Emma Cowing: Super idea, but I don’t fancy the Ultimo fix

Of course, the chances of any of them having enough free time to be able to make it to the cinema to see the film in the first place are slim, but still, at least the intention was there, which in Hollywood – a place which still apparently struggles with the notion that women come in anything larger than a size zero – is a remarkable step forward.

It’s an issue that was also raised this week by Michelle Mone, the Scottish businesswoman whose company, Ultimo, has become a household brand selling moderately priced and hugely effective scaffolding for women.

Now don’t get me wrong. I quite like Michelle Mone. She’s got that role model thing going on, and as far as a figure in the public eye for young women to look up to goes, I think you could do a lot worse than someone who started a business in her twenties, marketed it so well she roped Julia Roberts into her advertising campaign and is still successfully running it almost 15 years later.

But I nearly tripped over my jaw after reading her remarks on the subject of being a working mother, so far had it fallen to the floor. Mone is organised. Super organised.

“I run my business and my family with lists,” she informed the interviewer, not long after she was booted out of Celebrity Masterchef. “Everyone gets a ‘to-do list’, the gardener, the driver, the nanny, everyone. And when I leave that front door, my house is completely organised.”

Well thank goodness for that. Heaven knows what a gardener might do if left to his own devices (my guess is, get on with the garden). As for the driver – well I would have thought his list would only have one instruction on it … “drive”, possibly? But perhaps I am missing something.

However, wait, there’s more. Mone’s three children, aged 19, 15 and 12, are all given something called “key performance indicators” to drive their day.

“They all know what they’re expected to do,” says Mone. “I plan a schedule for each child and a work schedule for the house. And once everyone knows what they’re doing, I can leave and get on with my own work.”

I don’t know about you, but most mothers I know barely have time to plan their own schedule, never mind one for their child.

This is not to say that mothers aren’t organised. They have to be, particularly if they are single parents, or juggling a full-time job.

The difference is that most mothers nowadays don’t have access to nannies and drivers and gardeners. Most of them scrape along with what they’ve got, and make it work in any way they can. They have neither the time nor the inclination to plan out every nano-second of their child’s day. Part of the joy of watching children grow is seeing them make their own choices. Looming over every minute of their day in a domineering super-mum fashion must, I feel, be a little stifling for the child, not to mention exhausting and unnecessary for the mother.

Mone is, of course, entitled to run her home life any way she wishes. But any time a woman with staff and a multi-million pound bank account gives an interview in which she outlines in smugly joyful tones exactly how she does it, it demeans every woman who doesn’t.

There is enough of a tendency to make life over-complicated these days as it is, without the added pressure from Supermums. Women like Mone are not the norm, but the more they bang on about such super-organised lives the more pressure they put on the rest of us to somehow attempt to emulate them.

No, I don’t know how she does it. But ultimately, I don’t really want to either.