Almost as soon as I set foot in the European Parliament, I saw Nigel Farage. Like one of the four horseman of the Brexit apocalypse, he appeared as I turned the corner, chatting amiably with two male colleagues, looking every bit the Brussels bureaucrat.

Farage was a big part of the reason I was nervous to be there in the first place; as one of only two UK press delegates to the International Women’s Day conference in Brussels, I was prepared to be instantly unpopular. Farage’s nemesis, Gina Miller, meanwhile, was one of the reasons I was there: she was speaking on the impact of Brexit on ordinary women, and it felt strange to see both members of 2016’s most hyperbolic British news stories in such close proximity to each other.

The European Parliament is a huge, cavernous place and the room that we – a group of mainly female journalists from across the EU – took our seats in seemed, at first, intimidatingly large. The list of delegates was comprehensive: Latvian TV, the Times of Malta, Radio Romania, the Slovak Spectator, Berlin Business, Hungarian ELLE. “We have an interpreter for every language,” the moderator announced proudly, pointing to a slew of shadowy figures behind red neon signs proclaiming “GERMAN”, “LITHUANIAN”, “CZECH”, “FRENCH”, “ENGLISH” and so on. Each visitor is supplied with a set of headphones which connects to those surrounding interpreters, who are ensconced behind black soundproof glass with microphones, translating in real time as panellists speak.

Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Show all 13 1 /13 Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Ida Wells An African-American journalist and activist born in Mississippi in 1862, she wrote prolifically on the fight for women’s suffrage as well as the struggle for civil rights. She documented the practice of lynching black people in the southern states showing how it was often used as means of controlling or punishing black people who competed with whites rather than as a means of “justice” for crimes. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lotifa El Nadi Egypt’s first female pilot born in 1907 in Cairo. Although her father saw no need for her to pursue secondary education, expecting her to marry and have a family, she rebelled and worked as a secretary and telephone operator at a flying school in exchange for lessons as she had no other means to pay for the training. Her achievements made headlines around the world when she flew over the pyramids and competed in international flying races. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Frida Kahlo A Mexican painter and activist born in Mexico City in 1907, her work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and indigenous traditions and by feminists for its honest depiction of female experience. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lina Bo Bardi A Brazilian architect, born in Italy in 1914, she devoted her life to the promotion of the social and cultural potential of architecture and design. She is also celebrated for her furniture and jewellery designs. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Olga Skorokhodova A Soviet scientist born into a poor Ukranian peasant family in 1911, she lost her vision and hearing at the age of five. Overcoming these difficulties in a remarkable way, she became a researcher in the field of communication and created a number of scientific works concerning the development of education of deaf-blind children. She was also a teacher, therapist and writer. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Miriam Makeba A South African singer and civil rights activist born in Johannesburg in 1932, she was forced to work as a child following her father’s death. She became a teenage mother after a brief and allegedly abusive marriage at 17, before she was discovered as a singer of jazz and African melodies. After becoming hugely successful in the US and winning a Grammy, she became involved in the civil rights struggle stateside as well as in the campaign against apartheid in her home country, writing political songs. Upon her death, South African President Nelson Mandela said that “her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.” Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Sally Ride An American astronaut and physicist, she was born in Los Angeles in 1951 and joined NASA in 1978 after gaining her PhD. She became the first American woman and the third woman ever to go into space in 1983 at the age of 32. Prior to her first space flight, she attracted attention because of her gender and at press conferences, was asked questions such as, “Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?” She later worked as an academic at the University of California, San Diego. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Halet Cambel A Turkish archaeologist born in 1916, she became the first Muslim women to compete in the Olympics in the 1936 Berlin games as a fencer. She declined an invitation to meet Adolf Hitler on political grounds, and after the conclusion of the Second World War, she trained as an architect and later worked as an academic in Turkey and Germany. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Ada Lovelace An English mathematician and writer born in 1815, she became the world’s first computer programmer. The daughter of poet George Byron, she is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, and was the first to recognise the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, creating the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Rukmini Devi An Indian dancer and choreographer credited with reviving Indian classical dance, she was born in 1904 and presented her form of dance on stage even though it was considered “low” and “vulgar” in the 1920s. She features in India Today’s list of “100 people who shaped India” having also worked to re-establish traditional Indian arts and crafts and as an animal rights activist. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Cecilia Grierson An Argentine physician, reformer born in Buenes Aires in 1859, she became the first woman in Argentina to receive a medical degree having previously worked as a teacher. Women were barred from entering medical school at the time, so she first volunteered as an unpaid lab assistant before she was allowed to train as a doctor. She was acclaimed for her work during a cholera epidemic before going on to found the first nursing school in Argentina. The harassment she experienced at medical school helped make her a militant advocate for women’s rights in Argentina. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Lee Tai-young Korea’s first female lawyer and judge born in 1914 in what is now North Korea, she was also an activist who founded the country’s first legal aid centre and fought for women’s rights throughout her career. Her often mentioned refrain was, “No society can or will prosper without the cooperation of women.” She worked as a teacher, married and had four children before she was able to begin her legal career after the Second World War, becoming the first woman to enter Seoul National University. She also fought for civil rights in the country and was arrested in 1977 for her beliefs, receiving a three-year suspended sentence and a ten year disbarment. Google marks International Women's Day with 13 amazing women Suzanne Lenglen A French tennis champion born in 1899, she popularised the sport winning 31 championships and dominating the women’s sport for over a decade. She was the first female tennis celebrity and one of the first international women sports stars, overcoming a childhood plagued with ill health including chronic asthma – which continued to plague her in her adult life. At 15, she became the youngest ever winner of a major championship and lost only seven matches during her entire career. She received widespread criticism for her decision to turn professional, but defended her right to make a decent living in the days when the grand slam tournaments paid a relative pittance to the winners.

