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We're on the edge of a general election in which, for the first time in history, we are led to believe that a Labour prime minister knows he must show some rapport with women. That was the story last year when chancellor Gordon Brown, in an unprecedented commitment to women, made child care an election priority.

But this year, in the run-up to a possible May election, the prime minister has been reaching out to Middle England, prioritising defence, law and order and the kind of cultural counter-revolution that the Daily Mail likes: "no political correctness."

Given this disposition, how does his government propose to square up the bad news from the Equal Opportunities Commission about women at the top, the kind of women the government likes to like? The EOC report Sex and Power: Room at the Top shows slow progress and in some cases no progress.

A clue to the government's inclinations comes from the Women and Equality Unit at the Department of Trade and Industry: its Key Indicators of Women's Position in Britain 2005 ignores the EOC's unsettling findings and boasts that the gender earnings gap has narrowed considerably in the past 30 years. That would not be difficult - between 1975 and 2005 we have had the implementation of equality legislation, the consolidation of women's presence in the labour market, the lifting of bans and proscriptions from the professions, and the global acknowledgement, at the level of international institutions, that the era of patriachy is losing its legitimacy.

What Key Indicators doesn't show is that the earnings gap has been growing since the 1970s. The Thatcher years put a stop to the advances of that decade by de-regulation of the economy and by resisting European equality directives that were deemed a burden on employers. But the shock is that since the election of a Labour government in 1997, the differential between men and women in some sectors has actually been getting worse. Key Indicators is a piece of propaganda, designed to induce a soporific sense that progress is progress, things go on getting better and better.

But they don't. Key Indicators was either prepared before the publication of the Equal Opportunities Commission's report Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain at the End of 2004, or it was produced as a response to it. This is the EOC's first comprehensive collection of data on women's representation at the top echelons of power in politics, the law, business and public service.

Women's presence at director and assistant director level in the public sector has actually declined. Although most of the local authority labour force is made up of women - 71 per cent - they constitute only 13 per cent of chief executives (yet the proportion of female chief executives in the voluntary sector is 45 per cent.)


The EOC also catalogues the institutional barriers in women's pay: the long-hours culture that is prohibitive for women who typically take care of themselves, their jobs, but also their loved ones; and the recruitment and selection processes that filter out women. This is the nice way of saying that the paucity of women at the top is down to discrimination.

There won't be a woman of a certain age in local authority management who has not made it to a directorship, only to find herself re-organised out of the way once a new boss arrives with his team, a posse of blokes. And there won't be a woman who has not been through a women-in-management programme, only to watch the sea close over her generation when normal life resumes.

We are into the third decade after the implementation of the equality legislation and in each of these decades women have been having a go. Women have been so busy surviving sexism that they never acquire critical mass nor generate a secure cultural shift in attitudes. That means there is no guarantee of transmission of progress from one generation to the next.

The prime minister is part of the problem: he traduces the movements associated with equality and the reform of our institutions with the slur of political correctness, as if the problem were the movements rather than what that they challenge.

When women move into the men's rooms their survival is dependent either on the loyalty of another lonely woman at the top, or a patron. When their cause is not championed by political leaders women's presence continues to depend on patronage. Their impact becomes no more than a blip.

Beatrix Campbell is a journalist and writer