LONDON — As prize ceremonies go, the working mothers’ top employers awards is not exactly in the same league as the Oscars, but the issues raised by the event chime with a very live debate in Britain right now over flexible working for parents.

At a low-key presentation in the basement of a central London hotel this month, judges handed prizes to multinational companies like Unilever and Royal Bank of Scotland for commitment to family-friendly working.

The main speaker related how only that morning she had witnessed a fellow senior female executive in the office parking lot performing a frantic handover of a feverish daughter (dressed in pajamas and wrapped in a duvet) to grandparents who had driven some distance to remove the sick child so the mother could attend an important board meeting. There was sympathetic laughter from an audience uncomfortably familiar with just such a situation.

It feels rather depressingly backward-looking to have a prize geared mainly to mothers, when it is so clear that until men start worrying about work-life balance and begin demanding flexible hours so they can help with child care, there will be little progress toward gender equality at work.