Imagine a worldwide corporation with thousands of staffers and millions of shareholders that had failed to update its policies on gender equality, women?s rights and equal opportunity hiring for the last five centuries.

Imagine that despite growing rumbles from many members, this corporation continued with its policies. Its security stems from knowing that the nearest competitors ? two equally large companies with venerable lineages and great power ? pursue the same discriminatory policies and have done so for years.

Of the two other companies, one allows women to be employees under certain circumstances, but prefers that its executives keep their wives at home for the most part. One is fighting a battle to prevent women from occupying senior management positions, and while the company has been on the losing side, some branches have made up for the losses by making women into corporate targets. Several smaller corporations in the same line of business are similarly blind to the needs, rights and wants of half their employee and shareholder base. But neither the three big corporations nor the smaller ones are ever put through an audit or a legal investigation.

No Fortune 500 company, however powerful, would get away for very long with following these policies. Most real-world corporations have been forced to dent the glass ceiling if not break through it; the ones that don?t have been challenged and often dragged to court. They may not have equality, but they do have a commitment to it.

No modern-day government, either, could get away with policies that deliberately discriminated against or excluded or persecuted half the population without being declared a rogue state. The ones that do are dogged by human rights organisations, questioned by international bodies, often slapped with trade restrictions, and reminded by economists that gender discrimination is expensive for a country.

It?s like corporate charity: studies have found that there?s a correlation between how well companies do and how much they give back to society. Similarly, many countries have found that there is a direct equation between how well they do in economic terms and how well they treat women citizens. Countries that continue to discriminate against women seem to end up on the low end of the economic totem pole.

The only organisations that thrive on gender discrimination are religious organisations ? Islam, Christianity and Hinduism, to name the big three. Hinduism pays lip service to the idea of woman as deity while incorporating discrimination against women into many practices. Islam is fighting a pitched battle against women in the fold who are now demanding the right to pray alongside the men and to be accepted as maulvis. And Christianity has just elected, as its new Pope, a man who wrote an infamous letter in 2004 where he decried the ?damage? feminism had done the church and reaffirmed the historical subordination of women.

Half of the membership of any religion is roughly composed of women. If they got their act together, they could pull off the world?s largest, and most overdue, shareholder revolt.