I RECENTLY found myself in a discussion about equality with an old friend, who managed to brilliantly illustrate a point on inequality with one simple question.

She asked if I would be surprised if I was sitting on an aeroplane waiting to fly and when the captain’s voice echoed out through the fuzz of the public address system, it turned out to be a woman.

It’s something I’d never honestly considered, and I had to admit – yes, I probably would be.

I have no explanation as to why I’d be surprised, other than I’ve never heard a female captain speak to passengers. There’s little doubt in my mind that it happens every day.

However, like red squirrels, enjoyable Adam Sandler films and well-reasoned arguments in online forums, they’re so rare we find ourselves genuinely shocked when we see them.

It’s called unconscious bias, I’m reliably informed, and that’s one of the main reasons there are still surprising levels of inequality around us at all times - misogyny and bigotry, sometimes only in tiny levels, have been bred into the public consciousness for decades, centuries even.

As far as gender inequality goes, it’s still pretty consistent in today’s national and international broadcast and print media, and it’s not exactly subtle.

There are women in positions of great power around the world, but on the occasions they actually get a mention in news broadcasts or popular media, it’s more often than not highlighted that they’re ‘making waves in a man’s world’, or if not, it’s a bitchy comment about how dour they look, their masculine way of dressing, or something equally dismissive and insulting.

It’s there in a less than subtle way too, with the glamorisation of female celebrities and the obsession over every supposed imperfection that can only be glimpsed through a telephoto lens that gets splashed across the front pages.

Turn the page, and there’s the latest Page Three Girl, frozen in an image (and probably freezing in a garden), in place of actual news. Obviously, these women choose to make their living that way. That’s absolutely fine and all power to them, but it again just helps reinforce this unconscious bias. By putting them front and centre, as it were, isn’t the publisher holding back any chance of progression or change?

But of course, inequality isn’t solely gender based.

In these austere times, the class system has never been clearer, with war declared on benefit thieves, who are held up on national television for all to gawp at in disbelief. Some viewers get disgusted at the shows having been made, others get disgusted at the ‘characters’ they present, but either way they’re holding up these poor families as figures of hatred and buffoonery to further divide the audience and hammer home another stereotype.

But like the politicians say, we’re all in this together, and it’s not just people in the lowest economic bracket who this applies to.

I can think of at least one family in the upper-echelons of British society that’s among the wealthiest landowners in the country but do little or no actual work, keep having children, are constantly on television and live a life of leisure off the taxpayer’s hard earned cash.

When it comes to putting a stop to inequality, there’s no quick and easy solution. The problem is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it would take a complete change of human perception to undo the countless years of conscious and unconscious influencing that we’ve been party to.

Maybe it calls for the development of some kind of leaderless benevolent global cult, where everyone is treated the same, and we work as a kind of hive - like ants or bees, we’ll work for the greater good and advancement of the species, rather than extra zeroes on a bank statement.

Or a complete reboot might work - a great leveller. Maybe the best we can hope for is a giant meteor hitting the Earth, restoring humankind to factory settings.

Sadly, the simple answer is there’s no way to ‘un-become’ what we’ve become, unless we first acknowledge that there is a problem. Some people are less equal than others, and that is an issue. If we can help in even the smallest of ways, then we should, because that’s the only way life gets better for the world.

I’m probably telling you nothing you don’t already know, and there are many, many smarter people than me who’ve put better arguments across.

But if enough people make an effort to scratch the surface, maybe there’s a way we can take on the bigger problem.