Everyone, of course, is talking about the arrest of Whitey Bulger. It’s good news on every count. Observers point out that it signifies the departure of old-style Boston, with its easy corruption, tribal wars, and neighborhoods in isolation.

I noticed something else— the picture of the agents carrying out the pistol-packed books, the bags of cash and the flotsam of lives lived on the lam.

Those FBI agents were girls.

We are saved.

It’s about time too. After Anthony Wiener, Kadafi/Qaddafi, Newt Gingrich, Sal DiMasi, DSK and others whose misdeeds range from laughable to sadistic to cheating to criminal, we’re ready for a change from the Y to the X chromosome.

And these FBI agents didn’t look old enough to even be called women. They came in all colors, ethnic origins and probably sexual orientation too.

Their presence showed how far women have come in participation and leadership in our lifetimes. It started when women could finally control their reproductive lives. The energy let loose by that event has defined the last 50 years.

When we talk about women’s ascendance it takes a couple of contradictory forms. On the one hand, Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton run major world entities, and it’s no big deal.

On the other hand, women still make less than men do, and they still have most of the responsibility for working out the child care.

But these young FBI women weren’t yet in high levels of leadership, and it was impossible to tell that status of their child care arrangements, if they had any. Presumably, the FBI pays them at a level equal to men. But the best thing about that picture was how ordinary it was.

And women’s influence and leadership are now ordinary in all kinds of ways. Our neighborhood associations are led by women as well as men, and no one thinks about it one way or another. Men push as many baby strollers around downtown Boston as women do. You don’t think about how different the Boston Symphony’s makeup is now from 1965 until you compare today’s Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. With almost all men, the Vienna Philharmonic looks like something out of the 1930s. It’s simply strange and vaguely unpleasant.

And it’s not that women are wiser or more rational or more admirable than men. We have Michelle Bachmann as a perfect example of a woman who comes off as full of nutty impact as some men do.

But women are different from men, and it’s finally okay to value the difference while acknowledging that the differences do not affect women’s ability to lead or their trustworthiness on a team.

It wasn’t until I had grandchildren that I fully appreciated how controlling that Y chromosome is. Raising girls in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I naively believed that my strategies would produce women as tough and accomplished as men—and our daughters are, but in subtle, different ways.

But then they produced boys—boys who said “vroom, vroom” before they said “mama.” Boys who race around outside, playing spy and war together while their sisters sit on the porch, placing dog miniatures inside little houses. One boy can’t carry on a conversation without interrupting it with gun and rocket sounds every few minutes or so.

Star Wars, World War II, the Revolutionary War. The boys want to hear all about them. Their sisters regard the boys tolerantly as daft creatures. And these are children whose houses do not contain a television set, so they didn’t learn their aggressive behaviors from some violent-filled show. They were born with them.

I love this new world of recognition into which these boys have plunged me. And because they are learning empathy and self-control along with how to build bridges out of Legos, I want them in charge of the world when they are adults.

But I take comfort in the fact that their sisters will now be there too. Like those girls carrying out Whitey’s worldly goods, they will be part of organizations and efforts that are more fully realized because women are participating in and leading them, and it will be no big deal.