as well as primary school - that may account for one of the paradoxes of the gender debate: the deepening failure among uneducated young men to fulfil their potential.

The Conservative education spokesman Michael Gove (Scottish, adopted, state educated, clever) has been campaigning on the issue this week. It is part of the new Tory "fairness" agenda, which Labour knows it must hammer as flaky between now and election day.

There is still a long way to go on the more conventional male/female divide and other inequalities - and buckets of research to back it up. Twice as many men as women are in senior management positions in society at large. The civil service and public sector - NHS included - are both better (18 per cent or more).

I realise it is complicated. For instance, white men have been seriously under-represented at UK medical schools for some years now, but there are more women and more overseas-trained doctors. They too have their resentments, including preponderance in less prestigious specialties like geriatrics and learning disability.

I mischievously went to the Department of Health website and checked the composition of the NHS board: only one woman, Julie Baddeley, among eight blokes. And the "senior team" ranked just below? Six women to four men.

It's that elusive glass ceiling for which there are many reasons, including the tug of motherhood. So, plenty left for Ms Harman to do. Of course, women do live longer.