Another escapist fantasy arrives in the form of Mad Men, and what fun this series about Madison Avenue, showing on BBC4, is shaping up to be. There are clean-cut advertising men in sharp suits smoking Lucky Strikes, and submissive secretaries in pointy bras and tight sweaters – including one simply called “the new girl”, who has a worrying fringe and firmly expects to sleep with the boss on her first day.

There are intra and extra-mural affairs, Hitler-style 1930s putsch-grade betrayals – that is, not much different from most newspapers I’ve worked on – but be patient, I’m coming to my point. In Mad Men, we are back in the Swinging Sixties when Librium and birth control were only just arriving and a time when ethics in the workplace, diversity programmes, smoke-free environments, sexual harassment, equal opportunities legislation and corporate responsibility existed, if at all, only as the employment workshops of the distant future.

Okay then, flashback over. Let’s fast-forward to the corridors of power and the corner offices of today. The Equal Pay Act is coming up for 40 years old, the Representation of the People Act that gave women suffrage turns 90 this year, it was International Women’s Day yesterday – so it seems a good time to ask . . . guys, how are we doing?

Well, not even the smoothychops Mad Men of Madison Avenue could spin this into a success story.

Only one in five of our MPs is female. Only three out of the top 100 chief executives are female. Plenty of big companies are reverting to all-male boards of “chairman’s chums” as the screens turn red: it is a business nostrum that when the going gets tough, women lose out and the so-called frills such as “inclusion programmes” get hacked back.

One study reported a 40% drop in women in senior management roles at UK FTSE 350 firms between 2002 and 2007. Sarah Churchman is head of diversity at Price Waterhouse Coopers (and I’d be watching my back if I were her), which commissioned the report. “They are creating problems for the future,” she said. “Women are exiting corporate life.” Women leave for lots of reasons, the main one being that they have children and need and want to spend time with them; and of course most companies are run on the male competitive model, with its linear career progression and penalties for those who take career breaks.

Still, that said, before long I expect that when it comes to the recruitment and retention of women we will be talking about the “Nordic model” and not the male competitive model or the man’s world. This is why.

Not only do Sweden, Norway and Finland come top in the World Economic Forum’s gender gap index (the UK is 11th, the United States 31st), but Norway in particular has done something radical about the hidden female brain drain of women who cannot access what Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the American academic, calls an “on-ramp” back to their career after having children.

In 2002, Norway put in place a 40% quota for female nonexecutive directors in publicly listed companies over a certain size. In just five years the Oslo government achieved its target and this month boasts the highest proportion of female nonexecutive directors in the world. “A woman goes in, a man goes out. That’s how the quota works, that’s the law,” says Kjell Erik Oie, deputy minister of children and equality.

This is not just woolly-minded social engineering, mind. As Goldman Sachs pointed out in a report last year, reducing gender inequality and harnessing female ability (we do, after all, make up half of the available talent) would help to defuse two time bombs: heavier pensions liabilities and the ageing of the population.

Goldman Sachs is not known for its bleeding heart but for its business smarts. So when Goldman Sachs says closing the employment gap has huge implications for the global economy and could boost the GDP of the eurozone alone by 13%, and then goes on to name 30 stocks that would benefit from a rise in female employment, well, let’s just say that ears prick up in parliaments and bourses all over the world.

Harriet Harman announced last week that all-women shortlists will be extended to 2030. David Cameron has promised that if the Conservatives get in, he will follow the Nordic model and boot out the Daves (there are almost as many men called Dave in the shadow cabinet as there are women) to make way for female colleagues. But the government could go much further in the corporate sphere. And it should too.

If the record of the past 40 years has shown us anything, it is that lasting change to make the workplace a nicer, fairer, accessible place for both sexes, which would happen to give a huge boost to the economy, will never take place from the bottom up.

Sorry if this sounds like a line from Mad Men but positive discrimination, or what Cameron calls “positive action”, has to happen from the top down.

- One of the greatest paradoxes of modern times is the troubling ubiquity of sofas. Think sofas, think DFS, think Linda Barker of Changing Rooms, flicking her hair and baring her teeth, romping on a vast piece of pointless furniture covered with animal skin.

Haven’t you spent idle moments as you whizz past these endless acres of hoardings and warehouses wondering who is buying sofas at such a clip to justify the advertising spend, the retail space and why?

Didn’t the purchasers have sofas already? What are the people who are buying all these new sofas doing with their old ones? And who has a room big enough for that modular corner group that Barker is lounging on?

These are truly the big questions and now I have answers to the riddle of the sofas thanks to an episode with a ripped and ancient George Smith sofa that has gone a funny colour and smells like our dog.

I did what we all do in these straitened times and asked for an estimate for its reupholstering. I was informed that I would need 19 metres of fabric and that the work alone, excluding Vat, pick up and delivery, would be £650. So I did the math and worked out that if I used the only fabric we both liked, then sprucing up the sofa would cost £1,600 . . . and it would be cheaper to buy a new sofa. In fact, it would be cheaper to buy two.

This, I think, explains the fact that there are, when I last looked, about 8,000 secondhand sofas and other pieces of living-room furniture for sale on eBay. Lord knows how many there are in landfill. When DFS and its rivals put up the price of sofas by 7.2% last year, that alone added 0.1% to the national inflation rate.

First plastic bags, then bottled water. I would like to see sofas next on the list of proscribed items in the new economy, wouldn’t you?

www.racheljohnson.co.uk

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