I remember a relative of mine once making a passing comment about working women that hit me like a brick to the face.

I was half listening when I heard my auntie say we’d been sold a con: working was supposed to be liberating, she said. Women were supposed to have choices. The ability to work just like men was held up as a central pillar of equality. But it was all a bit of a con, she told me. In the end, women ended up worse off than ever.

The reason for this, she went on, was the burden of care. Getting into the workplace and having opportunities to climb the ladder didn’t lessen the burden women shouldered in the home. They still had primary responsibility for childcare, and for looking after other relatives - like elderly parents with complex medical needs, for example.

Women were generally still at the heart of keeping the home and family operating functionally, except now they had the burden of jobs to add to the pile. Women were now expected by the government to get into work once their offspring had reached a certain age, she sighed, thrusting the nightmare of childcare costs into an ever-growing equation.

And on top of it all, the absolute final slap in the face, was that employers had the audacity to pay women less than their male counterparts – and get away with it. It was a total con.

I was stunned. I had never looked at it that way. I thought the gender pay gap was what it said on the tin: an issue of inequalities in earnings between men and women. I hadn’t factored in the wider pressures on women – pressures that became more intense after their accession in the workplace, leaving idealistic notions of liberation drifting somewhere in the distance, replaced by hopelessness, helplessness and misery for many women at the poorer end of the spectrum.

The release last week of the gender pay gap figures recalled it all to my mind. The figures confirmed what women already knew: we are still facing outrageous discrimination over pay. At HSBC, for example, women are paid less than half of what men earn on average. At Apple, 71% of the top earners are men, and Ryanair’s gender pay gap came in at a whopping 72%. All of this followed the pay gap scandal at the BBC which emerged last year, showing that high-earning men were earning a lot more than high-earning women.

Banks, global tech companies, major airlines and big bucks broadcasters; it was all very terrible, but I couldn’t shift the feeling that the very simple metric of pay gap figures filtered out so many other vital aspects about the challenges facing working women.

I started to wonder whether middle-class feminism was doing a huge disservice to women lower down the ladder. Working class women, in particular, too often bear the burden of care for their families while working low-paid jobs, and they’re a lot less concerned about the gender pay gap as the burning issue when it comes to pay – when you’re working for the minimum wage, there are other things to think about.

If women are to accept that care is an undervalued service, predominantly and historically provided by women, which saves the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money, then we have to counter the culture of shame that has emerged towards women who want to devote their attention to it. It’s either valuable or it isn’t. Otherwise, we too become complicit in a culture that puts unmanageable amounts of pressure on women to do it all.

If it’s supposed to be about choice, then let’s make it about choice. If I choose a career, I should see the balance of responsibilities in my life change; I can’t be expected to fulfil all the traditional roles of mother, carer and home maker, and I should be paid the same as men for my work. But if I choose to focus my energies on the traditional role, it should be met with the appreciation it deserves, as well as better financial recompense.

There’s no question that unequal pay is wrong. It’s unfair, it’s unacceptable, it’s immoral and it’s infuriating. The confused debate around this is not purely down to entrenched misogyny in society; it’s also because we haven’t learned to give domestic care the hugely elevated status it truly deserves in society, and because too much of the discussion around gender and pay seems focused on boardrooms and high paid jobs.

For so many women in Britain, it’s not even possible for them to take part in that conversation. We need to reorganise how we view women’s immense contributions, and utterly essential roles, in our societies and economies. Be like my auntie – get angry.