What is the single most obvious thing that unites Patricia Hewitt (savaged at the TUC), Tessa Jowell (lambasted over her criticisms of the satirical television show Brass Eye), Baroness Jay (hooted derisively out of the running for BBC chairman), Margaret Beckett (vilified over the BSE scientists' balls-up) and Hilary Armstrong (attacked over her dressing-down of the anti-war Labour MP Paul Marsden)? Yes, you, the boy at the back? It isn't an easy time to be a female politician.

In this country, it never has been. Let me be clear, right at the start, about what I am not going to say: it is not that these or any other female ministers are paragons who make the right choice every time; or that they should not be robustly criticised and challenged. They are all playing at the top of politics, taking decisions that affect millions of lives. Like their male colleagues, they get it wrong from time to time - an infelicitous phrase, a misjudged call, a speech that flops. No female minister has yet been forced to resign in embarrassing circumstances. No female was in charge of the Dome, or the Railtrack saga, or the regime of "spinning". The worst mistakes have come from the men. But let's be honest: the girls have had their failures, too.

No, what I think needs to be highlighted is the tone of the attacks on prominent female politicians. Am I alone in finding something jeering, dismissive - sometimes just plain nasty - that is rarer when men are under the cosh? Take Margaret Beckett. She deserved criticism when her department tried to smuggle out the sheep-brain fiasco late at night. But here is Quentin Letts in the Mail: "Her angular spine showed through the back of her taupe suit. On her skull there protruded pale veins, pumping fast . . . Beckett exploded like an old mutton with too much gas in its gut."

Or take the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, whose exchanges with Marsden were certainly no worse than others with chief whips over the years. Ask a few of those who remember what John Silkin and Bob Mellish (Labour chief whips in the 1960s and 1970s) were like - if you crossed them, they'd pull your fingernails out slowly and painfully. Yet Armstrong is now attacked both for being excessively tough and, in the words of an unnamed minister quoted in the Guardian, for being unable "to knock the skin off a rice pudding".

She is not, the Times suggests, "up to the job". "Not up to the job", "out of her depth" - I've heard those phrases too many times when female politicians are being discussed. Tessa Jowell was deemed "hopelessly out of her depth" by television executives, according to the Guardian's Matt Wells, after she took a bold decision and rejected the BBC's proposed new youth channel.

Harriet Harman was invariably described as "not up to it" when she was social security secretary. Even Patricia Hewitt, one of the brightest brains in the cabinet, is dismissed as boring by the likes of Andrew Neil, the permanently overheated TV presenter, who cut out of Hewitt's speech to the Labour conference on the grounds that her oratorical style wasn't setting him alight. Sorry, guys, but each of these three women is more than a match for most of the grey Joes who grace our political scene.

Let's take an even more contentious example. Jo Moore behaved disgracefully in sending that e-mail about burying bad news after the World Trade Center attacks. She got a bucket-load over her head, and deserved it. But just suppose, for a moment, that the e-mail had been sent by a Charlie Whelan figure? Would there not have been a bit of jovial, "come off it, lads, that's just Charlie being Charlie" solidarity? The Labour Party is a bit more feminised. The Commons is very slightly better. More women are coming through in the media, particularly in broadcasting. But the opinion-forming class of Westminster - that tight, highly influential class of sketch writers, leader writers, political commentators and their associated sources and friends - is overwhelmingly male. And not just male, but conservative male: golfing, clubby, self-consciously old-fashioned male.

The real question, in the end, is how much any of this matters. Is it just another "girlie whinge"? Well yes, it is, but unless we whinge and point out these things, I am quite clear about what would happen: there would be even fewer women in politics. That would be a serious problem, not only for the sketch writers, who are desperate for any dash of colour among the drab and uniform politicians of today, but also for the Labour government and for British politics in general. The almost complete maleness of the Conservative benches, whose media people and supportive commentators are also almost all men, is matched by an increasingly male culture on the Labour side.

It's the war, needless to say. There is a fixated, up-themselves self-importance about the government at the moment, with its overseas-visit dramas, High Noon press conferences and Churchillian language, which is turning off every woman I know. Perhaps inevitably, the agenda of the state of schools, of crime on the streets, of hospitals and chaotic transport, has been shoved back with a sigh of relief. The male political class gives the impression that war is so much more fun. Well, female voters are watching and they don't find any of it fun, or (a lot of the time) interesting. They are frightened, suspicious of the rhetoric, and they have not forgotten the domestic agenda of politics, because they live it every day. Our political culture is one-sided, and getting more so. Where is the big-character, influential, female thinking at the top of the government? It isn't there. The seeds of another shocking slump in voter turnout, with the uncertainties it will bring, are being sown this winter.

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