I don’t know about you, but just keeping up with Sarah Palin developments is becoming a full-time job – and then some. Ever since she erupted on the scene with her sexy librarian specs and updo, her five kids, her hunky “first dude”, I’ve taken to the chaise-longue drained of life blood.

I lie there, flicking between news channels, feeling sorry for myself and thinking: by 7am Sarah Palin would have already had a baby, disembowelled a moose, jogged six miles, electrified the free world and had sex with her husband. I am a complete waste of space and a sorry excuse for a wife, mother and woman.

So yes, while everyone else in white-bread redneck America is collectively ovulating with excitement, I am curbing my enthusiasm and consigning Palin to my long list of things I refuse to get very worked up about for the moment – which niftily brings us to today’s lesson: the glass ceiling.

In case you missed them, there have been three developments on this subject that are worth mentioning. First, last Friday Australia swore in Quentin Bryce, its first female governor-general. Like Palin she is the mother of five (so no pressure, ladies – it’s breast pumps and BlackBerrys all round).

Second, the government’s equality commission released its latest Sex and Power report which revealed that in the UK the number of women in top jobs is declining. Even though girls are doing better than boys in secondary education and make up the majority of graduates, the 14.3m women in the workforce are underrepresented in all the obvious blue-chip places, where almost all the plum posts are hogged by the 16.9m working men and always have been.

“We always speak of a glass ceiling,” said Nicola Brewer, chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as she pointed out that the UK lags behind such model states as Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan when it comes to female representation in parliament. “These figures reveal that in some cases it appears to be made of reinforced concrete.”

And the third thing that happened? The thing that puts all the above into perspective? In the Islamic Republic of Iran, a court convicted four women’s rights campaigners – one of whom was en route to Sweden to pick up the Olof Palme prize for her humanitarian work – just after the activists had succeeded in persuading MPs not to pass a bill that would allow husbands to take on a second wife without reference to the first. The four have been sentenced to six months in jail.

According to grim reports from Tehran last week, women have to seek permission from their husbands to work outside the home or travel abroad; women are subjected to spot checks by patrols; women lose custody of their children in divorce cases and have half the inheritance rights of males; and a girl that has been raped can be murdered with impunity by her father or another male relation in order to cleanse the stain on the family name.

This explains, I hope, why I find it hard to get awfully worked up, try as I might, about the glass ceiling in the Anglophone world. As Bryce and Palin, the alpha females, prove, women in civilised countries can do whatever they want, even with large families and multiple responsibilities, if they have enough drive. The limitations that constrain women’s advancement in a free country that abides by conventions on human rights are largely self-imposed.

After the release of the Sex and Power report, various powerful women were canvassed on whether the glass ceiling exists. Fay Weldon, writer and mother of four, pointed out that it exists only for women with children and not because mothers are discriminated against, but because after childbirth women regard their role as mothers as more important than anything else. It is also physiological: “Women aren’t promoted because they don’t apply for promotion. They don’t want the longer hours, bringing more strain and more stress. They don’t want that extra responsibility because they already have enough responsibility as a mother.”

Nicola Horlick, a mother of five and the so-called City “superwoman”, said that she had never experienced any discrimination or glass ceiling: “The changes we’ve witnessed [the report’s findings that the number of women employed in senior positions is falling] don’t reflect women being disadvantaged. They simply show a greater desire for control over their lives.”

Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, head of a gender consultancy, pointed out that while there is institutional workplace bias towards men – male employees are talent-spotted for promotion and fast-tracked after they hit 30, the time when women are thinking about or having babies – the “glass ceiling is a fallacy”.

She argued that women don’t necessarily want to get to the top, elbows out, but they’re more “horizontally ambitious”. They want all areas of their lives to be successful and satisfying, not just the part for which they are paid. I don’t expect to be garlanded by the sisterhood for saying it, but this rings true to me. I know loads of mothers without jobs who are perfectly happily pottering at home.

And I know loads of mothers with jobs (yes, the famous jugglers, like the glamorous Tamara Mellon, the brains behind Jimmy Choo and now a director of Revlon) who are quite content to juggle away – until promotion looms. It’s then that the icy hand of fear grips the entrails, or it did with me, at the gloomy prospect of devoting precious family time to the dubious cause of career advancement.

It is a very male take on things to think that everyone is chafing to spend their whole lives in an office, undergoing annual reviews and longing to move swiftly up the ranks. As far as I can see, women with bags of drive, energy, oomph and confidence get there if they want to. Those who don’t are held back by themselves, not by others.

Yes, Palin has set the bar high, so high that just thinking about it makes me feel exhausted, but also relieved. I’m glad to think that there are some women who don’t just want to be prime minister or president or governor-general. Heck, they want all that and five children. I’m just glad I’m not one of them.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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