many women to decide the strain is too much. They take a less challenging role

I think this is essential. A lot of women choose to level out and stay put at a certain job definition, because pushing for a higher level means utter devotion to the job (which men and very few women are free to practise). In part, what this means is also that demands on the devotion and elasticity of hours of "those who succeed" have increased over the last few decades, eating up whatever progress the notion of gender equality at work may have made during the same period.

And it's sold to us with the "you too can be a winner" tag. Gaah.

When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind

It has been fascinating to read since it considers how society could be if run only by women, given that the vast majority of landowners are men, majority of top politicians, business owners etc etc are men.

This is still tokenism. Promoting women into bad jobs just means that bad jobs have bad women in them. Carly Fiorina, Sarah Palin, Margaret Thatcher and Meg Ryan have proved that more than adequately.

Also, most men still aren't CEOs, politicians, landowners, or business owners, and very few men have a realistic chance of becoming any of these things.

The implication of this kind of tokenism is the suggestion that having testicles automatically you qualifies for these roles, by definition. The reality couldn't be more different, but it's a reality which the equality commission has always done its damndest to ignore.

Tokenism won't solve the problem. Creating new kinds of opportunity which allow for flexible entrepreunership and non-monolithic kinds of politics and business might be more useful.  

It follows an advertisement by Barclays in the Financial Times, which revealed that out of 80 promotions to managing director level, only five were women.

Now why would that be?

What was the gender ratio in the managing directors previously?

What was the gender ratio in the pool of candidates for promotion to managing director?

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

It has been fascinating to read since it considers how society could be if run only by women, given that the vast majority of landowners are men, majority of top politicians, business owners etc etc are men.

I think I have read the first 4 or five issues of Y and I got tired of it after a while... Though it has some interesting tidbits in it (for instance, the POTUS is the former US Secretary of Agriculture since that was the highest-ranking woman in the US government) many of the situations are predictable and tendentious.

A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

Senior women managers I have known in the UK, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium all have prospered in environments that allowed home and mobile working and flexi-time.

Now, that's an important advance (especially for some who were single parents) because it creates the flexibility needed to manage non-work events.

But, they all worked long hours many evenings on the laptop. Sometimes this was because they were responsible for events across a longer set of time zones or operating hours. (Hence "availability.")

Other times, it was the sheer volume of things they had to keep on top of. Part of that is just employers skimping on labour costs, but some of it seems to be a conceptual block in dividing up higher positions across more than one person.

How do things operate in other areas? Some countries have a better record on this, have they got better answers to this problem?