In the United States the Democratic Party recently nominated Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate. If the results of the latest polls hold true at election time, America will swear in its first female president in January. The previous week, across the pond, British Prime Minister Theresa May was negotiating the terms of Britain's exit from Europe wIth Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Women living in Western society have been raised to believe they can be competent and successful in any professional role through education, ambition and hard work. And young girls today can point at severalliving role models operating at the highest levels of leadership. So is the long and hard battle for women's equality finally over?

Hillary Clinton is poised to become president of the United States, but in the religious sphere women's leadership is still a contentious issue. Credit:AP

Well, not entirely. In the religious sphere women's leadership remains a contentious issue. Last week Pope Francis announced a new commission to consider whether women should be made deacons in the Catholic Church. The Anglican Church consecrated Libby Lane as its first female bishop in January 2015, but this was only after a failed attempt in 2012.

While the Jewish Reform movement has been ordaining female rabbis since the early 1970s, and the Conservative movement since the early 1980s, in Orthodox Judaism the notion of female rabbis is still hotly contested. In November 2015, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America – in its third attempt to stem the growing tide of support for Orthodox women's rabbinical ordination – published a stern proclamation declaring the illegitimacy of female rabbis. Not without irony, as Hillary Clinton wrapped up the democratic presidential nomination a group of leading American Orthodox rabbis opposed to women's ordination launched a series of "hearings" on this disputed subject.