The "gender-quake" may not be a labour market-wide phenomenon but it has certainly shaken up the professions in Britain. Look at how the first generation of girls to have beaten boys in all key exam stages at school as well as at university is transforming professions that were previously dominated by men. More women than men are now being accepted on the civil service fast-track promotion programme and last year for the first time more women qualified as barristers than men. Trainee women solicitors already outnumbermen by 63 per cent to 37 per cent, while female medical students are doing almost as well, outnumbering males by 61 per cent to 39 per cent.

One glaring exception in this historic social change is business, including financial services. In a society in which women make up 45 per cent of the workforce only 9 per cent of executive and non-executive directors on the boards of FTSE 100 companies are women. Companies are failing to capitalise on the talents of almost half the workforce. Worse still, there were 32 FTSE 100 companies in last year's survey by the Cranfield School of Management that had no female directors at all. One intriguing fact to emerge from the study was that the longer the tenure of the chair, the less likely the board was to include women directors.