The scary thing is, if we don’t see these women and learn about their accomplishments, nothing will change. Women are more successful when they can see female role models around them. When we see it, we believe it, conscious or otherwise.

A 2013 study, published in the Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, backs this up. Eighty-one female students and 68 male students were asked to give a speech arguing against higher tuition fees. In the background, pinned to a wall, the psychologists swapped between posters of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel, Bill Clinton or sometimes took down the posters altogether to see if they affected the students’ performance.

The female students who gave their speech with Hillary Clinton or Angela Merkel on the wall spoke for significantly longer than those without (an increase of 49% and 24% respectively). Their speeches were also rated as higher in quality by those watching – who incidentally, couldn’t see the posters – and the women also rated their own performances more positively. The men’s performances were not affected by the posters.

The study is heavy-handed, but it does demonstrate that female role models have a significant impact on our performance, even on an unconscious level. Just six of the FTSE 100 CEOs are women (the list features more men called David than women: I’m considering changing my name). Women have only 30% of all speaking roles in Hollywood films. Just 24% of global news stories are about women. And 2.7% of all statues in the UK are of historical, non-royal women. We don’t have the same unconscious signals as men. High-achieving women don’t show up as much. This has an impact on our confidence.

The lack of visible women in positions of power causes problems. Unconscious bias – the unspoken subjectivity we all have when making snap decisions – is influenced by what we see around us in day-to-day life. That brilliant riddle about the surgeon sums this up well. Don’t know it? Time for another game.

Set your stopwatch again and, in 60 seconds, answer this conundrum: a father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to hospital and just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate – that boy is my son!” Explain. This riddle baffled me for ages, I simply couldn’t explain it. You can imagine how disgusted I was with myself when I realised the answer was simple: the surgeon was his mother. I am the editor-in-chief of a feminist brand. I create content day-in, day-out on equality. Yet I still jumped to the conclusion that the surgeon would have been his dad.

Jess Phillips MP told me a similar story recently. She recounted a conversation with her young son who had seen a headline about an unnamed MP in a newspaper, then asked Phillips if she knew him.

“I do,” she answered. “I know her.”

She was shocked that her own son, who only knows one MP intimately – his own mother – still jumped to the conclusion that MP was shorthand for man.

Now, this is nothing to do with Phillips’ son and everything to do with our gendered society. These examples happen all day, every day, and affect all our futures and prospects.

It seems that the echo chamber we’ve been hearing so much about doesn’t just apply to social media, but to our entire lives. Think about it, we know we can be anything we want to be, but if we don’t see it, don’t hear it, then fundamentally we don’t believe it. Maybe don’t even consider it. Does it affect the jobs we apply for? Does it affect the people we choose to hire ourselves? Unless we start to positively discriminate, to counter our history and diversify our cast of role models, it’s impossible to envisage a future with true gender equality.

The reverberations of the echo chamber show no sign of ceasing. Far from it. Our digital world is driven by data, by algorithm and, increasingly, by artificial intelligence (AI). All AI learns from pre- data and draws its own, new conclusions from it. But when you consider that all historical content, all data, consciously or otherwise, favours men, you can see that we have a big, new visibility problem emerging. By drawing conclusions from pre-existing content, all existing bias and prejudice will be magnified. Of course, humans can counter this effect by teaching the system to deal with the data in a specific way. But the majority of people working on AI development are – you guessed it – men. It’s a head-spinning problem. There may not be as many women as men working in tech, but there definitely are some. And they need a voice. Fast.

Let’s give a warm welcome to positive discrimination… Still not sure this matters? Then consider this. If we leave new technology to learn from old data, you simply may never see those ads for senior-management jobs. They’ll be served up into the news feeds of your male colleagues because the data will show more men have clicked on them in the past. And you may never learn about those women who do break the mould, as their stories will get lost as algorithms push the most general, appeals-to-all content to the top.

It’s that echo chamber again. Seek the information and you may find it. There are many of us trying to spread the word that women and feminism are worth hearing about. But if you expect that information to find you – or, even more importantly, a schoolgirl wondering what career options lie ahead of her – then without change we will all be painfully disappointed. Or, in a scarier twist, we won’t be disappointed, we’ll simply be none the wiser.

This isn’t just about the workplace. It isn’t just about women being erased from history. It’s not just about a lack of role models for younger women. This is about our voice and how equally we are heard and represented now, in 2018. Just 32% of our MPs in the UK are women, and 33% of the cabinet. These institutions are supposed to represent us, the women of this country, 51% of the population. What on earth is going on? If the upper echelons of our country are not equal, what hope is there for the rest of our society?

The detail is bleaker still:

Since women won the right to stand for parliament in 1918, 100 years ago in November, there have been 455 female MPs. That’s less than the number of male MPs who sit in the Commons today. In 100 YEARS!

Countries who have a more equal parliament are more likely to pass laws that benefit women. In Ecuador, a country that ranks eighth globally for parliamentary equality with 41.6% women in parliament, women have been more likely than men to introduce bills relating to education, health and the environment.

Back in the UK, in the past two years in the House of Commons, bills that protect women – such as one preventing and combating violence against women – have been vehemently opposed by some male MPs, while other men have campaigned for bills that could harm women, such as providing anonymity to men accused of rape.

Now, I’m not being naive, I know not all women vote for women’s issues, and not all men vote against… that would be ridiculous. But research shows time and again that an equal conversation leads to a more equal result.

“Why we need to stop erasing women from history”