To read the newspapers these days, you might easily believe that men are the oppressed sex. Boys underperform girls from primary school all the way to university. At entry level to the professions, they lag their female contemporaries. Young doctors and solicitors are now more likely to be female. Women are clearly poised to take over the world.

Except that they won’t. I would happily lay a £100 bet that these feisty, capable and conscientious young female professionals will watch with bemusement and increasing irritation as their male peers gallop up the career ladder faster than they do. By the time they reach their forties, these women are far less likely to be consultants, partners, QCs or headteachers than the men with whom they graduated.

You only have to look at the top of all these professions to see why sympathy for boys is unnecessary. Just 12 per cent of primary school teachers are men, yet they hold 42 per cent of headships. Of the top 100 FTSE companies, 97 per cent of executive directors are men. All 26 of the Law Lords are male, as are 94 of the 100 High Court judges. Only 8 per cent of QCs are women.

A couple of decades ago we assumed that time would remedy the inequality at the top. The growing numbers of women at entry level in the 1980s would surely feed through to senior management positions by now. Yet they have not.

Why not? There is still a certain amount of (maybe unwitting) sexism at play. Qualities that young men display — brash confidence and the ability to bullshit plausibly — may be more prized by their male managers than equally useful female traits such as teamwork and people skills. Bosses are always more inclined to promote others in their own image unless they actively recognise the inclination for the prejudice that it is.

But the main obstacle that holds women back is biological. Until they start to have children, modern women can still hope to do — nearly — as well as men. Then their careers either judder to a halt or veer off into the slow lane.

Have you ever found yourself asking a man how he manages to combine his work with his family? Or whether his career dipped when his first baby was born? I doubt it.

Yet if women are ever going to have equal chances at work, they need to establish equal responsibilities at home. And that involves fathers, and their employers, recognising that it is parenthood, not just motherhood, that should lead people to reassess their work and life.

Once a baby has finished breastfeeding, there is no reason why the mother should be any better a parent than the father. (I speak as a mother who has returned early from holiday to write this column while my husband struggles back today from Switzerland with two children and a toboggan.)

That is why the DTI’s proposals to encourage employers to offer a better work-life balance to parents of both sexes can only be a good thing.

It looks as if the take-up will be swift. The DTI’s accompanying survey, published yesterday, found that three-quarters of parents with children under six, even at manager and director level, said that it was important to consider work-life balance when choosing a new job. A third would prefer flexibility to £1,000 extra pay. Flexible working was considered a better perk than a company car or gym membership. And this was as true for men as women.

Two objections are always trotted out against more flexible forms of working. Those (usually childless) employees who are left to bear the brunt of the work while the “breeders” are away will feel hard done by. And employers worry that the disruption of irregular working practices will be cumbersome and costly.

To lessen unfairness, flexible working should be available to all, though the legislation covers only parents of young or disabled children. If childless employees want to work part-time so they can study or sculpt, they should be allowed to.

In fact, resistance to change may be less severe than it seems. The Government’s Work-Life Balance Baseline Study found that people without caring responsibilities were no more likely to see flexible working as unfair to them (25 per cent) than those with responsibilities (27 per cent).

Surely, though, flexible working must be costly? The answer is an emphatic “no”. All the evidence shows that it raises profitability and productivity, retention and recruitment, and morale. And it cuts staff turnover and absenteeism.

Xerox (UK) estimates that it has saved itself £1 million through better staff retention since it introduced flexible working. A study by the Judge Institute of Management at Cambridge found that nine out of ten employers with experience of family-friendly policies found that they were cost-effective.

And it is not just white-collar or large companies that benefit. Automated Packaging Systems, a manufacturing company in Malvern, Worcestershire, has cut its absentee rate by more than 20 per cent since it introduced flexible hours. Despite being located in an area of low unemployment, APS now receives calls from agencies asking if it has any vacancies because word has got round that it is an enlightened employer.

Demand for flexible working is high, and the good news for women is that men are as keen as they are. More than two-thirds of both sexes, according to the DTI survey, would like a better work-life balance. If, after April, this results in as many men as women asking their employers for more flexible work, then mothers will not be so disadvantaged against their male colleagues, and fathers will share more of the burden at home.

It will not create equality overnight. But it is the best hope for those twentysomething female graduates who want the same chance as their male contemporaries to succeed at work. Who knows? In 20 years’ time, I may even have lost £100. I shan’t mind.

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