Election 2001 - This election is an almost wholly woman-free zone. Four years after the great photocall, why aren't Blair's Babes in the front line?

We all have our own disappointments with the Blair government. There's the way you feel like singing ten "Hallelujah Choruses" when the trains show even a vague sense of punctuality; there's the frustration that, despite not having to wait two weeks to get a doctor's appointment for your sick child, you still have to wait eight days. But give Labour a chance: it admits that the investment has been slow in coming, and that it will take time. Yes, in many ways it deserves four more years.

Yet for me, there has been one huge, gaping, shocking let-down: the failure to do anything at all to advance the cause of women. And no, I'm not talking about a couple of months' extra maternity pay. I'm talking power. Because until women get their hands on the levers of political power, it will remain a man's world.

The absence of women in Labour's high command has become even more starkly obvious than usual during this election campaign. John Prescott's punch was simply further proof that politics is a man's game. As one of several horrified senior women MPs has complained: "This election is a woman-free zone."

Let us start with the obvious. Who are the faces of Labour who appear at press conferences and day and night on our television screens? Well, there's Tony Blair (lots and lots of him), Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, Alan Milburn, Peter Mandelson . . . and Margaret Beckett - good old Margaret Beckett, who is no mean fighter herself in the television studios, but who has been a senior politician since the Dark Ages (c1983), and is certainly no product of new Labour's first four years in power. Thank God for her. But where are the other women at the top? Where are the senior women whom new Labour has nurtured?

When the party's manifesto was launched in Birmingham, Margaret Jay was the most prominent woman in the Cabinet showcase alongside Tony Blair. Well, that's fine, except that she's off, leaving politics for a more enjoyable life. Mo Mowlam - who is also off - is kept well out of the limelight. Ann Taylor - who has been targeted for the chop in every piece of post-election reshuffle speculation - is nowhere to be seen. And Clare Short is probably even now buried under ten feet of special spin-doctors' concrete, after making the perfectly sensible observation that Blair's preachy calling of the election in front of a crowd of schoolgirls was "odd".

What about the election's important morning press conferences? What sign of rising Labour women there? Well, we have seen (apart from Margaret Beckett) Tessa Jowell, Patricia Hewitt, Yvette Cooper, Estelle Morris and Barbara Roche.

However, the pattern has been repetitive. Blair or Brown kicks off. There is the second male ministerial speech. Then the woman gets up, smiling uncertainly, and reads out her text, sits down, and is ignored again. Almost without exception, the questions are answered by the men. The impression is that the female ministers are allowed up to the top table as a bit of a treat, there to add a touch of colour, in their smart trouser suits. Emmeline Pankhurst would have either thrown up or thrown something harder than an egg.

Around the TV and radio studios, the pattern continues. When it comes to fielding hard questions or dealing with a potentially dangerous situation, female politicians are rarely trusted. The party sends in Darling, Milburn or John Reid, and only occasionally Beckett. For Labour, just three women, Beckett, Roche and Ruth Kelly, have been used on serious policy issues; Glenda Jackson was allowed to speak about celebrities. This was a government that came to power with a few big female hitters - notably Mowlam and Harriet Harman - yet today it sounds almost entirely male. The women are simply being used as electoral window dressing by a male machine.

The Conservatives' line on women is different. They are quite happy to see one, very high-profile woman at the top. The only problem is that they seem to go out of their way to pick the one person who is so off the wall that no one could possibly suggest bringing in any more for a long time to come. First, it was Margaret Thatcher. Now it's Ann Widdecombe. Yet, much as you may gasp at almost everything Widdecombe says, she is at least up there with the big boys. Theresa May, the education frontbencher, is almost invisible in a Tory campaign dominated by William Hague, Michael Portillo and Francis Maude. As for Ffion Hague, she merely smiles blankly as her husband replies for her: "I answer the questions."

