However, Sandi Toksvig doesn't believe women get the recognition they deserve, something she hopes to change through her new book, Girls are Best.

The 50-year-old writer and broadcaster has just given a talk to a group of children at St Olave's School, in York, as part of a whistle-stop tour to educate the nation's youngsters that history is as much about women as it is about men.

"I'm obsessed with the people who've been left out of history, or have been forgotten," she says. "There's so many great women who did so many great things that I didn't know about at school. I learnt about lots of great men like Einstein and Napoleon and even bad men like Hitler, but there were not a lot of women. In art I learnt all about the Impressionists like Degas and Renoir, but I didn't learn about Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot until I was much older."

It was the desire to redress this imbalance that inspired her to write the book. "I really wanted to write something that said to girls, 'whatever you want to do in life, you have a role model who's been there before.' I found fabulous female bullfighters and I found the very first book on fishing was written by a woman in the 15th century. There have been plenty of female inventors, scientists and explorers, we just don't hear about them," she says.

"There's a wonderful book called Who Cooked The Last Supper? which is a women's history of the world and it's a great question, we know about Jesus and his disciples, but someone made the food, how did she get lost in the mists of time, because she's just as important."

Toksvig has become a household name during the past 20 years. She is a familiar voice to BBC Radio 4 listeners as host of The News Quiz and has appeared as a panellist on shows like Call My Bluff, Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week.

She has never suffered a shortage of opportunities, although not everyone has been as fortunate and, as she points out, women in this country still earn less money than men for doing the same jobs. However, Toksvig is more concerned with parts of the world where women are denied basic human rights. "In Saudi Arabia, women can't vote, they can't drive a car and it's only this year they've been allowed to stay in a hotel on their own.

"For generations women were not allowed to be educated and that is still the case in large parts of the world. Literacy rates among Afghan women are appalling, around 87 per cent can't read. So this isn't just about history from years and years ago, it's about history now."

Toksvig, who wrote Hitler's Canary, a highly acclaimed children's book based on her family's experiences during the Second World War, rattles off reams of statistics. "Women do 75 per cent of the world's work and make 10 per cent of the money. So it's very easy for you and I in a nice place like York to say 'things are good', but nevertheless there is an awful lot to be done."

However, although the book carries a serious message it's not all about facts and figures. "I could have written a book 10 times the size, and the hard part was editing it. I've left out some astonishingly wonderful women and I'm sorry about that. But I wanted to make it accessible to the kids because you can't present them with something like War and Peace," she says.

"I did this thing with a jar full of jelly beans and an empty one. I told the children the jar of jelly beans represented all the things you can own in the world and I asked a boy to put into the empty jar how much of the world's stuff is owned by girls, and he poured half the jelly beans in.

"But the answer out of 300 jelly beans, is three, which really shocked the kids, including the boys. Women own one per cent of the world's assets and I think that's an imbalance that needs addressing."

She uses the recent presidential elections in the United States to illustrate her point. "For a very long time women couldn't vote and what's interesting is when they did extend the vote they extended it first to freed, male slaves. So the black men got the vote long before the women did, and now we get a black president before we get a female president. This is no disrespect to Barack Obama, who I think is terrific, but it's an interesting repetition to me of the stages of democracy in America."

Toksvig's own life has been somewhat nomadic. Born in Denmark, her father was the Danish equivalent of Richard Dimbleby, and the family followed his career, living first in Africa and then the United States. Hotels, she remembers, played a large part in her childhood. "I was terribly good at room service by the time I was four, so it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a normal childhood," she jokes.

Following her father's path into broadcasting, or "the family business" as she puts it, was always on the cards. However, her career could have easily been very different. She was studying law at Cambridge University when she found herself part of the famous Cambridge Footlights group, which at that time included the likes of Stephen
Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson.

"We were just a bunch of goofy kids. We didn't know how it was going to turn out. If I had picked one person from that period to be a success it was Tony Slattery. He was so beautiful and so clever and is
still the most charming individual," she says.

"I had every intention of going off to become a human rights lawyer when a director happened to come to a show and happened to be taking over at the Nottingham Playhouse and he said, 'Sandi, I'd love you to come and work with me for a year and get this theatre bug out of your system,' so I thought why not? And that was 30 years ago," she says.

"I keep meaning to go back but then someone else asks me to do something. I'm a terrible one for saying, 'that sounds a laugh, I'll go and do that.' I've never applied for anything I've had a career of happenstance, and even now I think, 'ooh, it's not too late to be a carpenter'."

Girls Are Best by Sandi Toksvig is published by Doubleday priced £7.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or order online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk Postage and packing cost £2.75.