The Women in Leadership concept can, if we’re not careful, seem to be synonymous with the image of the glass ceiling. As if the struggle for sexual parity is confined to skyscraper boardrooms.

Ironically – given the pain of bumping up against that glass ceiling – we might focus on this issue because it’s the lesser of two evils. Actually make that “of many evils”. Perhaps it’s comforting to think like this: “If we can just get that last thing straight, the sexual equality job is done.”

Of course, it doesn’t take much reflection to remember that this is not true. But few recent stories have brought it home with such sickening impact as this one.

You could spend a long time finding things to be dismayed about here, by a situation where 13 men have this kind of say over how women care for their bodies. But I’ve done that now, and I’d like to come to you with a slightly more positive spin.

This situation is abhorrently wrong; that is clear. And it’s so wrong because women have a relationship to our bodies that few (no?) men can understand. Same goes for women understanding men’s bodies (though mothers might have something to say about that). This physical difference – let’s strip sexism out of the equation for just a moment – is one fundamental reason why women’s experiences are so very different from men’s.

And isn’t it an absurdity that this difference of experience is not better represented in the boardroom?