LONDON Do you fancy having a baby and holding down a job? How retro! According to a survey by InterExec, a confidential agency for high salaried execs, head-hunters believe that women who want to get the top jobs in business should steer well clear of motherhood. Some 53 per cent of those questioned said that women who want a big business post should give up all thoughts of maternity leave - or what they prefer to call a “career break”.

So unless you can see yourself taking just a day or two out to give birth to, nurture and raise a child (do it in your lunch hour, perhaps?), then don't even think of combining being a boardroom high-flyer with passing on your genes. Doing so will apparently be judged on a par with taking a year off to learn skydiving or spending the winter in Kyrgyzstan. You may not have equated bringing up the next generation of human beings with taking an optional breather, but it seems the head-hunters of the business world do.

And semantics are all if maternity leave is little more than a “career break”, then the conclusion the head-hunters have reached is that it's a choice women simply shouldn't make - not if they want to go places professionally. But, as one chief executive said, many have at last seen sense. “Women are starting to realise they can't have it all, and are making clear careers-or-babies decisions,” he said, adding that in the US this was leading to many more choosing the boardroom over the nursery.

More women, perhaps - but not more mothers. Hasn't the world of big business realised over these past few years, that it can't do without our input, because it needs top-level, well-rounded representation? That both men and women who give up career time to bring up babies return to the workplace with new and impressive life skills.

Fathers have managed to hold down top-level business posts for generations; mothers can do just the same. The world of 21st-century big business, for either a mother or a father, simply has to be flexible enough to embrace the needs of real families.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service