Women should be considered for new board positions in banks bailed out by the government, to counter the male dominance of senior directorships at the biggest companies, the Cranfield School of Management has recommended.

It points to the fact that the number of female directors in FTSE 100 firms has barely risen over the past 10 years, with more than a fifth still run by all-male boards.

Do you think it has a point? Or is it a bad idea to set quotas and targets in this way?

Fewer women than last year are reaching the top in their chosen professions, an annual survey has found.

Progress on equality is moving at a snail’s pace, the Equality and Human Rights Commission says, blaming Britain’s long-hours culture and inflexible working pactices.

At this rate it will take women 55 years to reach parity with men at senior levels in the judiciary and 73 years to draw level in the number of FTSE 100 company directors, the commission predicts.

Do you have any experience of the glass ceiling and do you agree that women’s progress at senior levels in the workplace is stalling? If so, what is needed to turn things around?

Should women be allowed to fight on the frontline? Is it time for complete equality in the armed forces? Is society ready for the idea of female soldiers routinely fighting and dying in combat?

The death of Sergeant Sarah Bryant, the first female British soldier to be killed in Afghanistan, has reignited the long-running debate over women’s role in modern warfare.

The existing rules that exclude women from situations where the primary duty is “to close with and kill the enemy” are irrelevant in Afghanistan and Iraq where there is no single front line, according to some commentators.

Instead, British forces are engaged in a “360-degree war” where all soldiers, male or female, could be in the line of fire at any time, Catherine Philp wrote in the Times.

“In times gone by, rules like these kept women far behind the men,” she writes. “In the heat of the Iraq insurgency, however, all that began to change. In reality, the rules are already stretched to breaking point.”

The old arguments that women are not physically capable to fight or might disrupt “unit cohesiveness” no longer hold water, she added.

The Ministry of Defence says there are now about 18,000 women in the armed forces, just under 10 percent of the total. The Sex Discrimination Act (1975) allows the armed forces to exclude women from some posts.

That’s the right approach, according to one contributor to an online military forum.

“I’ve yet to see a woman who could withstand the mental and physical pressure of infantry work,” he wrote.

Not so, said Jo Salter, the RAF’s first female fighter pilot. She said society’s attitudes have changed over the years and the sex of a soldier is no longer the issue it once was.

“It’s always so sad when there’s any death at all. Gender isn’t the issue,” she told the Daily Telegraph.

That view was echoed by the parents of Flight Lieutenant Sarah-Jayne Mulvihill, who died in Iraq in 2006.

“Sarah did not distinguish between herself and the boys she served with,” her father Terry told the Daily Mirror. His wife Sue added: “There were four others with her and their families’ grief is equal.”

A quick look at the front pages after Bryant’s death suggests newspaper editors may not see it that way.

Pictures of Sgt Bryant in her wedding dress were splashed across several front pages under headlines such as “Our Afghan Heroine”. Most ran long stories on inside pages about her life and career in the army. The deaths of male soldiers typically receive far less coverage. There were few details of the three male colleagues killed with her.

Whether the media coverage of Bryant’s death reflects the wider views of society is hard to tell.

The last word goes to an unnamed military source who told the Herald newspaper: “Every man - and woman - is born equal under the 7.62mm gun law”.

Whatever happened to “girl power”? The phrase became a cultural phenomenon after the formation of the Spice Girls pop band in 1994, and was adopted as the mantra for millions of girls, even making it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

But, it seems that many fans — now grown women — are relinquishing this ideology in favour of that portrayed in a later cult classic: Sex and the City. Today’s generation of single women are relying on finding their “Mr Big” to fund their future and are investing a significant amount of time, effort and money in pursuit of the Carrie dream, a survey shows.

Almost one million women have set their sights on a knight on a white horse, banking on finding a rich man to take care of them, according to the “fashionistas not cashonistas” report from Friends Provident. Just 23 percent of the single women it polled have a pension and 20 percent have life or health insurance, yet just over a quarter own more than 30 pairs of shoes. Many are investing in their appearance to help them net an eligible man, too, the survey of 1,458 women aged between 25 and 45 found: 36 percent spend more than 50 pounds per month on clothes and accessories and 24 percent spend more than 200 pounds per year on beauty treatments.

And, it seems that money — not love — is the motivating factor in many relationships. Almost a third of Britons state they are reliant on their partner or spouse for financial security — but not all these relationships are based on love, according to another recent survey. Over 955,000 Britons would leave their partner if financially independent, according to Kaupthing Edge, the online retail financial services arm of Iceland’s largest bank.

It might be a sad fact of life that many women — like their counterparts in years gone by — still marry for money. But, for those women trying to stand on their own two feet there are still huge inequalities, particularly when it comes to pensions.

Figures from HSBC show the picture of retirement savings among women has improved greatly: in 2005, when it started tracking consumer attitudes to pension planning, just over a third of women surveyed aged 18 to 60 were contributing to a pension. Three years on, over half of women questioned are now paying into a pension.

But there is still a serious issue that lies largely outside women’s control. They still have far more erratic working patterns than men, taking time out from employment to raise children, for example. That means that, currently, only 35 percent of women retire on the full basic state pension, according to the Department for Work and Pensions’ gender impact assessment of pension reform, published last December.

The introduction of “personal accounts” into which workers will be automatically enrolled — the government’s solution to the looming pensions crisis — aims to increase that to two-thirds. Still, far more needs to be done to level the playing field. “It seems as if pensions were built by men for men and assume that everyone has a full basic state pension, which does not help women,” said Steve Bee, head of pensions strategy at Scottish Life in a recent podcast. “The government is making a mistake by assuming that women’s lives and work patterns are becoming more like men’s and that, therefore, they suit pension products designed for men.”

He called on ministers to allow women to buy back “missing years” of national insurance contributions to help them achieve a full basic state pension and put in place “proper advice structures” to help them on the road to a rosier retirement. Perhaps small steps, such as these, would herald the beginning of a new era of financial “girl power”.