Young people are increasingly likely to end up with sexually transmitted infections, experts say today as official figures are released showing record levels of STIs.

Those aged under 25 are most at risk because they are often vulnerable and lacking the confidence to negotiate relationships.

Data from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) indicates a worrying increase in sexually transmitted infections with sexual health clinics reporting 482,700 new cases in 2009, which is an increase of around 12,000 on the previous year.

While better and more widespread testing plays a part in the rise, there are concerns about young people. Two thirds of the STI cases were in females aged 15-24. These figures highlight the vulnerability of young women, said Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of the STI section of the HPA.

Many studies have shown that young adults are more likely to have unsafe sex and that they often lack the skills and confidence to negotiate safer methods.

When Stopes set up her first birth control clinic in 1921, everyone assumed that she had trained in medicine.

Yet, bizarrely, she was an expert on fossil plants and coal.

So how did this young palaeontologist come to transform Western society and become one of the most infamous women in history?

Fewer than 30% of consultant posts in the health service are held by women, even though two-thirds of doctors entering the profession are female. Female doctors also earn, in general, 18% less than male doctors.

Now the British Medical Association – which represents more than 140,000 doctors and medical students — is launching a new initiative called Women in Medicine to try to boost the number of women in senior medical posts.

Professor Bhupinder Sandhu, the chair of the BMA's equality and diversity committee, said: "Women have come a long way since the 19th century when they were not allowed to go to medical school. However, while equality between male and female doctors is relatively OK at the bottom end of the profession, getting into medical school and the early jobs in medicine, there are still areas where women are not rising to senior positions.

"There are still some medical specialities like academia and surgery where it is difficult to combine a top-level career and having a family. This means there are very few female role models at the top end and that is an issue.

"Part of the problem is the need for flexible working, but that is much easier now – particularly in the NHS where most doctors work. The other problem is that women are not pushing themselves forward.

"What this campaign is doing is raising awareness of the contribution that women make to medicine and exploding the myth that it is not possible for women to put in as much as men.

Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.

The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children's education.

In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. "It is flexible, malleable and changeable," she said.

The feminist movement in the UK and the US did not start with bra burning – brilliant as that act now seems as a piece of political theatre. It started with small groups of women getting together to talk about "the problem that had no name".

Sitting in a circle, housewives, students, academics, artists, scientists and activists met in small groups to talk about their personal decisions, their sex lives, their love lives, their ambitions, their work, their children and their men, and discovered that the individual idioms of their lives which felt so personal and particular were, in profound and often startling ways, similarly structured and imagined.

They were self-limiting and cautious. They had imbibed injunctions not to want, not to desire, not to do unless that doing was within strictures of nurturing others and enabling them to fulfil their dreams. Whether it was typing a boyfriend's thesis or ironing his shirts, remembering whether flour was needed or the baby's nappy needed changing, women came upon their own internal patterns, which put them as midwives to the activities of others.

Four decades of activism have changed the face of what it means to be a woman in the west. Ambition is encouraged. In principle abortion is available. Sexual preference accepted. Women can borrow money in their own name. Collect child support as mothers. Daughters grow up believing the world is their oyster; that they can enter it as principals, not guests.

Victims of rape and domestic abuse will lose havens and support services across Scotland if dedicated government funding for women and children’s organisations is removed, it is feared.

Rape Crisis Scotland and Scottish Women’s Aid have joined forces to demand that the Scottish Government protects ring-fenced cash for such victim-support centres.

Tomorrow, Sandy Brindley, national coordinator of Rape Crisis Scotland, will launch a Save Our Services campaign to safeguard their future.

More than £650,000 over the past eight years has helped to help sustain 13 rape crisis centres in Scotland through the Rape Crisis Specific Fund. Scottish Women’s Aid is also supported by hundreds of thousands of pounds.

However, both agencies fear the Scottish Government will remove the dedicated funding in the spring to allow it to be used for other purposes as the recession bites.

Even a top line assessment of the budget measures show 72 per cent of cuts will be met from women's income as opposed to 28 per cent from men's. This is because many of the cuts are to the benefits that more women than men rely on, and the changes to the the tax system will benefit far more men than women.

Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister, says women should adopt Christina Henrdicks, of Mad Men, as a "role model". The advice has been fulsomely rejected, with many women suggesting that life without any body-image role model is an even more noble undertaking than life with a large-breasted, large-hipped, tiny-waisted one. But Anne Milton, a health minister, says something even more weird: "If I look in the mirror and think I am obese, I think I am less worried than if I think I am fat." My dear, if you look in the mirror and think you are either fat or obese, you have body dysmorphic disorder, and really ought to be consulting a psychiatrist rather than lecturing doctors on how they talk to their patients.

Mohammad Mostafaei’s whereabouts have been unknown since shortly after he was released from questioning by judicial officials last Saturday.

Late that evening, the Iranian authorities detained his wife and brother-in-law, prompting fears that they are being held to put pressure on Mohammed Mostafaei to turn himself in to the authorities, if he is not already being detained.