IT’S heartening to learn that in this time of tightened belts and slashed arts funding, the government can still spend time and money on redesigning British passports as a celebration of our cultural heritage.

What’s less heartening — what’s absolutely bloody infuriating actually — is that the government reckons only two women are worth including in that celebration.

When statements like that are made there’s usually a big queue of testicle-bearing pedants clamouring to point out all the holes in them (the statements, not the testicles). Let’s get those niggles out of the way before we go any further.

One: OK smartarse, there’s more than two women. Apart from Ada Lovelace and Elisabeth Scott, there are three others. But one of them is Queen Victoria’s head on a Penny Black stamp and the other two are an anonymous Shakespearean actress and a dancer.

Two: Yes there are other problems with who they’ve included. Anish Kapoor is the only person of colour to have their work celebrated apart from two performers squished on a page of “multicultural festivals.”

Three: This is absolutely worth getting angry about. It’s a small thing in the context of maternity discrimination and the rape conviction rate. But it’s also one of the litany of small things which add up to a culture which allows that big stuff to happen. It’s one of a megaton of straws that broke the camel’s back years ago.

Make no mistake, this is a straw, a slight, not some meaningless incident unworthy of note. Because the line-up of the great and the good featured in the new design wasn’t the result of some office raffle, it was a deliberate attempt to celebrate the entirety of British culture, and British culture is not overwhelmingly male nor has it ever been.

I’ve seen people (men) pointing out that women just weren’t that influential before the 20th century and that the passport has to reflect that, but it’s more than that — we were being violently oppressed.

The women who succeeded in challenging that oppression were oppressed some more, censured and then mostly written out of history. Those who are remembered despite all that are worth more to this country than the bloody Tube map (awarded a whole double page spread all to itself). There are hundreds of them, enough to fill passports 10 times over — Jane Austen, any of the Brontes, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Pankhursts. There are still women like that having to fight today.

So to fail to come up with more than two women to represent feminine contributions to culture and history is ridiculous. It’s only achievable if you don’t value those women to begin with. It’s that which hurts more than the exclusion and it’s clear that that’s what’s really going on here.

When Mark Thomson, director-general of HM Passport Office, was asked about why there were only two women included, he basically shrugged: “Whenever we do these things there’s someone who wants their favourite rock band or icon.”

That’s 50 per cent of the population reduced to the status of chart acts. All those who care about them reduced to just “someone,” brushed away like lint off the expensive suit of an overpaid sexist. That attitude, right there, is why women are angry about this, because it’s the same attitude which leads to “there’s no need for this” cuts to domestic violence service, to the “they asked for it” abuse and assault of wives, daughters, mothers and sisters, to the “they don’t deserve it” 20 per cent pay gap between men and women workers.

Fighting sexism is fighting that attitude. Is the passport design worth caring about? Only if you think women are.