JANET STREET-PORTER: A glass ceiling? It's

reinforced b****y concrete!

Barclays Bank thinks that anyone without a willy hasn't got the brains to sit on their boardMy bank likes my money, but it doesn't want a female on the board. How unfair is that? I was hopping mad to read that the Royal Bank of Scotland, which received a £20 billion bail out of taxpayers' money (yes, that's cash provided by the hard-working men and women of this country), hasn't seen fit to appoint a single female to their board. Neither does their subsidiary, the posh Coutts Bank  -  even though they've made a huge fuss about wooing successful female entrepreneurs, artists and performers as customers, holding networking events to entice them to sign up. Barclays Bank, which has 10 million male and female customers, is another business which has no problem taking our cash but clearly thinks that anyone without a willy hasn't got the brains to sit on their board. I could go on  -  out of 70 bank directors in the UK, only seven are female, and that includes the nationalised ones. The Government claims to abhor discrimination in all its forms  -  but they handed over millions without insisting that half of the electorate  -  women  -  should be represented on these boards as a condition of our investment. Harriet Harman was denigrated recently when she complained that all-male teams running things weren't a good idea  -  and she's right. The under-representation of women at the top in business and government is a scandalous waste of talent. How can women take the majority of the consumer spending decisions in the UK, make up half the workforce and represent the majority of university graduates, but are still, in 2009, not considered to possess that vital gene necessary to sit in boardrooms up and down the land? We've proved beyond any doubt that we multi-task brilliantly, balance the household accounts, shop efficiently and plan holidays, choose the new car, buy our partner's clothes and whip up meals at the drop of a hat.  Yet, apparently, we don't have the skills needed to sit on the board of a bank  -  when even the men running them generally don't possess any banking qualifications either. We're nagged by politicians and do-gooders about climate change, poverty and ethical consumerism. But they should be getting just as exercised about the fact that in the world of business, women are treated appallingly.There's not a glass ceiling, it's reinforced bloody concrete  -  a new survey of the top FTSE 350 companies reveals that women now occupy just 8.8 per cent of boardroom seats, and most female directorships are non-executive posts, meaning they carry no real power to influence how a business is run. Of course, many women will not want to spend the majority of their time working and handling power  -  but that's not to say that the minority who do should find their careers so comprehensively blocked.