There has rightly been a lot of celebration this week of women winning the right to vote in 1918.

I still find it shocking that it was only 100 years since women were first given the vote.

Even then in 1918 it was only women aged over 30 who were “householders” or married to a “householder” who won the right to vote. Another 10 years passed before everyone over the age of 21 (men and women) was given a right to vote.

So it is really only 90 years that we have had anything approaching a fair democracy. Many of us will know women who are older than 90 and so were born in a time when they could not automatically expect to be able to vote on issues that affected them or for who would represent them in Parliament, or even on the local council.

Cleary over the last 100 years there have been massive positive changes for the women. Our world is more equal, women are treated more fairly, and they fewer obstacles stand in the way of them achieving whatever they want to.

But as we all know there is still some way to go. Men and women are not really equal, women are still not yet treated fairly, and they still face obstacles in their lives. At the current rate of change my daughter Gracie will be in her eighties before we have the same number of women as men MPs in the House of Commons.

One of the things that depressed me most when I was leader of the Liberal Democrats after the 2015 General Election was that my party had no women MPs. And one of the things that gave me greatest pride was the fact that we addressed this in the 2017 election and now a third of our MPs are women. But even that is not the 50% that we really should expect to see.

I was appalled to learn that an estimated 54,000 women in this country lose their jobs every year because they get pregnant and have a baby.

There has been lots of coverage of the fact that women often do not earn the same as men for doing the same job. The UK comes fifth from the bottom of the list of European countries when it comes to the gap between what men and women earn. We are behind Portugal, Italy, Belgium even France which only allowed women to vote in 1945.

And then perhaps the most shocking fact of all - about a quarter of all women will experience some form of domestic violence in their lifetimes and every week 2 women die at the hands of their current or former partners.

So although I guess we should celebrate the fact that women won the right to vote one hundred years to go. It was far from an unqualified triumph. There is still so much to do and we all need to play our part in making sure that it is done before many more of our daughters grow into women.