Women avoiding regular payments for years (4)
I believe the answer is:
ages
'years' is the definition.
(I've seen this before)
'women avoiding regular payments' is the wordplay.
'women' becomes 'w'.
'avoiding' is a deletion indicator.
'regular payments' becomes 'wages' (wage is a kind of regular payment).
'wages' with 'w' removed is 'AGES'.
'for' is the link.
(Other definitions for ages that I've seen before include "... of Man, according to WB Yeats" , "Awfully long time" , "Matures" , "Yonks" , "Epochs" .)