Editing the latest issue of PM was a bit depressing. Actually, no, most of it was enjoyable – editing one particular story, Flexibility 'puts women’s career on a knife-edge', was the bit that made for hard reading.

As a career woman I was keen to find out what could potentially damage mine and millions of other women’s jobs; oh, how predictable – the issue of children.

The question at large was specifically regarding whether maternity and flexible working rights are so generous these days that employers are being put off hiring women of a childbearing age. According to Nicola Brewer, chief exec of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: yes. Other commentators agreed that organisations are calling into question female employees’ ‘reliability’ because they may fall pregnant.

Our online poll on this topic also came back with a resounding yes.

Am I alone in thinking that this could be described as a somewhat extreme reaction on behalf of employers?

The actual concerns around hiring women of this age haven’t been spelled out. I presume cost is the major one – maternity pay, potentially having to find a replacement for maternity cover and so forth. But flexible working policies don’t have those same expenses attached. So does this hark back to that long-held myth that flexible workers simply work less? I have much sympathy with the cost issue – maternity can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses, and it would be useful to delve deeper into concerns around flexible working so that precise concerns can be aired and explored.

But still I ask again, corporate Britain, is your preferred response in protest at family-friendly laws really to stop hiring women of childbearing age? All women, up and down the land, from the age bracket of 16 to 45ish? You really would be prepared to alienate such an enormous segment of the labour force – from school leavers and graduates to those in the most senior positions – because in a period of about 30 years a woman may decide to have a child or two? Come on.

This is not employers rallying out against legislation. This is employers effectively saying that women contribute so little to the world of work that rather than treat them as individuals with individual needs (some women don’t have children, you know? Some women do but return to work soon after - Karren Brady had her baby on a Friday and was back to work on a Monday!), rather than view women as more than just a collective incapable of making different choices, they would prefer just to denigrate all women of this age bracket and keep them out of the workplace altogether.

The message is that they are not worth the hassle. I’m dumbstruck.

Imagine if just for a week all employment law was suspended and employers actually carried out this threat. Not a single woman of childbearing age would be hired and all the existing ones marched from the premises. What would happen? From a strategic level, lots of talent, experience, skill, creativity, innovative thinking, commitment and engagement would be gone. At a more basic level, workplaces would not be viable – there just wouldn’t be enough people to do the job, especially given the current skills shortages employers keep complaining about. A quick count tells me that on my floor alone the workforce would be slashed from 46 to only 13!

Of course, for employers to stop recruiting women of childbearing age would be an over-simplistic response to a fairly complex issue that links in with our social values and our views on the responsibilities of parenthood, which largely remains centred around the mother.

Those who have called for measures to make family-friendly laws more inclusive of fathers hold the key. Parental rights are currently too focused on women. Although PM’s own Tim Smedley called for increased paternal rights in a recent blog, I would propose going further and suggesting that current maternity entitlements should not automatically be given to mum but that either mother or father should be able to opt for it. But if current benefits for mums were scrapped, to the purported ‘benefit’ of employers, both working mothers and fathers would end up having to make plenty of sacrifices.