I won’t be joining the Mumtrepreneurs

Also on the table, next to the crayons and colouring books, is your featherweight laptop from which you're running a multi-million-pound online venture that has got Google, frankly, scared, because the sky's the limit.

Career women don't fantasise about giving up work any more. They daydream about running The White Company (is there a gap in the market for The Yellow Company?) in the kitchen with their children barely registering their mental absence. In this scenario, I even like dogs, and make room for a black Lab curled up in front of the Aga.

When the Equality and Human Rights Commission reported the biggest fall in numbers of women in power last week (we have fewer female MPs than Iraq and fewer than 11 per cent of FSTE 100 directors are women), the "mumtrepreneurs" were quick to retort that they were the new have-it-alls, the suggestion being that they have autonomy, flexibility, liquidity and most importantly, credibility.

While I have maximum respect for these women who use sofa shots surrounded by plump toddlers to publicise their e-ventures (be they Mumsnet or Netmums), I bet they couldn't set anything up — including plates and cutlery — at my kitchen table. Others in the kitchen have first rights to table space and the sound waves and, most particularly, my attention. Most of us have to admit that it would be completely impossible to run any kind of enterprise, let alone a successful one, from home, and look after children at the same time, no matter how long you could force them to watch CBeebies for.

To be a stellar mumtrepreneur you have to be just as focused as a Marjorie Scardino or a Clara Furse, even if your currency is Yellow Cashmere Cardigans or Mothers' Wisdom rather than the London Stock Exchange. Which means that either you must be able to turn a deaf ear to your children's chatter, in which case you may as well be in the office, or you are, in fact, despite your spin, in the office. Either way your life is still depedendent on the state of your childcare and your morale on the state of your bank balance. Mumtrepreneur may be the word of the moment but let's not delude our daughters into thinking that there's women's work, and then there's work that matters.