The Equal Pay Act came into effect 32 years ago. Last week a survey by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) showed that the pay gap between women and men had widened for the first time in 11 years.

This is despite the fact that the survey also found women scrabbling up the career ladder more quickly and more effectively (more promotions, and earlier) than men: the average female team leader is 37 (42 for men), the average female head of department is 40 (43 for men) and the average female director is 44 (48 for men).

Women are also more likely than men to be paid a bonus - 63.4% of women questioned, compared with 55.9% of men - but because women earn less overall the bonuses averaged 10.2% of total female income, compared with 13.8% for men.

The CMI surveyed 42,205 managers and senior executives in every sector and found that the women’s wages averaged £43,571 last year while the men’s averaged £49,647. That’s a gap of 12.2%, up on the previous year’s 11.8%. “It is clear that the pull of promotion is not being matched by parity in pay,” says Jo Causon of the CMI. “Despite the weight of legislation and the reality that reward should match responsibility, gender bias seems to be getting worse, not better.”

It’s hard not to be really disconcerted by this piece of information: what is going on and why is nobody doing anything about a situation that is, apart from anything else, surely incredibly embarrassing for a Labour government?

A spokeswoman for the Government Equalities Office said last week: “The minister for women Harriet Harman acknowledged when she set out her priorities in the Commons in July that much more needs to be done to tackle unequal pay. Her priorities will include pressing forward with the government’s commitment to reduce the pay gap between men and women.”

Well, that’s nice - but how? The antiquated Equal Pay Act makes individual women responsible for tackling their employers where there is obvious disparity in male/female salaries. There has been a 155% rise in equal pay cases coming to tribunal over the past year alone, but it’s a painfully slow and drawn-out process. Besides, who has the time and energy to sue their employer for something that should be a given? It’s like suing a company because it denies you access to a glass of water when you’re thirsty: really quite out there on the bonkerness front.

However, what is not recognised in this age-old debate is the fact that many women are happy to be paid less in order to work less and thus spend more time with their families.

Well, not “happy” necessarily, but “able to live with what is an essential compromise”. That sounds like an incredibly old-fashioned, borderline sexist thing to say, but it is in fact an entirely modern and realistic one.

The truth of the matter is that recent generations have produced an awful lot of women who crash through the glass ceiling only to stand triumphantly among the broken shards and think: “Hmm, you know what? I’d rather be home for the baby’s bathtime.”

This doesn’t make them wet or stupid or cutely retro or in need of a little feminist kick up the backside: the eighties are over and we women no longer get any Brownie points for behaving like some bloke in red braces, straddling three time zones, fuelled by nerves and caffeine, going home in the dark and rising at dawn, or popping out a baby in our lunch hour and being back at our desk later that day.

True, a few unreconstructed male colleagues may admire this kind of old-school dedication, but most women (and right-thinking men) do not. Some, myself included, see such maternal machismo as a complete and disastrous failure on the parenting front, and some see it as form of child abuse: I mean, really, why bother breeding?

We all know fathers who literally don’t see their children during the week – they’ve left for work before the child wakes up and come home after they’re asleep. This is considered quite normal (it isn’t), so much so that nobody really thinks twice about it – it’s what happens if you’re a man and you work.

Men are, with a handful of exceptions, unwilling to compromise an iota on the work/ family front: work comes first and will always come first. Besides, it’s not like they’re abandoning their children: how could they when said children are in the capable hands of the missus? She works too, of course, but . . . well, it’s not the same thing, is it? A two-week trip to Shanghai, you say? No problem. It’s work. It’s not negotiable. It’s important.

Very few women can make themselves think that way and I’d say very few want to. There’s little to admire in the ones that do and can - there’s no great merit in having your children brought up entirely by nannies, no matter how much money you earn or how fabulously successful you are (and you’d need to be big in both categories to afford the childcare).

What men see as triumphant professionalism - “I’m on it, I’m there, I’m getting on the plane” - is seen by many women as a humiliating failure on the domestic front. That means there’s a problem, and it’s one that’s reflected in the pay gap figures.

Faced with the choice of their children having two spectacularly absent parents - I used to know someone whose nanny held up her charge towards Canary Wharf every night and said: “Wave good night to Mummy” - most women compromise and cut their hours. Or work from home a day or two a week, or leave at 5.30 on the dot, no matter how much they’re needed.

Their salary takes a commensurate dip, as often does their popularity or what is perceived as their reliability. It’s not fair because if women didn’t do this then family life would be even more endangered and confused than it already is, but nobody said commerce and domesticity made great bed partners - and women are keener on their children finding them reliable than on being available to their boss at all hours.

There’s still a problem and it’s even older than the Equal Pay Act: it’s to do with women being respected and valued enough to successfully combine work life with home life. That respect needs to come from their employers, obviously, but it also needs to come from the men in their lives. It’s nice to know Harman is on the case - though I’m not holding my breath - but what is needed is not only changes to the statute book, but changes to the esteem in which we hold family life.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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