Tory leader David Cameron is a brave bloke. Well, brave-ish. He has at least ventured where the prime minister dared not go, or perhaps did not think it was worth going - into the den of the Equal Opportunities Commission.
The EOC has been getting bolder in recent times, so his encounter last week was no soft touch, likely to harvest a sweet photo opportunity with the ladies.
Cameron's party is aware that it is in a gender and generation crisis.
Women were the historic spine of the party, they invented its remarkable voting-harvesting machine, and, until modern women's politics began to make their presence felt on the Labour party a couple of decades ago, Tory women could bask in the notion that their party had the edge on macho Labourism.
But those days are long gone. Modern women aren't offered anything, as women, by Tories. The rhetoric of choice rings hollow in a world where childcare is so expensive, where the pay gap has hardly budged in 30 years, where women are economically punished for being mothers, where carers are expected to serve their time in solitary confinement and fathers work the longest hours in Europe.
When Cameron faced a question-and-answer session at the EOC he helpfully admitted that unequal pay was compounded by a 'climate of concealment' - how could women challenge their pay when they didn't know what anyone else was earning?
Strong stuff, but will he say the same thing to the employers who block pay audits and make transparency a crime? And will he face down the employers who have resisted reform of our outdated Equal Pay Act? He championed flexible working; will he also confront the businesses that won't let new mothers go back to their old jobs or work part-time?
He affirmed choice and flexibility, yet his party admits it has not begun to consider the polarisation between mothers' and fathers' working time and our long-hours, low-productivity culture.
One category was absent from Cameron's script: fathers. Like most politicians, he seems to think that equality is about 'women' rather than men and the redistribution of resources and respect between the genders.
But let's not be unkind. At least he knows these issues are important, at least he wants to be in the conversation. Let's see if the Labour leadership asks the EOC for an invitation.
