At NATO Review, we research all our topics before we cover them. And I can say that this edition, without any doubt, has been the most depressing research I have ever had to do for an edition.

Why? Because the further one looked into women's lot around the world, the more one could see that so much is still to be done.

At NATO Review, we research all our topics before we cover them. And I can say that this edition, without any doubt, has been the most depressing research I have ever had to do for an edition.

Why? Because the further one looked into women's lot around the world, the more one could see that so much is still to be done. In the comfortable west, we like to feel that huge strides have been made in integrating women into all key avenues. But we forget three key things.

The first is that we are also relatively new to this. Switzerland, for example - a bastion of tranquility and wealth - only gave its women full federal voting rights in 1971.

The second is that the advances made in developed societies affect far smaller numbers of women than the still prevalent oppression they suffer in the rest of the world.

The final - and perhaps most important - point is that conflict is not the same as war. Women suffer from conflict often regardless of whether there is war. One of the most telling answers I received in the interviews for this edition was when a respondent asked me: 'What do you mean by peace?'. Her point was that gender violence is something suffered by millions of women in ostensibly countries at peace.

True, war can lead to the numbers of abuses skyrocketing. But the abuses are often already there. And it is tackling them at all stages that is one of the main motivations of many people in the field.

It would be accurate to call this a work in progress. But to paraphrase my interviewee: what is progress?

Paul King