I don’t like commenting on political stuff – my political affiliations are personal – but I saw this graph doing the rounds on social media the other day and feel compelled to say something.

First of all, it’s a sad day when only one woman is considered good enough to take part in the Cabinet. Mr Abbott claims he wanted stability and that’s why he didn’t change much of his front bench … but he still changed some of his front bench so that argument is really invalid.

But, I felt slightly uneasy when acting opposition leader Chris Bowen said Afghanistan had more women in its cabinet. Politicians are very, very good at playing with numbers. Looking at the graph, Mr Bowen’s remark is certainly true, the raw numbers show that, but what about when the numbers are looked at in a slightly different way.

So, I checked the population* of the twelve countries to see how those numbers stacked up against the number of women in cabinet and those numbers tell a slightly different story.

China, not surprisingly, comes last with one woman per almost 700 million population. However, the US is pretty awful as is Australia. And Afghanistan is still doing better than Australia with more than twice as much female representation per population. New Zealand with one woman representative per 730,000 population and Liberia with one woman per 840,000 are the best out of this group.

On saying that, it still says something about women and how women are represented AROUND THE WORLD, when so few hold positions of power.

*I used Google to get the populations and the figures mostly come from World Bank and are the 2012 figures.