As Hillary Clinton stands down from her presidential campaign and urges her supporters to back Barack Obama, it's worth reflecting on what she's achieved, even though it wasn't the goal that she was aiming for. In her final speech on Saturday, she said that it will now be unremarkable to think that a woman can be president of the United States and that although she didn't break the glass ceiling, it now has 18 million cracks. Will it now be easier for other women to follow in her footsteps, or will she be regarded more like Margaret Thatcher - a woman who was somehow too masculine to make space for other women?

There's an interesting article in the Guardian about why there aren't more women in positions of leadership in the arts. Among the reasons offered is a lack of self-belief: 'Depressingly, the problem that seems to be unique to women is their own self-doubt. This sounds perilously like a stereotype-ridden generalisation, but Rawsthorn, who regularly sits on arts appointments panels, offers worrying evidence of its truth. All candidates, she says, are psychometrically tested, and "you can always guess whether a candidate is male or female. The characteristics that are flagged up again and again for the women are: self-doubt, questioning their ability to lead, and reluctance to step forward for promotion. It all adds up to a weaker sense of female entitlement for those very senior jobs." ' There's a Women Leaders in Museums network that was set up to counter that kind of thinking.

The article also talks about younger women: '...the education of girls is no longer as gendered as it was 20 years ago. "I look at my daughter, who's 17, who's studying art but also economics, and I think: you could run the world!" Nevill has a similar feeling about her own daughters, now in their early 20s. "They don't create barriers for themselves, because they've never seen barriers there in the first place." '

Are these observations true about female youth workers and the young women that we work with?