AFTER after some 200,000 years of human history it has never been a better time to be a woman than right now.

And who better that me, a white male, to mansplain this to a grateful public.

For a long time the idea of leadership was to be the bloke leaning on the bull bar of the Land Cruiser pointing into the distance, presumably with some kind of money making scheme in mind, then chopping down, digging up, draining, concreting over or fighting whatever stands between you and the horizon or the triple bottom line.

But we are at the point in the human story where it's beginning to dawn on us that this may not be the way to go forward any more in a survival of life on the planet type scenario - which I am presuming most of us want.

There are too many of us, earth's resources are finite and hyper-connectedness means poor people everywhere can see how good rich people (like us here in Australia) have got it and either want what we have or want to come here to have the same chances we have for a happy life.

In addition we are heading toward our sixth mass extinction and the (mainly) blokes who self appointed themselves and their mates as leaders have lead us into the midst of an enormous multi-dimensional natural, moral and financial clusterf--- that we can't spend or fight our way out of easily anymore.

All a massive over simplification but that's the beauty of the mansplain.

So as a consequence many professional political operatives are playing what is called the 'woman card'.

In other words when things get dire, and you figure you are on a hiding to nothing, you finally turn to the talented woman who has been standing there all along, and give her a shot.

Many who don't believe in quotas (except in coalition agreements) believe that because women get pregnant they are not able to cope with the rough and tumble of politics.

But if the childcare got sorted, women would spend less time than men banging on about how rough the political tumble was and spend more time coming up with workable solutions and just getting on with it.

Just like nurses or school teachers or the CWA do.