There has been a large amount of publicity around the gender pay gap over the last couple of weeks and for the most part, I am in agreement with what is being said. However, I do feel that there is an element of this that people are missing. I am one of four children, three girls and one boy. I remember my mother saying when we were small to my brother, "enjoy these years when you are young as you will spend the rest of your life working with no break". Of course, being from a long line of very strong women including my mother, I very much jumped on this statement with her. Why was she not saying this to her three daughters? The response she gave, was that we may be blessed with children and would spend a period of time out of the employed environment, which will never happen to my brother because he is a man.

Now I have never had children so this gap has never happened to me, but I have seen it with my sisters, friends and clients. I have also seen the consequence this has had on their careers and their personal financial position. Part of this has been by choice, but some have no choice. A large number of women who have children are unable to work full time, they have no alternative other than to work part time, thereby finding men have advanced in their careers. So automatically they have larger incomes, which is only fair. If a man has continued to expand his experience and work hard for what he has achieved in his career, it is not fair to be paid the same as another man or women, who have not put the same years in as him.

However, for those women who have been on the same path as a man, with the same experience and have been paid differently purely based on gender this is very wrong. Equality on an equal footing should be a certainty for men and women.

This situation has such a wider impact on women's current and future financial position. The obvious of course is that they have less money in their bank account, therefore less money to spend, but also the additional losses to their benefits which can be based on a percentage of salary. These benefits will automatically be less, as her salary is less. Death in Service benefit is based on salary so the amount of cover she has is less, meaning in some cases that she has to pay personally for more cover, through no fault of her own.

The employer may also be paying into her pension scheme, again based on a percentage of salary, so less money is invested. On top of this, she does not have the spare money to make larger contributions, again leading to a situation that at retirement women have less money to provide an income for themselves when they stop working.

In the past, this has not been so much of an issue as "oh, well my husband has a large pension, we will be more than be able to manage". Life is not that simple now, there are more divorces, more women not getting married, people living longer and more demands on incomes. It is no longer a matter of relying on someone else to provide an income in retirement it is important that each person has their own provisions.

Women do want to provide for themselves, they do want independence, choices and options, but are being restricted and punished for being women, when they are doing exactly the same role with the same amount of experience as a man but paid less. How is this right? It is not!