Gerry Adams was standing in Belfast City Hall at the local election count last May in the midst of a scrum of journalists, cameras and lights when I asked him this question: "How would you describe your party's record on promoting women and women's issues?"

As the president of Sinn Fein launched into a spiel about his party's excellent record, the puzzled press pack members began, one by one, to switch off their dictaphones, the camera operators turned off their lights and the sound engineers discreetly retracted their boom microphones.

When I finished my interview, the North's ubiquitous political journalist, Eamonn Mallie, immediately piped up with a question for Adams about the political issue of the day. On went the lights, out came the dictaphones and the boom mikes. Normality had been restored.

It was a briefly amusing and, for the onlookers, a slightly surreal moment in the four months of filming for a 40-minute documentary, Women's Work, directed by Diarmuid Lavery and produced by Michael Hewitt, on which I collaborated with the Belfast-based production company Double-Band Films.

That interview didn't make it into the final cut of the film, which will be broadcast on BBC 1 Northern Ireland tomorrow night as part of the Home Truths series.

But the scene struck was symptomatic of the situation of women in politics in the North. Just as our interview was a side-show to the day's main performance, so Northern women politicians are simply not part of the main picture.

The contrast with the Republic and Britain, where the highest number of women MPs to date was returned in this year's general election, couldn't be starker.

When it comes to women and electoral politics Northern Ireland is lagging at least a generation behind Britain and the Republic. With the notable exception of Dr Mo Mowlam, it is invariably a male politician before the cameras in the North. This is hardly surprising, as the North's 18 MPs and three MEPs are all men; and for every woman member of the North's 26 district councils, there are six men.

Plans for the documentary were in hand before the emergence of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC), the enfant terrible which upset the happily patriarchal family of Northern politics by making gender an issue.

The NIWC sent the other parties scrambling for women within their ranks to push in front of the cameras. We see them regularly now, peering out from behind the men-folk, and remaining mute. Visible, but without status.

The stock explanation for the dearth of women is that they are turned-off by the sectarian bickering that often passes for politics in the North and daunted by the security situation. But this can only be part of the answer because, despite the media portrayal of them as society's full-time grievers, Northern women have repeatedly proven that they are politically engaged and active.

They've been prominent in "movement politics" since the 1960s, and are also active in a host of civic organisations which are political with a small "p", such as support groups for single parents, refuges for battered women and advice centres.

Yet, for the 28 years of the North's "Troubles," men have taken centre-stage in both electoral politics and its understudy, terrorism - with the result that, as Monica McWilliams from the NIWC says, "the mainstream male politics of Northern Ireland has been not only macho in style, but macho in agenda".

This machismo has fuelled, and is fuelled by, a deeply-ingrained attitude in the North that it is the men who make the really important decisions and the women the trivial ones. So when jobs or positions within the parties are up for grabs, they automatically go to the men. The film shows that such attitudes are surviving unchallenged among many male unionist politicians in the Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue. When we sat in on a forum debate, our jaws hit the floor at the level of abusive and sexist barracking of McWilliams and her colleague, Pearl Sagar, by their male counterparts on the unionist benches.

The most abusive by far were the DUP members, in particular Ian Paisley junior.

Whinging women and scum are some of the terms that have been thrown at them and the taunters can and do get away with it. Women are acceptable to the parties, and the unionist parties in particular, only if they don't rock the boat like those nasty women from the Coalition by demanding that their voice or opinions be listened to.

And herein lies the main reason why there are so few prominent women politicians in the deeply conservative Northern society where the constitutional question dominates all others - there is simply little pressure on the parties to pay more than lip-service to women or women's issues, never mind to actually change things.

The only Northern women on the front bench during the plenary sessions of the current multi-party talks in Stormont are McWilliams, Sagar and Lucilita Bhreathnach from Sinn Fein. The Minister of State, Liz O'Donnell and Dr Mowlam are there also.

All the Northern parties are still far from achieving, within their own ranks, a gender-based "parity of esteem" which reflects the fact that women make up the majority of the population in the North. The SDLP and Sinn Fein may be more gender sensitive than the UUP and the DUP, but that isn't saying much.

Of course, the issue of women in politics goes beyond numbers. It's about creating a mindset that recognises the validity of women's work and rewards their talent.

Bernadette McAliskey, the North's only woman MP in three decades, sums up the current mindset when she says that a man can be photographed on his electoral brochure with his wife and children around him, and they enhance his position.

"But a woman surrounded by her husband and children may well initiate the question: `hasn't she enough to be at without running for parliament?' "

Home Truths will be broadcast on BBC 1 Northern Ireland tomorrow at 10.15 p.m.