Hamilton believes that women are innately more contented — “I think it must be more to do with women’s general make-up than their jobs” — while Shrimpton puts it down to women taking advantage of flexible working opportunities: “Women have to make decisions about whether to follow a career, become a full-time mum, or juggle both. With support you can juggle, but we haven’t yet got to the stage where men feel comfortable asking to work flexibly.”

Some companies also conduct women-only surveys. “It gives us a good pulse on how women are feeling and it can challenge preconceptions about what women want,” says Ingrid Devin, the diversity programme manager for Dell. Goldman Sachs uses suggestion boxes “to keep a check on employees’ opinions”, according to its global leadership and diversity director, Stephen Golden. “We also measure employee satisfaction through personal development plans and annual self-evaluation.”

Sometimes old-fashioned talking is best. Goldman Sachs employs an outside company to run focus groups, “including some specifically for women”, Golden says. Cassie Heiss, the head of European HR at Lehman Brothers, says that its chief executive “hosts breakfasts for senior women so he can learn from them their experiences of the firm”. She also says that its women’s networking group “has taken a number of initiatives to connect with female employees, including looking at the support that’s given to pregnant employees, to improve the number of women who return to work after maternity leave”.

Firms differ on whether male and female employees want different things. Heiss, among others, is clear that “women have different needs in the workplace to men”, though this may be because men have been slower than women to adopt flexible working. Most agree that this is changing. “Eighteen per cent of Capgemini employees who work a non-standard pattern are men,” Shrimpton says. “It’s encouraging to see that.” Goldman Sachs prefers to emphasise that “there are no things that specifically ‘matter’ only to women or men. Successfully managing a career and family life is critical to our employees, regardless of gender.”

But everyone agrees on one thing — finding out what people want, and acting on it, does matter. In the case of women, as Heiss says, “by looking at your take-up of flexible working, childcare vouchers, return-to-work, etc, you can measure how accommodating you are as a firm for your female population”.

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