Some speakers were more popular than others (a direct descendant of that famous Eastern European immigrant Marie Curie talking about her own work in nuclear physics drew a sudden admiring gaggle of schoolchildren who filed out once she was done), but none more so than Gina Miller. She is a woman with undeniable presence, who was spirited in and then spirited away as soon as she’d finished her panel, and unsurprisingly she expressed a strong feminist concern about women’s rights after Brexit.

What was surprising, however, was her passionate plea not to resort to women-only networks as a solution to sexism in the workplace, something which many had voiced support for throughout the conference: same sex networks can’t solve the problem of sexism in a society where most men are in the top positions, she said. “I always say: get the men to mentor the women,” she added. “That way, both will learn …We shouldn’t forget that women and girls need male role models as well as female ones.”

Miller is particularly concerned about “nuanced sexism”, she said, which can, in many ways, be more damaging than the overt sexism we used to find acceptable. When an attendee asked her to elaborate, she told a story about a young, newly qualified barrister who had arranged to meet with her.

“Her male colleagues said to her, ‘What a shame you didn’t go last week when you’d just got your hair done,’” she said. “I would never have judged her for the way she looked. But that planted seeds. It suggested women won’t treat other women with respect. And it suggested that what a professional woman looks like has everything to do with her grooming.”

Theresa May puts down Jeremy Corbyn on International Women's Day

How do you legislate for gender equality at EU level when a quarter of member states don’t even have any formal laws on maternity leave? The question of cultural relativism reared its head repeatedly throughout the debates. After I delivered my own speech, a Lithuanian journalist asked me how I can use the word “feminism” in my articles without provoking deluges of abuse (I still get the abuse, by the way, but not to the extent that she described the reaction in her own country.) “I get Facebook messages to my personal account calling me frigid,” she said. Another woman, from the Czech Republic, came to ask me at the end how I stopped abuse for being a female journalist from affecting my mental health. “I get insults, speculation about my sex life,” she said. “I refused to sign up for Twitter despite pressure from my bosses because I was afraid it would accelerate the abuse. After I showed them what I get on Facebook, they backed off because they said they could see what I meant.”

It’s a very different story in Iceland, where we heard that Icelandic culture is essentially feminist, and that, impressively, it became that way within a generation. Hanna Birna Kristjansdottir, Icelandic chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee and also the chair of the Executive Board of Women in Parliament, commented that when she was born there was one woman in the Icelandic parliament, and by the time her first daughter was born, 50 per cent of the parliament was female. “Change can happen, and it can happen quickly,” she said – which makes one feel a little ashamed of the stagnation in British politics, especially within the left-wing parties which supposedly stand for gender equality. This woman, after all, came from a self-described “centre-right” conservative party in her own country.

But how did change happen so quickly? Largely because of the introduction of laws surrounding parental leave from work after a child is born, apparently. In Iceland, paternity leave operates on a “use it or lose it” basis: three months are given to the woman, three months are given to the man, and three months are intended for the parents to take together. No parental leave is transferrable, so if a man doesn’t use his share, it’s gone forever.

“Socially, it’s unacceptable for a father not to take his paternity leave in Iceland,” said Kristjansdottir. “People would judge a man very harshly if he chose not to take it – they’d ask, ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you not want to be with your family?’” Crucially, the government supplies 80 per cent of the person’s usual salary while they’re on parental leave, in order to incentivise men to take it even when they are the main breadwinners.

What about that 50 per cent female parliament – surely that happened because of positive discrimination and strict quotas, something many feel uncomfortable about advocating? Not so, according to Kristjansdottir, who said that there are no quotas in the Icelandic parliament. Some parties have their own quota system (hers doesn’t), “but no party would ever go out to the ballot box with less than 50 per cent women. Culturally people would find that very odd. No one, male or female, would vote for a party that was 80 per cent male.”

Such words make it feel like Iceland is a million miles – and a good few decades – away from Poland, whose MEP Janusz Ryszard Korwin-Mikke stood up last week in the very same place and stated that the gender pay gap wasn’t just acceptable, it was preferable: “Of course women must earn less than men,” he said. “Because they are weaker, they are smaller, they are less intelligent, they must earn less.” Is it any wonder it sometimes takes months to get very simple things done in these cavernous rooms?

As I made my way back to the Eurostar terminal, the skies opened and the streets were suddenly awash with torrential rain. Sheltering under the eaves surrounding Brussels Midi Station were dozens of apprehensive people crouched on mattresses, in blankets or sleeping bags, arranged in neat little colourful rows, a community of the destitute far bigger than I’ve ever seen in Britain.

A woman was curled up under a clearly homemade blanket half-asleep, and as I went past a child emerged from beside her and pointed and laughed at me struggling in the rain with my loud suitcase. He was only two or three years old, and clearly homeless.