WHETHER you prefer the term glass ceiling or the term sticky floor, the fact is women face obstacles to employment, pay and career advancement that men simply don’t and the greatest of these is the caring obligation – namely, motherhood.

There is an odd doublethink when it comes to society and motherhood. On one hand it is revered: there was Michelle Obama this week, giving a passionate and elegant speech in support of Hillary Clinton but, to truly connect with voters, she didn’t speak as a tireless campaigner for girls’ and women’s rights, she didn’t speak as a Harvard educated lawyer or as a writer. She spoke as a mother. “As a mother…” shuts down any debate. Nothing trumps the mum card.

On the other hand it is treated as the great hurdle to female advancement: there was MP Kirsty Blackman defending her decision to take her children in to a Westminster voting chamber after being ticked off by clerks. She brought the incident to public attention in order to call for crèche facilities at Westminster, to lessen barriers for parents trying to carry out their political duties. In her column on the issue, Ms Blackman referred to hurdles for parents – but really this boils down to a mothers issue. Currently, the House of Commons has a record high of 29 per cent female MPs. I’m quite sure if the 71 per cent of male MPs were struggling to find childcare there would be a long-established crèche at Westminster.

And there’s the answer, really. The government has its responsibilities: introduction of shared parental leave, increasing affordable childcare, legislating for flexible working. But there’s similarly a vast resource that seems to be largely underused: dads.

Mums are still viewed as the primary carer, the parent whose life is seriously disrupted by the production of offspring. Broadly, women take their full parental leave allocation and then they go part-time while the father has two weeks off and continues to work full-time. It’s a choice, and a fine one, but it necessarily leads to a loss of female resource in the work place, exacerbates the pay gap and leaves women speaking of frustration at their lack of career advancement.

The narrative of the woman in her 40s whose career has been stymied by children and who has regrets about what she might have been is oft-told. What is less familiar is the voice of dads who have reached a satisfying peak in their career but who lament the loss of being present at their child’s first word or step or taste of ice cream. Money can be earned at any age but moments like these are lost. Perhaps we don’t hear these voices because dads aren’t bothered about these things.

Or perhaps it’s hard to admit to being bothered when men are still perceived as the breadwinner and women still have no pause in saying they actively sought a mate who earns more than them to secure a standard of living they wouldn’t achieve on their own.

Money is another reason cited for not sharing care. Parents will say that it makes sense for the man to continue to work full-time while the woman goes part-time – rather than vice versa or both cutting their hours - because the man’s salary “is needed”.

Surely, though, a society where men and women are viewed as equal parenting and working partners can only lead to a narrowing of the pay gap.

There’s an attitude shift in the establishment. In Scotland, the collaborative divorce procedure avoids referring to “primary carers”, instead pushing for care to be shared between both parents. We have the aforementioned shared parental leave. But let’s look at that: in the first year of shared parental leave, introduced in April 2015, only one per cent of couples opted for the father to take it. In 55 per cent of families canvassed, the mother refused to share. Some 50 per cent of fathers said taking shared parental leave would damage their career.

Has the attitude shift in the establishment been joined by an attitude shift on the ground? I’m not sure. For all the women who call for better supports to allow them free access to the workplace there are women making choices to prevent it.

As Kirsty Blackman points out, there are barriers to mothers entering parliament, just as there are barriers to mothers in workplaces everywhere. We’re left with a situation where the status quo is lamented as failing to work for women yet no one really wants to challenge it because it works for them. A status quo that faces much criticism yet where the obvious alleviation of those criticisms is glossed over.

For equality, there needs to be a cultural shift in society from viewing women as main carers to viewing parents as equal partners.

But perhaps the reason this hasn’t happened is that it isn’t really what women want.