What is holding women back in the workplace? If you ask Kevin Roberts, the outgoing Saatchi & Saatchi chairman, the problem is women themselves. “Their ambition is not a vertical ambition, it’s this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy,” he said last week in an interview with Business Insider. A few days later, having been suspended by parent company Publicis, he admitted that he had “failed exceptionally fast” and announced he would resign.

It is superficially appealing to cast Mr Roberts as the victim of a feminist witch hunt. Surely he is a martyr who dared to speak the truth: that for many women it is the desire to have a work-life balance, rather than discrimination, that stops them reaching the top of their industry.

But his comments went far beyond that. He denied that gender inequality was a problem at all — “the f***ing debate is all over” — and accused British advertising consultant Cindy Gallop of lying about sexual harassment in the industry. “I think she’s got problems that are of her own making,” he claimed. “I think she’s making up a lot of the stuff to create a profile, and to take applause.”