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As we have seen, there are very few women that have found a way through to the highest ranks of Politics, one of the three fields in which men have in the past been predominant (the other two being Religion and the Armed Forces). Nonetheless we have had women in power in many countries of the world.

Although there is still a long way to go to meet the goal of 50/50 representation,

• Rwanda, Sweden and Cuba are now approaching that target and the Assembly in Wales has already reached it.
• In 1995, only 8.7 % of elected officials were women; by May 2004 it was 15.4 %.
• In 22 countries women make up more than 25% of those in Government.

Thirty years ago the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act came into force in the UK.

• In this spell of time the number of female managers raised from 1.8% to 33%,
• that of female lawyers from 7 to 42%,
• secondary schools headmistresses from 18 to 33%,
• the MPs from 4 to 19% (27-127), women in cabinet from 2 (Barbara Castle and Shirley Williams) to 6 (Margaret Beckett, Patricia Herwitt, Tessa Jowell, Hilary Armstrong, Ruth Kelly, Baroness Amos).

With a global eye, number three of the Millennium Development Goals aims at: "empowering women and ensure that girls have same access to school as boys by 2015".

• Today an estimated 63 million primary age girls are not enrolled in school.

Not for nothing the African Synodal Document states that 'to educate a woman is to educate a people' and the Second Vatican Council, declares in its Closing Message to women: "The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at his moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women imbued with a spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling". (quoted by Pope John Paul II, Mulieris Dignitatem,1). In other words, a spiritual conscience is the more accomplished form of Politics and a new 'modus vivendi'.