Style icons? Probably. If shoes teetering on six-inch heels setting you back roughly the same as this month's mortgage are the kind of must-haves that feature in your fantasies. But poster girls for western women's brave new twentieth-century world?

US TV's Sex and the City quartet, strutting their stuff down the red carpet for London's world premiere of their movie, were marketed during the half-dozen seasons of the small-screen version as the women who had it all: glamorous jobs in upmarket galleries, PR and law firms or glossy mags; fancy apartments on New York's Upper West Side. They met up in the hottest bars and restaurants, sipping the latest in lethal cocktails. And, so achingly, trendily liberated were they, that they utilised their not inconsiderable collective IQ obsessing variously about men and or the quality of their orgasms. The not-so-subliminal message was that 21st-century womanhood had achieved the dizzy heights of behaving like materially successful single blokes.

When you're christened Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte your mother clearly didn't expect you to wind up stacking shelves in the local dime store, but she probably didn't imagine a social career in wholesale promiscuity either. Then again, upmarket gals with witty scripts and silk sheets play to different ground rules. If this is the pinnacle of the post-feminist world, then I'd kind of like it to stop while I get off. In fact, whatever part of the contemporary female globe you put under the microscope, we seem to have mislaid some vital parts of the plot. The British equivalent of Carrie and Co are the self-styled ladettes determined to beat the world record for early onset of liver damage while operating under the dangerous illusion that they have a unique immunity to tobacco-induced cancers.

A depressingly high percentage seem unmoved by the fact that 40 years of legislation on equal pay and discrimination have signally failed to close the pay gap with men in similar employment, most dramatically within the part-time world, with its high preponderance of working mothers.

Meanwhile, despite it being against the law, thousands of women are routinely "let go" when they become pregnant. There has, superficially, been a cultural shift towards personal female freedoms in the west, but a wholesale rise in hedonism, allied to continued workplace injustice, doesn't seem to me the greatest of modern bargains.

For women from Asian traditions the problem is not a headlong rush into sexual and social modernity so much as a failure to break free of entrenched misogyny. The practice of aborting female foetuses continues largely unchecked in the very countries lauded as the new tiger economies: India and China.

There are all kinds of traditional triggers for this carnage, bound up with the roles of sons in parental care and the expense of marrying off daughters. But the fact remains that tens of millions of female babies who should have been born are deemed dispensable. The chilling Punjabi proverb that bringing up a girl is "like watering a neighbour's garden" is emblematic of a deep-seated prejudice alive and well even in India's thriving middle classes. Alive and well, too, in modern China, where the one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s led to an explosion of sex selection, thanks to the accuracy of modern foetal scans. Neither China's efforts in outlawing the gender clinics involved, nor the Indian government's repeated assertion that it would impose tougher sentences on errant doctors, appear able to stem a tide that Unicef calculates means one million fewer female babies every year worldwide.

The World Health Organisation reported 10 years ago that 50 million Chinese women were missing from what would have been the statistical norm. The obvious corollary of all of which is an abundance of men who won't find wives, and the attendant rise in trafficked women from elsewhere.

In the UK as well, studies have shown that British Indian women, barred from another NHS abortion, go "on holiday" to the old country for a scan and, too frequently, a termination. In the Middle East, wilful misinterpretations of Islamic law used to outlaw female choice and education.

So here we are at the fabulous new frontiers of a technologically-savvy century still encircled by the anti-female prejudices of the last one and the one before. The saddest thing of all is that women worldwide are still prepared to be accessories to institutionalised discrimination. At its most horrendous, women prepared to slaughter daughters as relatively worthless. At its most depressing, mothers conniving to lower female aspirations. And at its most trivial, girls thinking the answer to what ails them lies in the next bed, or the next pair of Jimmy Choos.

Hey, we can do better. Because we're worth it.