‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man? complains Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, a musical whose title alone, being an endorsement of both the patriarchy and the British class system, would frighten off many theatre companies today. Post-modern apologists have tried to ascribe Higgins’s misogyny to homoerotic feelings for his boulevardier flat-mate Colonel Pickering. But to give the production serious de nos jours traction smart directors might tweak the plot in a few other respects. Rather than a tale about a working-class girl who improves her social standing with elocution lessons, for example, he might make it one about a middle-class boy who improves his social media standing with elective surgery. And instead of grimy Edwardian Covent Garden, he might set the metamorphosis of Eli to Eliza in leafy modern-day Hampstead, where Professor Higgins discovers his protegé not selling flowers but performing a karaoke drag act in a pub near the Tavistock Centre. This is where Eli undergoes a course of puberty blockers and therapy until the night before his penectomy when, in a tragic finale which secures the Tony nomination, the building is torched by a mob of fake-tanned Karens and heavily tattooed Daily Mail readers. Am I hopelessly biased, or does the long-awaited make-over of this Lerner and Loewe classic have Baz Luhrmann written all over it?

A question which readers of Australian newspapers might be more likely to ask right now is ‘Why can’t a man be more like a woman?’ It’s not that Aussie boys have suddenly been hit by the tsunami of Instagram-induced self-doubt that put so many of their sisters on the road to double mastectomies. Or that they want to emulate the success of trans athletes – a window of opportunity which closed before it really opened here. It’s simply that in the contests that really matter, it is increasingly women who are kicking the goals. It wasn’t innovative ALP policies which wrested seats like Kooyong and North Sydney from heavyweight Conservative control; it was the concerted action of a group of women most Australians had never heard of two weeks previously. And it’s not Anthony Albanese who will repair our broken South Pacific relationships; it’s Penny Wong, one of an unprecedented ten women in the new federal cabinet. And irrespective of what the Voice to Parliament will consist of, and when the referendum will happen, and what its outcomes will be, we can be confident, from her inspirational maiden speech to parliament, that any improvement in the safety, health and education standards of remote indigenous communities in the immediate future will be due in no small part to the efforts of a female senator and Speccie contributor called Jacinta Price. And lest the pollies start getting diversity tickets on themselves it’s worth pointing out that they still lag the real professions by some distance. There are now more female than male solicitors, GPs and accountants in every Australian state and territory. And while men still outnumber women in our university faculties, female students outnumber male students by a margin which grows bigger every year – notwithstanding White Ribbon claims that a girl is more likely to be sexually assaulted walking across an Australian university campus than backpacking in Somalia.

The news for women is as good or better on the international pages, and while the disappearance of the political glass ceiling may not yet be a global phenomenon, it is certainly a Western one. It was not John Kerry or Anthony Blinken who called China’s bluff over Taiwan; it was Nancy Pelosi. And of all the Kennedy’s Mr Biden could have made US ambassador to the US’s most important Pacific ally he chose one called Caroline. And if he falls off one more bicycle, or down one more flight of stairs it will be a woman who replaces Mr Biden as leader of the free world. Meanwhile, Britain looks all set to get its third female prime minister, with Liz Truss being just one of three women who made it to the final four of the Tory leadership contest. The same sort of thing is happening all over Europe. When Angela Merkel took office in 2005 she was Europe’s only female leader. There are now nine, and there will be one more if Nicola Sturgeon’s gets her secessionist way. But Australian women don’t need to look that far afield for inspiration. The All Blacks may be slipping down the world rankings, but with Jacinda Ardern making the Forbes World’s Most Powerful Women list for the second consecutive year, rugby is no longer what the world thinks about first when it thinks about New Zealand. And yet, according to the latest polls, Jacinda is far from being a shoo-in at next year’s election. Which hardly seems fair. I mean, you win an election, you have a child, you fight a pandemic, you save a planet, and then you have to stand for re-election all over again. It’s true what they say: A woman’s work is never done. But maybe that’s why they get paid less?