Patricia Hewitt: Q: What do women need if they're really going to get on in life? A: Men

It seems on the face of it like a feminist's nightmare. But the Government's latest answer to women's problems is simple: men. After decades of watching talented sisters hit the glass ceiling, sacrifice careers to nurse children or open a discriminatory pay packet each month, Patricia Hewitt has hit on a novel solution.

The Trade and Industry Secretary and Minister for Women is to target men in a drive to improve the lot of women in the workplace.

Prompted by research that showed young men were hankering after a more balanced life, Ms Hewitt has vowed to work with business to allow mothers to be mothers, fathers to be fathers, and both to be equal at home and at work.

The daughter of working parents, Ms Hewitt now has two teenagers of her own. The work/life balance she talks of so often in the House of Commons is as real an issue for the politician as it is for her public audience.

"I have been living this issue of work/family balance for a very long time. First because I've two teenage children but also because I grew up, unusually, with two full-time working parents," she says.

It is a theme to which Ms Hewitt's professional life seems fated to keep returning. Ten years ago, at the influential think-tank the Institute of Public Policy Research, she wrote a book called About Time, which argued the working world had moved on from one in which men worked full-time to bring home the bacon, leaving women to slot in a career around them, to one in which different people worked different hours at different stages in their lives.

It is rarely the privilege of the thinker to become the doer but in Ms Hewitt's current job she could make her theory a reality. Already she's been part of the Government that has brought in better maternity rights, paid paternity leave and, from April, will introduce new legal rights giving employees the right to ask for flexible hours. And yet the pay gap stands stubbornly at 18 per cent; there are pitifully few women in the boardroom and children are still, in most cases, the death of a woman's career. The key to changing all that, Ms Hewitt believes, is men – convincing largely male bosses of the case for change and young fathers of their value as parents.

"I am determined this should not be a 'mummy trap' in which we ghettoise mothers into shorter and more family-friendly working hours while men continue on their merry path into the higher-paid jobs. If we do that we will deepen job segregation at home as well as at work and not eliminate the pay gap that still exists.

"We are very much directing this package of support towards the fathers as well as the mothers, and putting it on the agenda of every business."

Around a third of childcare is already being done by fathers; research shows that children benefit from the support of both parents – together or apart – and yet the workplace hasn't caught up with the reality of 21st-century family life. And common sense points to a few other benefits, too. It enables fathers to "get a better balance – and also not to have their wives complaining!"

In the next few months, the Trade and Industry Secretary will be taking her message to the men in question. In April, to coincide with the new employment laws, the pilot issue of Dad Mag will be published. A newspaper advertising campaign will begin at the end of February. In what will be a completely different approach, adverts aimed at men will appear on the sports pages.

That's the vision. From the sofas in Ms Hewitt's office, it all sounds perfect. The problem comes when you look out of her window at the specks on the ground, and wonder: will it work for you and me?

Critics insist the Government has bowed to business and introduced a non-compulsory scheme with a built-in get-out for bosses. Who, they ask, is going to demand flexible working hours when it could harm their promotion chances? What happens when the boss says no "for good business reasons", as the law will allow?

But Ms Hewitt refuses to put herself in a situation in which the Government ends up "dictating" to people how they should lead their lives. Flexibility, by definition, she argues, cannot be contained within a rigid law. Instead, the Trade and Industry Secretary intends to woo yet more men.

"I think we need to be more sophisticated in our use of regulation to achieve change, because simply hitting businesses over the head with a big stick actually doesn't work very well."

Part of the process of convincing them will take place at a conference on overwork, women in the workplace and changing working patterns at a London hotel this week.

There, Ms Hewitt will again make the business case for family-friendly working practices. One in three employee mums leaves her job after maternity leave and 15 per cent work part-time elsewhere.Though "frustrating", Ms Hewitt feels the fight for women in the workplace has made huge strides forward.

"I'm an old-lag feminist and in the 1970s the conversations were very different. We had the BBC and ITN refusing to employ women newscasters on the grounds their voices were too high to report on a disaster. We have come a long way, but I don't want my daughter in another 25 years still having to be campaigning on these issues as I am." Let's hope those men are up to it.

Biography

1948 Born in Australia, the daughter of a diplomat

1971 Graduates from Newnham College, Cambridge

1981 Marries Bill Birtles; has one son and one daughter

1988 Joins Labour policy team

1989 Helps to set up Institute for Public Policy Research

1997 Elected Member of Parliament for Leicester West

1998 Promoted to Economic Secretary to the Treasury

2001 Secretary of State for Trade and Industry