I t was, as is so often the case, reading The Guardian that did it. There was page after page, 15 of them, yesterday morning, of men writing about men: not a single female byline, nor a single prominent female photograph (there was a tiny one of Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller), in the whole of the home news pages. Barely a woman in sight till I got to Polly Toynbee. There were male suicide bombers, and their male barristers and a male judge and male home affairs spokesmen, and there were broadcasters – not one woman among the long list of Sony radio award winners – and there were fat politicians, and all these men writing about what all these other men were doing.

I say there were no women. My apologies: there was one – a large picture on page three of Kate Moss modelling in Topshop, accompanied by a female byline. (And, yes, The Times did that too on its own page three.)

What has happened to us women? Was there really nothing of any note done by any woman in Britain over the weekend? Were there no female journalists in The Guardian to report the news on Monday? Or have we, as The Times suggested all over its front page, given up the fight and crept back into our kitchens? “Nurseries feel pinch as mothers stay at home . . . first evidence of an end to the ‘have-it-all’ generation [with] mothers choosing to care for young children themselves.”

Is this, in the end, I thought, the cultural revolution wrought by ten years of new Labour: to send women back to the past?

Thankfully, the figures in the study reported by The Times tell a slightly less depressing story. Yes, a higher proportion of nursery places are empty than in the past – but only because the number of places has doubled in the past four years. There are, according to the report by market analysts Laing & Buisson, some 725,000 nursery places available, with 580,000 children attending them. Four years ago there were 407,000 kids attending nursery and a total of 425,000 places. Far from scurrying back to our kitchens, there are well over a third more children at nursery today than there were four years ago. Phew.

And yet . . . and yet . . . what are we doing, we women? Nothing, according to most of the news yesterday (thank goodness for Ségolène Royal). Posing in shop windows.

From time to time, writing these columns and bombarded by hostile mail from you male readers – “Dear ‘Ms’ Miles, as I suppose you call yourself” – you have to wonder where are the women in public debate in Britain today? Looking up something on the Times Alphamummy website the other week, I was astonished to find a whole colony of intelligent, working women giving up their time to discuss nannies, flexible working or the merits of Caesareans. All important things, sure, but where are these voices in the debate over Trident or the future of the health service?

Any newspaper columnist will tell you – and look at Comment Central in timesonline or any of the political blogs if you need confirmation – that public debate today is overwhelmingly dominated by men. There are some common opinions about why this is so. Women don’t have time, is the commonest view among women. That isn’t true. Look at Mumsnet or Alphamummy. If a woman has time to discuss her nursery or the relative merits of the different sippy cups, then she has time to post a comment on the failings of the school system or whether we should pull out of Iraq. By allowing men to dominate public discourse, through both politics and the media, women remove their own voices from the debate.

Then there is the view that women “don’t have opinions”. That isn’t true either. All the women I know, from newspaper executive to nurse to nursery assistant, have plenty of opinions. Nor are they uninterested in politics: women are always the first to volunteer for playgroup committees or school governing boards – raw politics – when men claim that they haven’t got the time.

What is true is that to be a woman and to proffer an opinion on a “man’s” topic – for which read any hard issue from al-Qaeda to the transferable tax allowance – is to invite derision, ridicule and patronising commentary; and this from men who often have (take it from me) nothing but prejudice to argue with. The level of hostility is enough to put off any woman, and a lot of men too, I imagine, from joining in public debate. Hence the popularity of Mumsnet and the like; it isn’t so much that the topics are soft but that the language of the audience is. It’s a safe place to speak.

I wish I knew how to stop the bullying, and encourage women to make their voices heard more. Just as the internet (and other media) ought to be allowing women to gain a voice in the public sphere, they actually seem to be doing the opposite, leaving women chattering among themselves in the online version of the ladies’.

Even in the House of Commons, it’s going to get worse. It is likely that after the next election, there will be fewer women MPs than we have now: a disproportionate number of female MPs occupy Labour marginal seats, and a swing to the Tories always tilts power back towards the male member. This matters, as it is because of the macho, confrontational maleness of our political system that so much time is wasted and so little gets done.

If women could find a way to harness their power, then we ought to be able to make a real difference to the public sphere. Now here’s a girly admission: I have very little idea how we could best go about it, but I would love to see Mumsnet and the other leading women’s websites leading the debate. Or do they, too, secretly believe that we are too busy changing nappies to be bothered with changing the world?

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