Question: According to the Fawcett Society, women still earn between 58% and 80% of what men earn, Labour have been in power for almost four years and we have a Women's Unit, so why do we still have such a disparity in earnings between men and women?

Margaret Jay: Well, we've had a disparity in earnings ever since the Equal Pay Act. The fact is that since we introduced the minimum wage, the discrepancy has gone down quite a bit. In fact in the last year it has gone down by 1%, the average gap between women's earnings and men's earnings for equivalent work is about 19%. That has changed in the last 18 months since the minimum wage was introduced. What the government can do in terms of equal pay is reasonably limited, because the government is not a major employer. We can influence public sector employment arrangements and in all those areas where we are a direct employer like nursing and teaching, there have been very good wage settlements. But what we are completely aware of, and one of the problems about women's wages which is why we have taken much more long term action on this, is the main reason why women's earnings are much less than men's, even though they have improved through the minimum wage and so on, is because women are congregated in the lowest paid occupations. So that 60% of women who work are congregated in the ten lowest paid occupations.

So the medium to long term policy, which is what we have been focusing on through the employment and education policy is improving skills and improving job opportunities for women. So that over time they are much more likely to be employed in higher paid occupations, which is the way in which you will reduce that pay gap.

Question: So you have ruled out the possibility of legislation to ensure that women would get paid the same as men ?

Margaret Jay: Well how would we do that?

Question: You could see no way of passing a law that is saying that every time that a woman has a job, she is paid the same as a man for that same position?

Margaret Jay: Well, they usually are paid the same for the same position. But the point is that as I am saying, that women are congregated in the 10 lowest paid occupations in the country. And while they are, in the catering trades, in the nursing assistant trades, and so on and so forth, they are paid much less.

Where women are doing the same work as men, in areas which the government can influence like nursing and teaching and so on, the pay equivalence is there. What we are doing with working with the employers is to try to improve voluntary arrangements with employers so that there is much greater openness about pay, so if you have two people in professional jobs, one of whom is a man and one of whom is a woman, there isn't any discrepancy, but that is of course for the individual employer to determine. But if there is pressure from the employees because they know, if I know that you are doing the same job as me and are being paid more, then there is pressure from them to achieve the same wage levels and it is much more likely that it will happen.

The other thing which we have done of course is to try to improve the way, that if women do identify those kinds of discrepancies, they can take them more easily to an industrial tribunal, because one of the problems in the past has been that where women have identified direct sex based discrimination in an occupation, speech therapists is the classic example, it has taken up to 12 years in their case, to get a case through the courts and through the whole industrial tribunal procedure. And the Department of Employment has now introduced a way of seeking to simplify that procedure so that if women do want to seek legal redress in cases where they are being discriminated against, it is much more easy to do.

Question: What would you say has been the biggest triumphs of the Women's Unit?

Margaret Jay: Well the biggest triumphs have been influencing government policy to introduce things like the minimum wage, working families tax credit, record increases in child benefit, the Sure Start programme. Issues around improving maternity pay, we have got a Green Paper out at the moment for a consultation on improving maternity leave and pay and perhaps introducing the possibility of a different flexible way of coming back to work after you have been away having a baby - it's called 'Working families and competitiveness'. They are all issues that we have really spearheaded within government and they are all ones which have made a tremendous difference to women's lives.

Question: The Sunday Times reported that the Women's Unit is to shut down. It said 'it will be replaced by a new unit to combat discrimination against men and women.' Any truth in that?

Margaret Jay: Well we haven't come to any conclusions about what will happen to any parts of government after the election.

Question: But whatever it would become, there would always be Ministers for Women?

Margaret Jay: Up to the Prime Minister, not up to me.

Question: The Women's Unit received a lot of criticism over it's body image summit. Are you still concerned about the issue of body image?

Margaret Jay: Very concerned indeed. In fact every time you read in the newspapers that 15 year olds have been given 'boob jobs' for Christmas and all of these kinds of things, you realise how significant that particular initiative was. And of course it was an easy target for a lot of columnists who saw some good easy cracks in that whole situation, but in fact, the interesting thing we found was that when we looked at all the coverage that was in regional newspapers and in the letters to local MPs about it, that this was something that had great resonance in the country and it was the subject on which we have done a sort of public initiative on which the women's unit have received the most correspondence.

Question: The 15 year old girl you refer to about the 'boob job', her argument was 'well, everyone on TV has got one' how does that concern you?

Margaret Jay: Well, what concerns me is that young women particularly, I have to say it is not the primary issue that I have ever worked on or that I will ever work on, but what concerns me about it is that if young women have a genuine sense of self-esteem, and a really good set of opportunities which their education and the jobs market provides for them to do worthwhile activities, and feel that they have a sense of self worth, through what they are doing in their lives, whether it is in their relationships or in their work or in their personal lives, then they are much less likely to be fixated by things which are not necessarily good for them, in terms of things like body piercing and goodness knows what.

