Jim Armitage: Career women need childcare help, not league tables

League tables of pay equality may win a few headlines for the Government but will do little to get more women up the executive tree.

While we should welcome the fact that they’ll keep glass ceilings regularly in the news, data and league tables have a habit of being entirely superficial.

A tally of the mean and median pay of men vs women does not get into the detail of how far females are progressing inside corporations, when they are dropping out and — most importantly — why.

Furthermore, as the CBI’s Carolyn Fairbairn points out, it makes no concession for the fact that some decent employers may be offering flexible working hours precisely to help women stay in the employment game.

Part-time roles tend to mean lower pay, so this blunt measurement could actually vilify the best employers.

To deal with the lack of women in executive jobs we need to make difficult, possibly expensive policy actions to address the problems female executives face when children come along.

This primarily means proper financial help for childcare. I’m not just talking about vouchers for nurseries. Mums climbing the ladder in their mid-30s often have to work long hours and spend days at a time out of the country. As a result they need full-time nannies who — for women whose earnings haven’t yet hit stratospheric levels — are ruinously expensive. Subsidise that, possibly through the tax code, and we might really make a difference.

Let’s start dealing with the underlying causes rather than measuring yet again what we already know — that the workplace is failing our brightest women.