Rowan Pelling: My life on the front line of discrimination

In the past few weeks a depressingly predictable skirmish has broken out in the women's pages. The aggressors are childless, professional women who say working mums get a number of wildly unfair concessions. Nicki Defago, author of Childfree and Loving It! (though clearly not "loving it" enough to become genial and stop sniping at the child-laden), recently cited parents who think the word childcare "has become some kind of magical password to leave work early or arrive late".

There's just one problem with this theory; women with small children face more prejudice in the workplace than ethnic minorities and the disabled. Talk to any woman struggling to combine a career with motherhood and they'll say that "childcare" is indeed a password - it whisks you away to the magical land of redundancy and conjuring tricks, as in: "Your job has been restructured." Abracadabra! There's no way a woman with a child and a modicum of dignity can carry out the reconfigured job description. Many women barely mention this scenario, let alone protest about it.

When I sold a majority stake of my magazine The Erotic Review to a large company I was 10 weeks pregnant. It turned out the new head of the company's consumer magazine department, my immediate boss, was also 10 weeks gone. My sister-in-law, who did the magazine's marketing, was three months pregnant, with two small children at home. A year later none of us worked for the company; we had all been let go with the usual semi-plausible explanations and less usual generous packages. You go along with it for three reasons: a) post-natal exhaustion b) a desire to spend more time with your child c) guilt. No woman I've met imagines that her colleagues and bosses are delighted she's taking maternity leave. Some females may believe companies exist to sponsor their breeding programme - but I've never met one.

I find it astounding that some women will cast the evil eye on colleagues for the measly slither of leeway bosses grudgingly allow working mothers. This wildly indulgent pampering consists of permission to leave the office at the end of the working day, rather than several hours later, and getting first dibs over holidays. There's a lot of loose talk about mothers taking time off for sports days and school plays, but it's extremely rare for this not to come out of holiday allowance. Working mums do sometimes have to dive out of work because a child is sick, but nobody gets militant if a childless colleague takes time off because a parent is drastically ill or their house has been burgled or flooded. We understand in these circumstances that some compassion and leeway are due.

Why do we now view having children as a form of gross self-indulgence, akin to keeping a racehorse? Defago cited a male friend who told her, "If I took the afternoon off because the dog had a cold, my colleagues wouldn't accept it for one moment." That's such a superb analogy: a sick Labrador is right up there with little Casper battling meningitis in Great Ormond Street.

Before I had my son I never harboured simmering grudges against colleagues who had kids. I felt sorry for them having to battle through the nightmare of rush hour while I could idly flick through my email. I had great sympathy for the fact they were tied to expensive peak-rate holidays during school breaks, while I could I could go away off-season at a fraction of the price.

Nor have I ever harboured the view that it's incredibly selfish to breed. If your colleagues don't have kids, who's going to tend your corns in the Sunnyland Retirement Home? We do all have a vague responsibility towards the next generation, even those of us who find kids repellent.

I think the whingeing about working mums is a smokescreen to stop employers noticing how often the childless bunk off work. When I employed eight people it was the single and childless workers who took the most arbitrary leave due to flu (never a cold), faulty trains, banking errors, the plumber, a long lost brother returned from Narnia (translation:a hangover and strange man in the bed) and, of course, stress. Most working mums are too darn stressed to complain of stress. The office can be a picnic compared with the sweatshop of the nursery. "You don't know the meaning of time management," says my sister-in-law, "until you have three children under four and a 30-page marketing plan to finish by teatime."

If companies were given incentives to employ that leprous minority - mothers of young children - Britain would swiftly be twice as competitive.