Equality is a hot topic at the moment; the election of America’s first African-American president has raised questions of whether a member of Britain’s ethnic minority groups could be elected to the highest office and from where the British Obama may come. In California 52% of electors chose to write inequality into their state constitution by only recognising marriage as existing between a man and a woman, undermining the estimated 18,000 same sex marriages that have taken place this year. Here in the UK hope for progress towards gender equality has been dealt two serious blows in recent reports. Firstly, the country has fallen two places in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Index (GGI), from 11th to 13th place. This fact was hammered home when recent figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) showed that the gender pay gap in this country was not falling, but actually increasing.

In its GGI the World Economic Forum attempts to create a comprehensive measure of gender equality by looking at scores for Health, Education, Political Empowerment and Economic Participation. Each of these categories is afforded equal weighting so that none is prioritised over the others. On the basis of these measures, each country is then awarded a score between one and zero, where one is perfect equality and zero is absolute inequality; in 2008 the UK scored 0.733 down from 0.744 last year. This is part of a wider decline which has seen the UK fall four places from its 9th position in 2006 and which now sees it behind developing countries such as the Philippines, Latvia and Sri Lanka.

A major factor behind the country’s poor rating this year has been the economic sphere.  Britain plummeted 20 places on wage equality alone. The World Economic Forum’s research is backed up by The ONS’s own figures which recently showed that women in full time employment can expect to earn £369,000 less than their male counterparts over their life time as a result of the 17.1% gender pay gap. When part-time employment is considered the size of the gap is dramatically larger at 36.6%. Both of these figures have increased from their respective 2007 levels indicating that this is a growing problem needing urgent attention.  How has a Labour government, committed to equal opportunities for all, overseen such a decline in gender equality and what can now be done to reverse this worrying, and sadly not unexpected, trend?

When Labour came to power in 1997 nearly one in four of its MPs were women, dubbed Blair’s Babes, and it is still leading the way with 94 females in its 350 MPs. However, the momentum seems to have stalled there, and is actually showing visible signs of decline. The GGI places the UK 21st in the world for equality in political empowerment, which represents another fall from 12th place in 2007. Women are not only underrepresented in government but also in other branches of state such as the House of Lords and the judiciary. This means that issues which specifically affect women are not always decided, or legislated, upon by women. Wider social problems such as shockingly low conviction rates in rape cases, currently around 5.7%, which demand urgent action across the whole spectrum of society, are not being adequately addressed.

The falls in political and economic equality are in sharp contrast to the situation in education and health, making them more concerning. With 69% of women, compared to 50% of men, completing further or higher education they are now better educated and healthier than men. Surely it is detrimental to our economy and political establishments to have this group excluded. Campaigners claim that unlocking women’s potential could contribute an added 1.3 - 2% to the national GDP. The question now must be; how can the UK’s decline be arrested and reversed?

The current Equality Bill is a promising start, it imposes a duty on public sector employers to conduct and publish pay audits, which will clearly show the degree of gender inequality in pay packets. On top of this duty, the government proposes to use the public sector’s purchasing power to require private contractors to carry out the same kind of audits before contracts for public works can be awarded. The idea behind this is that transparency is the enemy of inequality; if discrepancies cannot be seen, they cannot be challenged. However, there are currently no plans to make such pay audits mandatory for the whole of the private sector. If the government is committed to changing the attitude of private companies towards equality it must impose the rules on pay auditing across the board.

There is more that can be done. At the beginning of this year a law came into force in Norway, ranked 1st in the GGI, which required Public Limited Companies to have women make up at least 40% of their board’s members. The Act has seen female membership in company boards increase from 6% in 2001 to 37% by 2007. This progress has only been made through strong action by the Norwegian government and would have not occurred without government intervention.

Whilst outlawing discrimination is a fundamentally important aspect of combating inequality it is only one element. If the government is committed to closing the increasing gender gap across society it must take the lead. It has to build upon the work it has done in getting women more involved in parliament and government ranks, continue its reforms of the House of Lords and the judiciary and follow Norway’s lead in regulating the private sector. Creating gender equality is not simply a formal process of removing barriers to equal treatment but also a matter of taking positive action to make fairness and equal opportunities a reality for the benefit of working women, the economy and wider society as a whole.

Stalin or Mr Bean? Angry Bear or Drunken Bear? What will the West pick as Dmitry Medvedev’s cliché? Putin and Medvedev seem eager to profess a return to the pre-Soviet, Europeanised past. They celebrate the quatrocentenary of St Petersburg, the city upheld as the symbol of European Russia, and replace the hammer and sickle with tsarist eagles on state crests.

Nor is it all hype: the current Russian administration contains fewer ex-KGB, in less influential positions, than did Yeltsin’s in the 1990s, and Gazprom, far from a state puppet, attacks commercial debtors both allied to Russia and hostile.

But Western media narratives endure.  Saudi Arabia, banning Bibles and exporting Wahabiism through petrodollars, remains the preferable Western energy partner. And this is largely because not only do Putin et al continue to sharpen their claws in a classic Soviet way, most obviously in Georgia, but they actively encourage a Western view of Russia as Soviet.

It is not that Russians have no concept of image. Indeed oligarchs on both sides of the Putin divide routinely invoke the powers of PR.  The British agencies Ketchum and GPlus (not forgetting their recent hire Gerhard Schroder) promote Gazprom’s floatation on Anglo-American markets. Berezovsky, an exile famous for his riches and ferociously anti-Putin stance, uses Bell Pottinger to slow it.

Nor do Russian politicians lack talent in promoting themselves at home. Putin’s domestic image, skilfully pushed by state media, is of a muzhik, literally ‘peasant’, a combination of “good bloke” and “real man”. Supposedly unofficial pictures of him with gun and muscles sparked fitness drives amongst overweight Russians and European leaders. His folksy “Putin-isms” have become colloquial: Russians send each other ‘to the outhouse’ after describing their opinions as ‘nonsense, soft-boiled boots’.

The supposedly closed Putin responded in a Russian internet chat to questions about his sex life and about his apparently spontaneous kissing of a little boy at a recent rally. The Times suggests the incident was instigated by Ketchum for Western audiences: in my view the gesture, and his rather clumsy sentimental explanation, resonates far more strongly with his domestic public.

Pragmatic, admired, strong, intelligent yet “one of us”: Putin’s domestic image is neither Yeltsin nor Stalin but Clinton. It is simply unfortunate that for ordinary Russians, that entails a belligerent attitude to the West. No wonder Medvedev longs to dump the Bear for the Eagle.