If you are a woman and have always fancied working in Ethiopia or Tanzania, setting up new infrastructures, or even building hotels in the proximity of a swamp, then consultancy is your business. This does not just mean at entry level, or only up to the age of 30 - there are many more opportunities at the top than there used to be.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we had a female managing partner in the UK before long," says Tricia Bey, partner in charge of Deloitte & Touche's UK change leadership practice. "We have very senior managing partners who are women in the States."

Contrary to popular belief, consultancy is not just a man's world. "Soft skills" which women often possess - empathy, listening qualities and communication - are highly prized as key negotiating requisites by the top consultancies and their clients. And as consultancy has become more accepted as a profession, so the number of younger women and MBA students who apply has increased.

"Now dynamic, bright young people of either sex want to do consultancy, it's not just seen as a male thing" says Vicky Pryce, chief economist and strategy partner at KPMG. "But what has also changed is that women have become more accepted as business advisors and as a result it is more acceptable for them to start in consultancy earlier."

Pryce came into KPMG's consultancy as a chief economist after working in banking for 10 years, followed by a stint in the oil industry. Her specialism in monetary economics has given her the opportunity to work on economic reform programmes in Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and be creative in turning macro issues into micro issues.

"Helping firms to look at the micro issues involved in Economic and Monetary Union, and take advantage of the economic change is very exciting. Women are quite imaginative in this and their instincts are slightly better than mens'," says Pryce. "In the past women used to focus on human resources consulting and change management, but now there are quite a lot working in the financial management, strategy management and economics divisions."

The opportunities are there for women to work throughout industry worldwide.

The work is challenging, varied, analytical and creative and it allows them to develop new task and people skills.

Cap Gemini has two female divisional directors and the ratio of new female and male recruits coming in is 50:50. "There weren't the promotion opportunities 15 years ago, but now more women are beginning to move into senior positions in management consultancy. They are more flexible and more accommodating," says Diana Billingham, Cap Gemini's divisional director in technology consulting.

The barrier to entry in technology, though, is still substantial and "testosterone meetings" are still the order of the day. It is a male-dominated field and culture, where women are still seen as not quite technical enough. At Cap Gemini the technology consultancy team numbers 80, but it only includes three women. Billingham aims to change all that and is embarking on a campaign to recruit more women.

The '90s are seeing more women moving into consultancy as their first career than ever before, but still the numbers are low in comparison to men. While consultancy is booming, the number of women at the top seems to stay around the 10 to 11 per cent mark.

Ten years ago Gill Rider was the first woman to make partner in the UK at Andersen Consulting. She has now been with the firm for 17 years and is partner in charge of utilities. Rider believes that opportunities for women have shot up. Andersen has three women partners in the UK and a fourth based in Hungary. It has 150 associate partners and one in 10 is female.

"There were not many women around when I started," recalls Rider, "and I was the first one to become the most senior manager at Andersen. It is tough when you look above you and there is no role model.

"For my generation 15 per cent of recruits were women, now the figure is 30 per cent. Women understand the task and the people side of issues, which is very often intuitive, and the combination of those skills makes for a very good consultant," says Rider.

But she points out that it is also a question of getting women to apply to Andersen. She believes their reluctance to do so has a lot to do with the lifestyle, the travel and being away from home.

Pryce agrees that the dearth of women in the profession is not due to lack of opportunities, glass ceilings or a failure to progress but because, for many women, the demands of the job do not tie in with those of family life.

"The demands on your time are enormous; I don't think that I have worked as hard anywhere as I have at KPMG in the last 10 years."

Margaret Stephenson, a managing partner at PA Consulting, who concentrates on the public sector, has been with the firm for 20 years. She thinks that society pressures cause a lot of women drop out in their early 30s.

PA has one female managing partner out of 12; two female senior partners out of 36; and five female partners out of 95.

Now consultancies are introducing schemes to hang onto their consultants, both male and female, and help them manage family life and still climb up the corporate career ladder.

"I suspect the fall-out in the 30s is because of family issues and because there aren't many women role models," says Jan Gower, partner leading the public-sector systems consultancy practice at Coopers & Lybrand.

"I know a lot of women at Coopers who work part-time, but I'll be interested to see if they get another promotion after that."

Andersen's HR department has set up a working mothers' database which gives information and advice. It also lists childcare facilities and reputable nannies. In addition to maternity leave, consultants can take a two-year unpaid career break and come back into the firm at the same level.

Women who work at Gemini Consulting and have children can fit their consulting work around the school holidays under the firm's scheme Flexforce.

"Industry goes through peaks and troughs and the opportunities are there to be flexible," says Tina Hope, vice president, Gemini Consulting. "Until my daughter was two she flew with me to South Africa about 200 times, and then we needed something more stable. We settled on project on/project off contract. It's manageable because you can see an end to it, which means you can throw yourself into a project body and soul," she adds.

KPMG is also following the trend towards flexible working. Pryce thinks flexible and portfolio working will be the way of the future for both sexes, particularly as technology enables people to do more than one job.

At Deloitte & Touche, says Bey, "you can work less days provided we understand what it is you want to do, but that flexibility should be available to men too."