HOWZAT

This sits awkwardly with figures released last week from the Office for National Statistics, which indicated that two-thirds of wives who have a toddler go out to work, meaning the number of working women who are bringing up a child under five has doubled since the 1980s. Furthermore, according to research carried out for an excellent two-part BBC2 programme called The Trouble with Working Women, two-thirds of females said they worked out of necessity, not choice.

None of this paints a very happy picture, especially if you chuck in inequalities in pay (the programme found that, on average, men earn a jaw-dropping £369,000 more than women across their career) and gender-based discrepancies when it comes to what men and women hoped for — and expected — from working life.

There is also the glass ceiling: at the age of 20, men and women are level pegging in terms of earnings. By 30, women are being paid 7% less on average than men. “By the age of 40,” says Sophie Raworth, one of the programme’s presenters, “that gap has grown enormously to 20%. Is it any coincidence that those are the child-bearing years?”

This grim picture isn’t terribly surprising. The model we are desperately trying to adhere to — the old “you can have it all” chestnut — is fundamentally broken and, it increasingly seems, always has been. The great plan for “equality” didn’t work because it never took motherhood and its practical and emotional ramifications properly into account. It is therefore ironic — and possibly quite stupid — that we should still be chasing after it.

As Rosie Boycott, the co-founder of Spare Rib magazine, states: “The sky was the limit. We thought all you needed to do was to remove the physical restraints: if you could sort those out at a legal level, women would kind of float upwards.

“Of course, we didn’t have any children. None of us at that point were mothers. Which is significant. Had we been, we’d have looked at things in a very different way.”

Erin Pizzey, another women’s rights pioneer, founded the first women’s shelter in the UK. Now in her seventies, she provides a lone radical voice — but not necessarily saying what you’d expect: “There has been a subterranean war between men and women which has largely been won by women, who don’t understand what they’ve lost.”

Justin Rowlatt, who co-presents the BBC2 report with Raworth, expresses amazement at this esteemed radical holding such a view and asks Pizzey to elaborate.

“The traditional family has been going for thousands of years and it works,” Pizzey says. “What I see now is men disenfranchised from their roles and women who are lost because they have to work full-time. They don’t have a choice: there’s no proper provision for children.”

What about the hard-won freedom of choice? In fact, “it’s imprisoned women”, says Pizzey. “I just see an exhausted generation trying to do it all. I’m a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother and of all the things I’ve done in my life, that’s the one I’m proudest of.”

I call Raworth, who has three children aged 4, 3 and 14 months, to find out what she feels. “I’m extremely unusual in the balance I manage to have,” she says. “I love my job, presenting the lunchtime news. I get home at three, the nanny leaves the second I get in and I look after my three children. I’ve not lost anything. Compared with a lot of people, I have it easy.

“Erin Pizzey said we were imprisoned by our choices, but I’d feel a lot more imprisoned if I didn’t have the choice in the first place. Having said that, we all suffer from working-mother guilt — I soul-search every week. I do think you can have children, a happy domestic life and a career, but it comes at a price.”

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