Don’t cry for me Dame Marjorie

When I left Cambridge for what was then the top name in mergers and acquisitions in the City, Morgan Grenfell, I'd never heard of the glass ceiling, still less the concrete one.

I'd studied what I wanted (philosophy and history) while ensuring I did the maths for arts students course, the pre-fast track entrance week at a big American corporation and a research job in the House of ­Commons.

There was a clutch of City job offers and a month at City University Business School. Then, as one of two women in a graduate intake of 28, I joined my bank. If anyone had a 10-year plan at the age of 21 they didn't own up to it but we certainly argued about the shortest time it might take to get to director. It didn't occur to me to think about work-life ­balance or any of the barriers that might get between me and the top.

I talked my way into a transfer on good expat terms to New York. There, shackled to a spreadsheet at midnight before an early morning flight to somewhere like Oklahoma, it dawned on me that being on call for difficult corporate finance clients day and night was family-unfriendly. Nobody used that word, and I did not then have children but I had noticed there was only one female director in the entire department. So I took a pay cut and went into newspapers.

Within 10 years I had three children under the age of six. The killer hours sometimes pursued me but dodges like writing on Sunday when the editor was at church and my husband could look after the baby helped me through. So did the freelance trick of doing interviews by mobile from the park so the noise of the wind disguised a toddler's squeals.

By this time, attitudes towards working women were already changing. Companies were having to become more flexible. When I joined the then fledgling financial service BreakingViews with a three-month-old baby, the founders were happy for me to do three days a week.

Yet the way the Equalities and Human Rights Commission looks at it, I was helping to losing the battle for gender equality in Britain's workplaces. I hadn't taken the path to the top job, become a Marjorie Scardino, CEO of international educational and media group Pearson.

But the EHRC is wrong and I don't regret my decisions. Much depends on what you call a top job. Someone like Chrissie Rucker of The White Company, who creates a successful chain of shops, doesn't have the power to shape law that a senior judge has but she may create jobs for hundreds and significant wealth, as we report on the opposite page.

But the EHRC research with its rigid categories — the police, the armed forces, politics, trade unionists, MPs — ignores such people. Only a few women would want to be a senior member of the armed forces, where life-and-death responsibilities come hand in hand with disrupted home lives and limited salaries.

It is not that women are trying and failing to get these jobs. They just want something more adaptable. Look at the areas where their careers are flourishing: retail, new media, food, music, film, education, design and fashion. The EHRC report and its "Blow for women in top jobs" headlines cannot be an excuse for bosses to tell themselves the girls aren't cutting it. This is ­supposed to be a body that helps to get more women into the workplace, not fewer.

Yes, employers would prefer everyone not to have career breaks on their CVs. I asked my sister, who recruits for a big bank, about this. She grumbled about the loss of skills in those trying to get back after having children.

But grudgingly she admitted the ageing population will force through changes. In the future, there may not be enough fresh young graduates. By then I hope that all of British business will have woken up to what is already an open secret — the one that sees talented women making enormous contributions at the very top of their fields when rigid business structures are more flexible.

THOSE WHO HAVE BROKEN THE BARRIERS

Dame Marjorie Scardino, 61, Pearson CEO married with three children.

Baroness Kingsmill, 61, Labour peer, married with two children.

Anna Mann, 60, MWM Consulting, founder and non-executive director of BP, married with one child.

Dianne Thompson, 57, Camelot CEO, one daughter.

Clara Furse, 51, chief executive of London Stock Exchange, married with three children.

Rachel Lomax, 63, deputy governor of Bank of England, two sons.

Val Gooding, 57, BUPA CEO, married, two sons.

Margaret Cole, 46, FSA director of enforcement.

Harriet Harman, 58, Minister for Women and Equality, married with three children.

Baroness Scotland, 53, Attorney-General, married two sons.

Baroness Valentine, 49, London First CEO.

Fiona Shackleton, 52, divorce lawyer, married with two daughters.

Shami Chakrabarti, 39, director of Liberty, married with one son.

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, 75, deputy coroner of Queen's household, married with three children.

Jacqui Smith, 46, Home Secretary, married with two sons.

Theresa May, 51, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and shadow minister for women, married with no children.