It’s really lovely that the government is so keen on remedying the gender pay gap. Demanding companies publish what they pay employees so that the difference between male and female earnings can be seen nice and clearly, and – so the thinking goes – solutions sought sounds just peachy. Right?

Wrong. This measure is just another pointless addition to the clucking that goes on around women’s pay; a panacea with no real power to create structural change. In short, this measure fits neatly into calls for gender equality but in reality pays mere lip service to what is, indeed, a very deep, very complex and very vexing problem.

The real issue, which corporate culture and the government seem wholly unable or unwilling to address, is the reality that so long as people wish to perpetrate the species, women are still the ones who have to do the biological heavy lifting.