Question: Do you think the government will be doing anything positively on body image in the future?

Margaret Jay: I don't know. I mean it was something on which frankly from our point of view it wasn't a particularly main stream thing, but the interesting thing was that although it wasn't absolutely mainstream from our point of view it got such enormous correspondence, and such resonance from people, and particularly mums with teenage daughters out there.

Question: Come the election, which issues do you think will engage women voters?

Margaret Jay: I think women are tremendously interested in all of the work that the government is doing, the investments it is making in the public services. Because women are traditionally, as indeed it has always shown up in the statistics, the biggest users of things like the health service, because they are the ones who take the kids to the doctor, they are the ones who go to the clinics and so on. And also, they are the ones who have a lot of interface with schools and so forth, so they are very very aware of and concerned about standards in the public services and I think the huge investment programme in those areas which the government is undertaking and the changes that we are making, albeit so far with some degree of slowness, but hoping to accelerate as the investment programmes continue, will be one's which will be very important to women.

I think they will see a real choice between the Labour Party who want to continue that investment, and for example, the health service and transport, have a long term plan for reinforcing that investment and taking it forward and really improving schools and hospitals and the Conservative Party who want to cut huge sums from public expenditure. And I think that will be very important to women.

Question: Only two of the 26 safe Labour seats have selected women, does that concern you?

Margaret Jay: Yes it does concern me, but one of the things which we are aware of is that we made an enormous improvement in 1997. We had a record number of women MPs elected and the problem as I am sure you are aware, is that we ran foul of the sex discrimination employment act when we had all women short lists before the 1997 election and what the party was doing was ruled illegal from that perspective. What the Home Office is now doing is looking at ways in which we can change the election law rather than the employment law, which won't run foul of sex discrimination legislation and won't run foul of the Human Rights Act , to enable political parties to take positive action about selecting women which hopefully will begin to push that swing back. But we also have to change the culture of selection and the culture of the way in which the parties operate. But I have to say, up against the other parties we are not very ashamed of our record. In fact, rather the opposite.

Question: Political parties have been accused in the past of being macho and sexist, does that culture still exist?

Margaret Jay: Well I think obviously in certain parts of certain parties there has been a preference for going for the 'good old boys'. We did make a breakthrough in the pre-97 election and I always look with enthusiasm at what has happened in Scotland and in Wales where you have got very large numbers of women in the National Assembly in Cardiff and a majority in the Scottish Parliament and you have got large numbers of women in the Executive bodies in those two devolved areas. I think the ways in which they achieved that may have lessons for the way in which you can move forward at Westminster. But as I say, at the moment, it is the election law that we are looking at as opposed to the employment law which is what we were trying to use before 1997.

Question: And any progress with the election law?

Margaret Jay: We have only been looking at it since the Autumn.

Question: How would you like to see Westminster become a more family friendly working environment?

Margaret Jay: Well I think that the changes which they have tried to make in the Commons, and which are now being endlessly objected to by Mr Eric Forth and his cohorts, and the Tory backbenchers, are ones which are very sensible. Things like not having votes after 10pm and revising the working day so that you have working sessions in the morning, so that you don't regard it as something that people turn up in a leisurely way to at 4pm when most sensible people will perhaps be beginning to think that this was more or less the end of the working day.

Again, if we look at the Scottish Parliament, they have school holidays, they have 9-6 sittings most days when they meet. Why not do that kind of thing at Westminster ? There is no inherent reason why you couldn't do that. In some ways it is slightly more difficult in the House of Lords, because we are not paid, and people genuinely are appointed to be working peers, because of their experience in other areas. Particularly it is very useful to have people who are still involved in outside jobs, whether it is industry or the voluntary sector, or whatever it may be. It is a bit different given that we don't have salaries, and we do encourage people who are doing other things to be members of the Lords, because we want that expertise. It's a bit difficult up here to make quite the argument that you should sit from 9-6 or something because it does then preclude the possibility that you have that other life, so in the Lords it is a bit more difficult, but we could still be more family friendly, as the jargon goes.

Question: There won't be a White Paper on the family, instead there will simply be a progress report?

Margaret Jay: Well that has not been decided.

Question: There has been newspaper speculation, and they accuse a group of women ministers including yourself, Tessa Jowell and Margaret Hodge for persuading Tony Blair not to promote marriage as the best model for society. Is that true?

Margaret Jay: No, it is absolute rubbish. I don't know where it comes from, funnily enough I was talking to Alastair Campbell about precisely this subject earlier today, I asked him if he knew as it were who were running this. I have no idea where it is coming from. The position on the status of marriage and the relevance of marriage in the paper which will be published when we finally decide will be exactly the same as it was in the Green Paper.

Question: There are rumours that you will be standing down from Government after the election. Are they true?

Margaret Jay: You know, that again is between the Prime Minister and me.