Forcing professional cycling teams to pay female riders a minimum wage could be “counterproductive” and result in more women being paid nothing, according to the head of cycling’s governing body, the UCI.

Last month the Olympic silver medallist and Commonwealth champion Lizzie Armitstead said it was “pretty crazy” that the best female cyclists in the world had to hold down part-time jobs to survive.

She called on the UCI to introduce a minimum wage – something the current UCI president, Brian Cookson, promised to bring in within a year of his appointment last September.

But 14 months into the job Cookson, who was head of British Cycling for 16 years before joining the UCI, says he has been advised by women within the UCI that it would be “premature to pass that rule at this moment in time”.

At the same time he suggested women’s races should be allowed to get longer and harder in order to make them more exciting to watch and ride.

Speaking at an event at the Rapha store in Manchester on Thursday evening, Cookson said: “The women who have been involved in the Women’s Road Commission have told me that the result of that would not be 500 women suddenly being paid the minimum wage; they’ve told me that actually most of the teams that currently present themselves as professional teams would fold or re-register as amateur teams, so they wouldn’t end up paying those women anything at all anyway.”

He added: “It’s a bit of a chick and an egg [situation], I’m told, and passing a simple rule at this point in time could potentially be counterproductive. But it does remain an important objective.”

The minimum wage for male UCI World Tour cyclists is €35,000 (£27,800) per annum, with the average salary reported at €265,000 (£210,500) in 2012, according to Ernst & Young. Discount the big earners and this figure would probably equate to €125,000-150,000 (£99,000-120,000), according to an estimate from Steve Beckett, former head of cycling at British Sky Broadcasting. Female elite cyclists reportedly earn just €20,000 (£16,000) per annum – and those are the lucky ones.

Cookson suggested women’s cycling should be split into two divisions – one “genuinely professional, which we will insist does pay a minimum wage”, and a “lower level”, which would not.

“There is nothing to stop a women’s team from paying parallel salaries to men’s teams if they can do it, if they can raise the sponsorship. Passing a rule won’t do that,” he said.

Women’s races could be made more difficult in order to make them more exciting to ride and watch, suggested Cookson. Currently UCI rules prevent elite women from riding more than 140km in a stage, compared to the maximum distances of 240-280km for men.

He said: “There is no reason why women’s road races should not be harder and longer. Most women’s races are well within the distances in the regulations and it’s certainly something that we could look at.”

But he suggested there can be an “over-simplistic knee-jerk reaction” to the problem. He said the original demand last year from Le Tour Entier pressure group – led by the four-time former Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington with multiple world champion cyclists Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley – for a women to ride the same, full Tour de France route as the men was unrealistic.

“I don’t think that would work,” he said. “The Tour de France organisers tried it to a lesser extent before and it was a disaster. If you suddenly did it one year it would be counterproductive, it would put back the development of women’s cycling … I would like to see a week-long women’s Tour de France, a challenging event, some mountain stages and so on. I think these things need to be changed incrementally.”

He added: “People say: ‘Why don’t you insist that there is a women’s team associated with every men’s team?’ Well I don’t want women’s sport to always be secondary to men’s sport. You’ve seen that with the Tour of Britain this year which has been hugely successful without being attached to a men’s event … I think there are sponsors out there who would be interested in sponsoring women’s cycling but not men’s cycling, for whatever reason.”