Yet it was her decision to return to work after the birth of their baby which came under scrutiny

Yet it was her decision to return to work, after the birth of their baby, which came under scrutiny. Nobody asked the father whether he had considered giving up his job to look after the baby; in fact, we never met him. We did meet a family where the father had stayed home to look after the kids When they reached their teens, he went back to work But now one of the boys isn't doing well with his GCSEs. Was this his father's fault? Who knows? Panorama was too busy grilling his mother to ask."She doesn't accept that her absence is affecting Rob's schoolwork," lamented the presenter. Given that Rob's mother had always been at work, this view did not seem illogical, but it was clearly quite unreasonable to Panorama.

If children suffer when both parents work full-time it is, apparently by definition, the mother's fault.A study which claimed that, all things being equal, children do better when raised by stay-at-home fathers rather than mothers was published two days after Panorama It received almost no media attention. One could argue that, as all things are very rarely equal - most women earn on average 20 per cent less than men, and are therefore the logical ones to give up work - we were right to ignore it. Alternatively, 20 years after the Equal Pay Act was passed, this is perhaps the injustice Panorama should be worrying about.But is seems that we don't much like women when they do earn more than men. When Nicola Horlick and her pounds 1.5m salary became big news, free market stalwarts like the Daily Telegraph were suddenly alarmed by the senseless "greed" of the City.

Presumably, they were not unaware that City high- flyers earned such sums; it was merely when the salary was drawn by a woman that they began to wonder whether it was quite right.There is nothing fascinating, normally, about a row over City recruitment - but something irresistible about the opportunity to take a gleeful swing at a "superwoman" who had presumed to Have It All. She couldn't take it when it all went wrong, could she? When Chris Evans mouthed off in public teeth after his sacking, he was a cheeky showman. When Nicola Horlick fought back, she was a hysterical disgrace to her gender. When she played the children PR card, she sank to some grotesque sort of she-devil."A woman so ready to quash the protective instinct towards her offspring is a sign that nothing of intimacy is deemed off-limits in the perpetual battle for Mammon," sneered one commentator. Men in trouble routinely pull such stunts - John Gummer fed hamburgers to his little girl, and David Mellor, at the height of his sex scandal, assembled his kids for a photo call - without their innate integrity being damned.What was so special, anyway, many scorned, about being a working mother of five when she could afford all those nannies and cleaners? The "real superwomen", right-wing papers were suddenly declaring, were poor, unemployed, single mothers struggling to get by. Which is odd, because only yesterday those women were feckless scroungers jumping the housing queue - and doubtless they will be again tomorrow.