Closing the pay gap, prioritising housing for women fleeing abusers and making public transport safer are all key issues for the Mayoral candidate for a new political party.

Sophie Walker, 44, is standing against Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith as the Women's Equality Party's choice for city hall.

October 2015: Tory mayoral hopeful Zac Goldsmith talks Jeremy Corbyn, tax credit cuts and Heathrow expansion

November 2015: "I'll probably die in Tooting": Our interview with Labour's mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan on Crossrail, police cuts and Nandos

January 2016: Pidgeon on planes, trains and "Boris over a barrel": Lib Dem candidate Caroline Pidgeon discusses her Mayoral campaign

March 2016: London's only gay mayoral candidate talks arts, housing, tube strikes and why London is better out of the EU

In the sixth of our one-to-one interviews with the London Mayoral candidates reporter Rebecca Taylor visited the campaign in their Bermondsey offices.

The former journalist turned to the party out of disillusionment with the pace of change in society, desperate to see women achieve equality in her own lifetime.

She said: "In the last election there were an awful lot of people being treated as a special interest group when they are half the population.

"I didn't think twice about it when I heard the party was being formed, I was in immediately.

"I think the needs of women have been overlooked by Mayor after Mayor."

Ms Walker's first move should she get into City Hall would be to publish the pay and working structure of every employee to find out "what is really going on there".

She said: "I would establish flexible working there as default as you need to lead by example.

"We don't have enough childcare in London, the cost is a third more expensive than the rest of the UK and it is shutting women out of work and creating a situation where men do not feel comfortable taking the time to spend with their families."

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Ms Walker said that last year women earned £70 billion less than men, a combination of access to work, unequal pay and child care costs.

The party leader is struck by the lack of an outcry over the number of rapes in the capital, some figures suggest there were 5,000 reported last year. As a comparison the latest full-year figures for stabbings, 2012, says there were about 3,000 attacks.

She said: "There is quite rightly an outcry over knife crime but where is the outcry about rape?

"I want to see this prioritised.

"We do need more police but we need to train the police force to understand sexual violence against women and understand the experience of survivors."

Ms Walker also said she wanted to see more prevention work, work in schools on consent and healthy relationships and community work to alert people in areas with high rates of sexual assault.

She said she was "taken aback" to hear the British Transport Police had scrapped its specialist sexual assault unit, after a rise in the number of reports of offences and called for an investigation into the decision.

On housing, Ms Walker said there needs to be a gendered budget, to establish what affordable housing means for women, who earn less than men.

She said: "I'm concerned there are rooms full of men with calculators looking at affordable housing for men but not for women and their different salaries.

"The crisis in London housing has got so bad that I am not surprised it is at the heart of this Mayoral campaign.

"We need to take the politics out. We need a cross-party group to work collaboratively to use the best ideas from everybody."

Ms Walker would prioritise those trying to leave abusers for homes in the capital, saying that refuges are on their knees because of cuts.

On transport, Ms Walker says that what exists needs to work better, and puts accessibility for wheelchair users and parents with pushchairs as a focus point.

She said: "We need to design new buses.

"If you are a person waiting for hours and hours when buses are full then a ticket deal is not your first thought.

"We need to focus equally on buses and the tube, there is a huge amount of work to be done to make the tube more accessible and make sure the improvements on the tube have that in the development."

Ms Walker also advocates more quiet ways and segregated cycle lanes in the city, citing her own fears of cycling through the capital where 25 per cent of cyclists are women but they account for 40 per cent of all cycle deaths.

She said: "I'm doing this because I want to get this done. It has taken far too long.

"I would have to live to be 162 to see the pay gap close in my lifetime.

"We are aiming to get the job done."