Is the pay gap down to women not being ruthless enough? I once read that a woman would more readily accept a marriage proposal from a man she's in love with than share a mortgage with him; whereas a man would rather share a mortgage than propose. In other words: women have an emotional response to money, men have a logical - or non-emotional - one. Both men and women understand that what you are paid reflects the worth placed on you by your employer but where women may not challenge that pay, for those very reasons, men will. It's ridiculous, of course, to suggest that women are not able to demand a proper salary or think logically but there's no question that we still suffer a pay gap problem, some 40 years after equal pay legislation came in. News on Wednesday that the time limit for equal pay claims has effectively been extended from six months to six years will have been greeted by campaigners with delight. But this story came from a case in the public sector where the pay scales tend to be formulaic and structured. In the private sector, equal pay gaps are, arguably, much harder to measure because the pay tends to be talent and performance-related. At notonthehighstreet.com we believe in recruiting the very best talent we can and paying against performance and deliverables. It is also the case that we have more women employees than men but that is as much down to the brand itself and the retail sector culture than anything else. It's not the case in every department anyway - it is difficult to find women who will work in technology. We're currently recruiting for our executive team and we are actively thinking about the balance of men to our female ratio and making sure we don't tip too much in the other direction. For women who still find themselves working in majority-male environments and are concerned that they are being paid less than their male counterparts, perhaps they should also closely examine their own negotiating tactics. A study which found that male graduates were being paid more on average for their first jobs than female graduates concluded the reason was not that the men were being offered more money, but that the women were accepting the first salary figure offered where the men would refuse it and negotiate higher. The question we should be asking ourselves is: in the private sector, is the pay gap wholly down to companies or the fact that women are sometimes not as ruthless or as clinical when it comes to their pay as they could be? And if so, can legislation change that anyway?