Despite the concerns I expressed in my last two blogs on Open Forum ["Australia's not so secret shame [0]", 18 Aug 2008; "Advance Australia Fair [0]", 5 Aug 2008 - Red.], there is of course much to be pleased about in the way the current government has made it possible for women to actually participate directly in policy direction. The most significant is the number of good, competent women in senior positions in the government.  The importance of women being at the table cannot be overstated.

There are ten women on Kevin Rudd's front bench - 4 in Cabinet, 3 in the outer Ministry and 3 parliamentary secretaries. Women are 20 per cent of the Cabinet and 23.3 per cent of the total ministry, the highest level ever for an Australian government.

However, this number falls far short of many governments elsewhere in the world, especially in Europe, where it is now becoming commonplace for 50 per cent of ministers to be women. Even the conservative French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, has almost equal representation of the sexes in his cabinet.

As a country we have lagged badly in opening up the powerful institutions of our country to women but since the election of the Rudd government there does seem to be a change of attitude towards appointing women.

The default position of too many men - still, after all these years - is that you appoint people like yourselves, middle-aged Anglo men, to run things. Until men become sensitive to what is wrong with this, some kind of formal advisory and scrutiny mechanism needs to be in place to ensure this default position begins to be systematically questioned.

We now have a woman as deputy Prime Minister for the first time, and we have women in government in charge of Industrial Relations, Employment, Education, Health, Social Inclusion, Families, Community Services, Women, Housing, Indigenous Affairs, Sport, Ageing, Climate Change and Water.

That's quite a list, and shows that women are in charge of some of the biggest problems and challenges confronting Australia.

It is now commonplace to see women ministers on the nightly news discussing carbon emissions trading schemes, health funding, Indigenous issues and all of the other big policy areas of our time.  The signal this sends to our society is incredibly powerful.  It not only tells young girls they, too, can aspire to any job at all.  It also tells those men who have stood in the way of women that it is time to step aside.  Women have a new authority, one that emphasizes the competence they have always had but not always been allowed to exercise.

From September, we will have a woman as Governor General. And not just any woman, but one who has been a Sex Discrimination Commissioner, who has worked in the childcare area and who has a strong commitment to women's equality.  What a breath of fresh air that will be!

There have been a lot of other good things happening, with women being appointed to head up powerful commissions, and so-called women's issues like childcare getting top-level attention.

And already having women there has made a difference for women.

We are now engaged in a discussion about not whether, but what kind, of national paid maternity leave scheme will be introduced next year. There are various models being floated and their merits debated.

None of this would be happening had Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister, not referred the question of parental leave to the Productivity Commission, asked it to investigate and report back in early 2009.  Until she did that, paid maternity leave was politically dead in the water.  We should be grateful to her for finding a way to revive it.

Interestingly, with the government setting the lead, the response from business has changed markedly.  Only a year ago, business was declaiming that paid maternity leave would send them all broke, would hurt women, would blah blah blah. 

Now, business can't wait to endorse the concept.  Just shows what a change of government can achieve!

Gillard has also said she is going to turn her attention to pay equity.  We look forward to seeing what she can do in this previously intractable area.

However, after more than a decade of neglect the road to gender equality will be a long one and these appointments can only be considered the first tentative steps.

Anne Summers is a best-selling author and journalist who has had a long career in politics, the media and the non-government sector. Her political background includes her time as a political adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating prior to the 1993 federal elections and she ran the Office of the Status of Women for Prime Minister Bob Hawke from 1983 to 1986.

Ms Summers also presented these ideas at the 20th annual Women, Management and Employment Relations Conference, held in Sydney in July.