Yesterday, I asked a client about household finances and how high his bills are. He did not have a clue. ‘My wife deals with that’ was the gist of the response. As a rule of thumb, when I speak to people, if anyone is taking responsibility to the home finances, it tends to be the female.

Why? Maybe an answer lies in the appointment of Israel’s new – and for the first time, female – Governor of the Bank of Israel, Dr Karnit Flug. Competent and experienced, she was the acknowledged choice of her predecessor, Professor Stanley Fischer, himself an internationally renowned economist. And yet, it took the government over 100 days and several failed efforts to make the decision. Historians can debate whether egos, politics or any other pathetic reason saw the country’s banking system left partially unprotected.

As things stand in Israel, Flug now joins a growing and honourable list of women at the top of the country’s finances. The three leading banks – Leumi, Hapoalim and Discount – are led by females. Similarly, three of the leading positions at the Ministry of Finance are occupied by women, including that of Director-General.

Women are prominent elsewhere in Israeli society. Ms Sheli Yahimovitch is the leader of the opposition in the Kenesset. Ofra Strauss runs one of the country’s largest food manufacturing companies. Tahunia Rubel, a 25-year-old model born in Ethiopia, won the 2013 season of Big Brother. And so the list goes on.

Yes, women in Israel still have to overcome many of the problems faced elsewhere around the globe. Studies show that equivalent female wages can be at least 20% lower than for men. Specifically, in the film industry, women producers have found it more difficult to receive funding. And religion can ensure that a women’s place remains in the kitchen (or the bedroom).

Israel is a country surrounded by enemies. It has large variations in wealth. Over half the country is covered with barren land. That said, female empowerment in Israel continues to move forward and is light years ahead of its neighbours in the Middle East. (In one extreme case this year, an Iranian cleric blamed women for his country’s earthquakes.) Israel has developed, and continues to do so, as an open society. After all, Dr Flug herself can recall how her family left the anti-Semitism of Poland in the early 1950s and she grew up in poverty in Jerusalem.

And today? It was the Huffington Post which posed an interesting question just recently: “Guess Who’s Valedictorian at Israel’s Top Medical School?”

It’s a 27-year-old stereotype-buster: a charming, feminist, smart, open-minded and observant Islamic woman named Mais Ali-Saleh who grew up in a small village outside of Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee.