International Women's Day was last week celebrated around the world in recognition of equality between genders and the continuing emancipation of women in a world still dogged by prejudice and bigotry.  With women now considered largely free of patriarchal bondage in the West, the focus for organisations working to promote women's rights has largely moved overseas.  Some have called for increased representation by women in parliaments still dominated by male politicians, and for larger numbers of women to take up executive positions and appointments to corporate boards. But others have congratulated women for their moral resolve in taking to high ethical ground, avoiding the rank corruption, exploitation and self-serving rapacious bastardry associated with over-paid corporate positions and common among the elected representatives of the State.

The advancement of women has progressed apace in the two hundred years since the beginning of modern feminist activism in the West. For more than a century women have been allowed to vote in progressive democracies such as those of Europe, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.  Wages for women have improved, bringing financial independence to many, and legal reforms have followed. After World War II women were employed in an increasingly wide range of professions, destroying the old traditional divides.

As a result Australian women have slowly been corralled into public service and corporate servitude in recent decades, following men into subjugation under corporate masters or the bloated heads of bloated government departments responsible for the maladministration of the State.   Federal sex discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward wrote in an editorial for Melbourne's daily newspaper The Age last week that 'the January 2006 "Income and Wealth" report by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling shows educated young women are getting more job opportunities than ever, while other women are heading back to work in larger numbers.' (opinion piece online here)

However, women's emancipation in Western cultures has not necessarily been translated into equal representation in all areas of society. their absence has particularly been observed in the top echelons. In the political arena, Australia has been slow to realise equality. Goward notes in her opinion piece that 'only 35.5 per cent of senators are women and a mere 24.7 per cent of MPs in the House of Representatives are women.'  In her report the power-hungry Goward laments this continued imbalance in Australian public life, calling for  'greater numbers of women to be appointed to senior leadership roles.'  She observes that the judiciary also remains dominated by males: in Australia's supreme courts and courts of appeal, 'there are only 33 women of a total of 202 judges' and  'only five of the 42 Federal Court judges are women.'

Some high-fliers - for example, the well-paid Sex Discrimination Commissioner - argue women should become still more complicit in the damage done to Australians and their communities by the legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic arms of Government, increasing their representation in patriarchy-built parliaments and the institutions of the public service.  However, others applaud women for avoiding corrupt political roles and the gravy train of public office.  As Australia's broken political system becomes more and more run down, small groups of power-brokers controlling powerful factions within major political parties make a nonsense of democratic ideals of genuine representation of the people.  Almost everyone who climbs to prominence within such a structure - male or female - has done so at the expense of their nobler and more principled fellows.

Somewhat perversely the misguided Norwegian Parliament enforces an affirmative action strategy. Norwegian  women are co-opted in a mandatory 40 per cent representation on corporate boards -  made 40% responsible for the misdeeds of the current agents of the 300-year-old exclusive instititution of the Corporation.  Meanwhile powerful men are allowed to conceal their  patriarchal and sometimes hereditary culpability for centuries of exploitation, while maintaining an all important controlling majority on corporate and public boards where necessary, in order that the status quo can be maintained.

But others still set another kind of example, disdaining any involvement with the social spheres of State and Corporation and rejecting the trinkets and tokens of privilege that accompany a move up the still shiny glass staircase to the cloud cities of the elite.  Goward reports NATSEM's modelling shows 95 per cent of women in Australia still earn less than $50,000 a year, instead retaining the integrity and ethical peace of mind impossible for those receiving larger salaries.