The Liberal Democrats, who in many ways seem far more progressive and reformist than Labour, are even worse when it comes to women. At the launch of their manifesto, there was a platform of three men and one woman - Shirley Williams, a former Labour Cabinet minister from the 1960s and 1970s, and now in her seventies. With all due respect to Baroness Williams, who has been a fine politician in her time, surely hers is not the face of modern Liberalism. And she did not open her mouth once. Throughout the press conference, the co-leader of the Lib-Dem election campaign, Lord Razzall, called the usual suspects: John Sergeant of ITN, Andrew Marr of the BBC, Adam Boulton of Sky News - and so it went on. At the end, I asked Razzall and Charles Kennedy if they had intended their programme for the next four years to be all about men talking to men, despite a number of women journalists trying to ask a question. Both looked nonplussed. "Oh, sorry," said Razzall, clearly amazed that anyone should think it odd that women were being excluded from the political process.

Our table above shows the extent to which men dominate the election campaign. Echo Research has monitored mentions of individual politicians in national newspapers in their coverage of the first two weeks. Only one woman, Widdecombe, appears in the top ten. The others are almost invisible. Remarkably, Cherie Blair, Ffion Hague and Margaret Thatcher (who are not actually standing for election, and so do not feature in our table) have all got at least five times as many mentions as any woman apart from Widdecombe.

There is one obvious, but unhelpful, retort to all this: isn't it the same everywhere in British society? In business, science, journalism, everywhere that power is wielded, women are in a small minority. We are allowed out when it comes to the arts, to books and magazines, to gambol innocently in pastel-coloured cultural reservations. Politics is just the same.

But politics shouldn't be the same. Politics should be at the cutting edge in this country. If women cannot advance under a government meant to be particularly responsive to equity and fairness, then where can they?

The Tories do not surprise me. They are a party of women, very often, at the local level - but the kind of women who still baulk at putting forward unmarried mothers (or married mothers, for that matter, or single gels) to fight safe seats. The Lib Dems are a disappointment, but they are also some way from real power, except at the local level, where their gender record is a bit better.

No, the real problem is clearly "new" Labour. Every single top job is in male hands. Had Blair been serious about this issue, then surely, four years on, we would have had a female Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, Education Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister or even Chancellor? And who is coming up for those jobs next time around? Patricia Hewitt for Foreign Secretary? Tessa Jowell to take over the Home Office? Harriet Harman for Attorney General? Ruth Kelly for Trade and Industry? (She sounds a lot more convincing on the economy than do several men in the Cabinet.) Well, why not? If Gus Macdonald can be brought in from the Lords to a Cabinet job, then why not Baroness Scotland or Baroness Symons? Why has more encouragement not been given to the rising stars of the last intake, Oona King, Fiona Mactaggart, Sally Keeble and Hazel Blears? The Blairites have leaked the news that, in the post-election reshuffle, there will be no Women's Unit, but a female minister in every government department. Great. But what about some women in the top jobs? This is worse than Labour in the 1970s. It's worse than the 1960s. There is no one remotely of the power of Shirley Williams or Barbara Castle.

None of this is to underrate the advances in childcare provision, maternity leave and help for poorer families that Labour has enacted. And yes, it is true that the party's manifesto contains a promise to change the law to allow all-women shortlists.

But frankly, if you look back at the past four years of the Labour government, women have become less, not more, equal. The Commons remains an alien place to many women, as does the political culture in general. Women MPs, who are nonplussed at how little they have advanced under an allegedly left-of-centre government, insist that it will be different next time. The new girls won't be so new any more; they plan to band together and lobby much more actively.

Good luck to them. They should also seek advice on those techniques of public speaking and giving interviews at which men excel; publicise the failure of departments to achieve a gender balance among ministers; invite over senior politicians from Continental sister parties to advise on how to go forward. Call it "In Labour".

And one other thing: if Blair dares to suggest another "babes" photocall, they should tell him where to stick it.

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