Do women lack ambition because of their genetic make-up? Is the glass ceiling self-imposed? Absolutely not, says Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, whose book Why Women Mean Business (Jossey-Bass, £16.99), co-written with the journalist Alison Maitland, was published last month. It’s down to a phenomenon she calls “manonomics”.

“It’s not nasty or deliberate,” she says, “but codes of working were simply developed in a different age, with a different family model, when there were no women in the room.”

High-achieving women tend to have children in their thirties, she points out, but the average company identifies key potential in its workforce between the ages of 30 and 35, which she sees as a disaster for female advancement.

She adds: “From the second you walk into an office as a woman, the business culture, processes and attitudes affect you. There is no one obstacle to progression.”

Men simply aren’t recognising a female colleague’s potential because years of conditioning have taught them to look for someone in their own image, she argues.

“I’ve talked to three male CEOs in the past three months who all said that the one quality they would look for in their replacement is ‘hunger’. When I asked 150 women at a leadership conference if they would describe themselves as ‘hungry’, not a single person raised their hand: it’s masculine vocabulary. They would describe themselves as ambitious or passionate.”

Professor Susan Vinnicombe, director of the International Centre for Women Leaders, says female hormones are only part of the problem for working women.

More women are studying IT at university, yet the number of women entering the IT profession is going down. One of the main reasons, she believes, is that traditionally male industries such as IT and engineering aren’t packaged up to appeal to women.

“We conducted a survey for a global management consultancy firm worried that it wasn’t appealing to women,” she says. “We asked graduates all over Britain what they look for in their first job. For men, it was starting salary; for women, there were eight factors, none of which included money. They wanted opportunity to develop, to feel valued, to work in a friendly atmosphere, to work with international people.

“At graduate recruitment fairs, the young male management consultants simply weren’t using the right buzz words that appeal [to women]. And the same is true across the board.”

According to research by Cranfield School of Management, the number of women in the UK holding executive directorships in FTSE 100 companies fell last year to the lowest level in nine years. Only 13 executive directors of Britain’s leading companies are female; three women are chief executives.

Last week a survey by the Association of Graduate Recruiters indicated that the proportion of women recruited by leading companies in the UK had fallen from 42.6% in 2006 to 39% last year. But women represent 57% of graduates and girls consistently outperform boys at school.

Figures from the Department for Children, Schools and Families show that 66.4% of girls achieved five or more grades A*-C at GCSE last year, compared with 57.7% of boys. Girls also achieved more A grades at A-level in maths, chemistry, physics and biology.

Research by the Women and Work Commission suggests that if women’s skills were better harnessed the country would gain about £23 billion.

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