Following an opinion piece by Labour MP Austin Mitchell in the Daily Mail, the role of women in politics is once again under scrutiny. “More amenable and leadable" is how Mitchell described women MPs. Meanwhile, a new study claims that female bosses earn 35% less than their male counterparts – over forty years after the Equal Pay Act was designed to put an end to such discrepancies. Have things changed since the labour market of the 1920s and ‘30s? Or is there still much to be done?

We spoke to labour market expert and Professor of Public Sector Management, Alison Wolf about gender equality in business and politics. Wolf is Director of the International Centre for University Policy at KCL, she headed a major government review on education in 2011 and is author of The XX Factor.

Is it a conundrum that the closer women come to equality of employment, for professional educated women, the weaker the ties and affinity across womankind?

I don’t particularly think it is a conundrum, to be honest. The better women do, the more important it becomes compared to gender. It seems to me that when we analysed society in the past, when women tended to be quite invisible, people would talk a great deal about conflicting class interests and conflicting interests of different groups. In the past, being a woman decided so much about your life – you could have been a rich or poor woman – but you had a huge amount in common with women of other classes because you were all so restricted in what you could and couldn’t do. Well once that ceases, then the differences, to put it bluntly, in class interests, in the interests of different groups, goes across to women just as much as it does to men.