NAME me a senior director – not chief executive - of a FTSE 100 company.

Unless you bury your nose in The Financial Times each day, you probably can’t.

The only one you may recognise is Laura Wade-Gery. She’s a Marks & Spencer senior executive, poached from Tesco four years ago, who at the age of 50 has – gasp – taken maternity leave.

Since then there have been thousands of column inches analysing the woman who was considered so important to M&S’s fortunes that they made an announcement to the stock exchange when she made the decision to take the time off.

Initially it was only supposed to be four months, but just before Christmas she said she would take a full year.

She’s since been overlooked for the top job she was tipped for, which was taking over from chief executive Mark Bolland. Instead her colleague Steve Rowe – who also has a very distinguished background - was named as Bolland’s successor.

The number of senior female executives at FTSE 100 companies is still pitifully low – under one in ten.

One can imagine, while it’s not politically correct to say so publicly, there were murmurings behind closed doors in the City when Wade-Gery suddenly announced her time off.

The Daily Mail had a field day, approaching everyone they could find to try to get someone to publicly criticise the decision, not only to take leave, but to have a baby at 50, especially when no bump had been in evidence – but, thank goodness, no-one did.

So uncommon is maternity leave among senior-ranking executives that only three have taken any time off in the last ten years or more.

This week a panel of women representing the teaching, legal, medical and recruitment professions told a panel of MPs that mothers who spent more than 12 months on maternity leave were penalised in their careers.

Women who took time off “were not quite looked at in the same way when they returned” and from around the age of 38, the career and pay gap began to appear between men and woman who struggled to compete after starting families.

One of the problems is “maternity” leave. While the UK has introduced the new shared parental leave, the take-up has been just two per cent. Part of this is the age-old problem that men are generally paid more than women.

Therefore, it makes financial sense to a couple that the individual paid the least takes the time off, as the hit will be smaller.

But, until women’s pay matches that of men, or until people are paid in full when when is true equality going to happen? It’s a vicious circle which needs to be addressed by government.

It’s not shameful to want to balance work and family, whether you’re a man or a woman. It’s not weak, it doesn’t mean you’re not dedicated to your career, by wanting to spend time with a perfect little newborn.

Let’s start calling the whole thing parental leave, not maternity leave. Let’s pay people in full to take at least six months off, and offer incentives to fathers to share the leave, as in Norway.

Enabling men to take a greater share in childcare at this early stage can only lead to better equality of opportunity further down the line – and stop working women being penalised for being mothers.