As a childless woman, Christmas was until recently a time of intense personal pain. It is, after all, a celebration of the definitive miracle baby. I am now out the other side of my heartbreak: I've grieved the life unlived. But for many women (and men), Christmas remains an annual reminder of how they have "failed" to reach what is seen as the ultimate marker of adulthood – having a family of your own.

As a society, we need to find new ways of thinking about the childless among us. Last week, the Office for National Statistics released its latest "cohort fertility" figures. The ONS has data on women's fertility all the way back to those born in 1920, and the new figures show that the level of childlessness is steadily increasing: one in nine women born in England and Wales in 1940 were childless at the age of 45, compared with one in five of those born in 1967 – my generation. The indications are that this may rise to one in four of women born in the 70s.

It is apt that the ONS concentrates on women: though men often feel the lack of children just as keenly, the prejudice against adults without children falls more harshly on women – you only need to weigh the difference between the words "bachelor" and "spinster" to see how, and men without children are often simply seen as not fathers yet.

It's been five years since I accepted that I would never be a mother, after 15 years of hoping, planning, trying, dreaming. When I was on the hopeful path to motherhood, I had an acceptable identity in society – but once I became unequivocally childless I felt like an outcast. Nobody wanted to hear how I felt – they just wanted to share a miracle baby story with me, or to reassure me with, "Well, you can always adopt". (Adoption as a single, working woman is particularly difficult, and is not always the obvious next step.)

The ONS data is purely quantitative – live births by age 45 – so it doesn't show how many women have chosen to remain childless (often referred to as "childfree") and how many are, like me, childless by circumstance. There is a limited understanding of this in the wider culture too, with most people presuming that a middle-aged woman or a couple without children either didn't want or couldn't have children. But the truth is far more complex. Some childless people are with partners who already have children and who don't want more, others were unable to find a suitable partner to have children with.

Many in this second group self-identify as "double whammies", and coming to terms with being childless is arguably toughest for them. Where is the double whammy to spend Christmas Day? At her parent's home, watching her siblings and their children take centre stage while she is relegated to the worst bedroom in the house (or, in the case of one woman I know, to a tent in the garden)? Or at her friends' homes, feeling like a gooseberry? Double whammies are too often seen as a problem to be fixed and, if not fixable, to be avoided. Parents, too, can be at a loss at how to deal with their childless child.

On a personal level, all we want is some empathy (not pity, please, no more pity!) and an awareness that, as childless women, we are navigating life on the margins of society and, if childless not by choice, are often weighed down by unresolved grief and perhaps a mountain of IVF debts. On a political level, we would welcome a discussion on the underlying structural reasons for the current levels of childlessness. It hasn't been this high since a generation of women born around 1900 were first robbed of potential partners by a world war, and were then hit by the Great Depression, which made children a choice many couldn't afford. What are the reasons this time?

Those of us born in the 60s and 70s are the shock-absorber generation, taking the hit for a seismic change in male-female relations. In the space of one generation women have entered a labour market based around a "male" pattern of working hard in your 20s and 30s before "settling down" in your 40s – a pattern that runs counter to female fertility. We need to collectively confront the nature of work. We could do with looking at sex education too. Many women of my generation were given the idea that pregnancy was for losers, and that getting pregnant was all too easy – our teachers' intentions were good, but the message was misleading. Mine was also the first generation to have had IVF as a "backup" and, lulled into a false sense of security, we remained blissfully ignorant of its 75% failure rate. Add to that the childcare costs and career knockbacks that motherhood brings – factors that will disproportionately affect women born in the 1970s, for whom the economic crisis has coincided with the prime childbearing years. Now that two incomes are needed to bring up a child, these structural factors also are crucial.

It is time, too, that we acknowledge the valuable role childless people play in society. That "village" needed to raise a child – we're part of that. We are entitled to help shape the next generation and can have insights that parents don't have.

Childless people use less resources and help pay for the resources that children need; mostly, we do so willingly. Yes, we may need more support when we're elderly, but we will have contributed a lot by then. If we silence, shame and ignore a huge percentage of our mature women, we are missing the chance to create a more compassionate and just society. I choose not to agree with our culture's view that as a single, childless woman there's something broken about me. By allowing myself to grieve the loss of my longed-for identity as a mother, I've created a space for a new identity to blossom.

• Gateway-women.com, founded by the author, provides support to childless-by-circumstance women