The dilemma I have a 21-month-old baby and took six months maternity leave. Since returning to work I’ve managed large projects and am delaying trying for baby number two as I don’t want to leave during project delivery. I have high aspirations and I really like my job and enjoy these opportunities. My boss is offering me another big project next year and I feel in a predicament. If I have my “family life” hat on, I don’t want to leave trying for another baby any longer, but if all goes well, I would be pregnant for a large portion of it and my boss wouldn’t give ownership to me – he’d find someone else on the team. My husband thinks we should just go for it. However, it doesn’t have a massive effect on his working life and career. I’d be grateful if there were any reality checks as I feel I’m going around in circles.

Mariella replies Let’s not leap too far ahead. First, can I just say how livid your letter makes me. There’s too much lip service paid to advances in equality for women, generally from those with something to gain by association (ie politicians or business moguls). But whether it’s sexual abuse or harassment, equal pay, investment in female-specific medical research or a fairer division of domestic labour, we still haven’t caught up with the rhetoric. Instead, we dawdle in the doldrums and it’s hard not to surmise that no matter how loud we shout and how many headlines we monopolise with salacious stories of starlets abused, enduring equality remains far from accomplished.

I know that right now we don’t have time to be worrying about trivialities like equal rights what with a recession looming and small islanders running amok in the corridors of power, but the simple fact is that if you empower your female population your GDP grows, if you don’t it withers. The evidence is that no country can afford to make working life an unrewarding prospect for half of the population. Yet it’s a culture that continues to flourish, seven decades after promises of pay parity became enshrined in UK law. Other nations, once examples of bad practice, from South America to South Africa and across Asia, are fast putting our stalled levels of emancipation to shame.

You have every right to this work and no duty to inform your boss

The outrage that followed revelations that the rot at the heart of the male establishment was still flourishing – from Harvey Weinstein to Jeffrey Epstein – failed to illuminate the less spotlighted realms of female experience – zero-hour contracts, enduring domestic abuse, women unable to afford to go back to work or in jail because they can’t feed their children without shoplifting.

Not for the first time in my life I note that the story has moved on and brave survivors and their flame-carrying contemporaries are back in the crepuscular corner that’s been a regular detention location for my pioneering feminist generation. In maturity, you realise there really is nothing new on this earth, just the same old injustices, edging inexorably and hopefully forward to a brighter day. To find women in your situation in the 21st century, still trying to find ways around the inevitability that pregnancy equals demotion is, as I said earlier, entirely enraging.

I can’t give advice about your particular workplace. What I can offer is encouragement not to accept the fate you describe and to stand your ground. Bosses will adhere to employment law if they know they’ll be held to account. I suggest you acquaint yourself intimately with your rights, then make the choices you feel best for your family. Rights are hard fought for. They are there to protect us and if we allow them to be ignored the world simply won’t change.

I don’t know what sex your first child is, but once you have a daughter it’s hard to take anything on the chin that spells unfairness for her future. You have every right to run this new project, no responsibility to inform your boss that you are thinking of having another baby and every reason to forge ahead with energy and enthusiasm on both fronts.

I went back to work after three months following the birth of both my children, because I’m a freelance and that was as long as I could afford to stay away. If you share your leave between maternity and paternity, then your husband, too, will discover the challenges of balancing parenthood and professional life. A BBC boss told my agent 15 years ago when my daughter was born that my “breastfeeding schedule was inconvenient” and stopped using me. I was advised to accept that fate. In today’s more adversarial climate I’d be too ashamed not to call him out. Progress may be painfully slow, but when we refuse to settle for less than we are due, the future bodes better for our daughters.

Finally, while most of us will regret elements of how we raise our children, I’ve yet to meet anyone who regretted having one. I suggest you stop worrying so much – the wind is in your favour, you just need to spread your wings.

If you have a dilemma, send a brief email to mariella.frostrup@observer.co.uk. Follow her on Twitter @mariellaf1