One of the wealthiest women in the City yesterday told MPs that employers should cut maternity leave and ban excessive payouts in sex discrimination settlements.

Nichola Pease, who — along with Crispin Odey, her husband — was estimated to be worth £204 million in this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, argued that onerous legislation designed to protect women’s rights has had the opposite effect, making some employers believe that hiring a woman is a “nightmare”.

Ms Pease was addressing the Commons Treasury Select Committee, which yesterday began to take evidence for a new inquiry into the role and treatment of women in the City.

Ms Pease, who has three children, is the deputy chairman of JO Hambro Capital Management and has worked in the City since the 1980s. She has a stake in the fund management business valued at about £20 million and is part of one of the families that founded Barclays Bank.

The cross-party committee is looking at pay inequality between men and women, flexible working practices, the extent to which the culture of the City is sexist, and the prevalence of sexual harassment.

Ms Pease, 48, told the committee that old-style City sexism has “died a death” and that the diffculty able women once experienced in trying to get their first foot on the ladder in the Square Mile no longer existed.

She rejected claims that old boy networks still conspired to block women, insisting that the globalisation of Britain’s financial sector had effectively blown apart inclusive, clubby male circles. She also said human resources departments had a much higher profile in the recruitment process.

Ms Pease and her husband have been nicknamed “the Posh and Becks of the City” because of their high profile and wealth.

The fund manager said that the reason there were so few women in top jobs in the City was not because the financial world was sexist, but because female workers had chosen not to pursue very senior roles, often because the working hours and demands of such jobs were not necessarily compatible with raising a family.

She said: “I would love to give everyone flexible working parctices — but there are certain jobs [in the City] which have unsociable hours — conference calls at various times to accommodate the global nature of business. There is a lot of travel. Those are the commercial realities.”

A report compiled by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, cited by Ms Pease, found a 55 per cent pay gap between men and women in the financial sector.

Ms Pease — who has said in the past that she worked a four-day week so that she could collect her children from school on Fridays — urged the committee not to recommend formal quotas that would determine the number of women on boards.

She said: “Please don’t legislate. Sex discrimination is not significant in the financial community.”

The committee also took evidence from a number of City professionals and from Daniel Ferreira, Reader at the London School of Economics in Finance. He said that when women were present on an executive board, the male directors turned up to meetings more often.

He concluded that the reason there are so few women on company remuneration committees is because male chief executives prefer to have men running the groups governing their pay. Dr Ferreira found that banks where women had board seats were more likely to remunerate their staff with equity-related bonuses, rather than revenue-dependent cash bonuses.

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