These are the people who are meant to have shaped the world in 2001. With a few shuffles and additions and subtractions, it will be people just like them who also shape 2002.This is so obvious that it feels almost embarrassing to spell it out, but the women who appear in the reviews of the year are nearly all archetypal, anonymous figures. Here a woman in Afghanistan removing her burqa; there a Catholic woman taking her daughter to school in Belfast; there a female nurse seated next to the Tony Blair at the party conference Their names are not recorded. And a high proportion of them are mourners: an Israeli woman weeping; a Palestinian woman weeping; a New York woman weeping.To be fair, in the newspaper sections that reviewed the cultural achievements of the year we saw some admirable female faces shining out, from Joanne Rowling to Kate Winslet, as well as some absurd ones, from Elizabeth Hurley to Geri Halliwell. But as far as world events go, from war to peace, from politics to economics, from heroism to villainy, it's hard to glimpse a woman.Even a few years ago we might have seen some female faces among the powerful. Margaret Thatcher, Madeleine Albright, Mary Robinson, Hanan Ashrawi, Mo Mowlam, or ditzier figures such as the late Princess of Wales, or Hillary Rodham Clinton, would have popped up in those reviews over the past decade. But now the view of the world presented to us through our media is more relentlessly masculine than ever.Many feminists would say I was barking up the wrong tree to be talking about heroic women in these terms.

Yes, I know that if feminism is to mean anything it must mean the empowerment of all women, not just a handful of women. A single Elizabeth I or a single Golda Meir or a single Mo Mowlam is far less important than the everyday empowerment of millions of dispossessed women That's absolutely true. But I don't see why the two aspects of female power are taken to be opposites rather than complementary.This is partly a question of the way we see world events, of the fact that we still see politicians as more important than politics, and making war as more important than making peace. That means that many women whom you might see as heroic are never f?d in public And that matters. Because if we don't hear the voices and see the faces of women who aim to change the world, when will the world ever change?And it is also a question of the people we choose to represent us.

What does it say about our society that power is more than ever concentrated in the hands of men? If the decisions that affect our lives, from those on public spending to those on war-making, are taken, day by day, year by year, by men, while the women sit quietly beside them or weep quietly over them, how can we be satisfied with those decisions? And what does it say to young women now if they can see so few women in the world who are not limited by their sex?It would be absurd to hold up a 16th-century queen as some kind of proof that nothing has changed for women. The events of this year have brought home to women in the West how very lucky we are to live in a society where so many of the basic rights for which feminists fought down the centuries – of birth control, education, work, independent income, equality before the law – are now taken for granted.But wouldn't it be great if this year a few more women's faces were seen and a few more women's voices were heard? Wouldn't it be exciting if we saw more women affecting events rather than just being affected by them? Wouldn't it be intriguing to see more heroines – and even anti-heroines – in the present as well as in the past?n.walter btinternet . How does the Conservative Party make its new leader, Iain Duncan Smith, look sexy and "in touch" with the rest of us? Francis Maude, a former shadow foreign secretary, thinks he has the answer. But watch out if you are waking up in hospital following an operation. Mr Maude's proposal is for a Tory MP to stand over you complete with bedpan and mop.Interviewed last week for the political website Epolitix, Mr Maude suggested that the Parliamentary Conservative Party, frontbench and backbench, should "immerse" themselves in the public services by becoming classroom assistants and ancillary health service workers for prolonged periods. "Spending the next two years really immersing themselves – and actually not just the senior politicians. I mean right through the parliamentary party en masse, going off and really immersing ourselves in the health service, in the way state schools run, living it, breathing it, feeling it, touching it." Oh no, Francis, please! I can think of nothing more gruesome or gimmicky than sick people being "touched" in hospital by Ann Widdecombe, Michael Howard, Nicholas Soames or Douglas Hogg and all the rest, got up in white overalls, feeling their pain.