On those fine summer mornings, the earliest light would tickle the tops of the trees and trickle in through our kitchen window. My sons are two and five, and bowl downstairs for breakfast too soon after the sun rises, so we’d end up sitting around their tiny table in the sunlight, telling stories, them dribbling milky cereal on the floor, chattering about the plans for the day. Amongst the chaos, exhaustion and the brutal logistics of child-rearing are these tiny, precious moments of absolute delight, of demanding that we suspend all the things that seem to matter and just sit on the floor and play, or listen, which we adults find so hard.

And our babies, these buds of people, grow into children, their personality unfolding, one petal at a time. We laugh a little, cuddle while reading a book, and maybe argue over getting dressed or about throwing a spoon across the room. And then I have to kiss them goodbye and get on a train to work.

At the weekends, my youngest will look at me for reassurance: “Are you going on a train to London today, Mummy?” “No. No, not today. Today is a Mummy Day.” But in truth there are too few of those, and that conflict is there for me every day that I go to work.

I found the summer holidays hard, because the kids were at home with my husband and I couldn’t be there with them too. But this is an everyday conflict for women who work, and it’s the tiniest crystal of ice at the top of the berg. In our family, the division of duties just about works.

In the office, I feel an obligation to make it work so that I still have a voice, a valuable female voice, in our organisation. But every woman has tales of obstacles, of discrimination and of compromise, whether missing bedtime, missing a promotion because they took time out to raise a family, being paid less than male equivalents, being talked over by men in meetings or of being assumed to be the PA. This is the norm.

I’m often asked about how to address the lack of women in the technology, but the framing of the question – and the fact it seems to be only asked of women – assumes it’s a problem for women to solve. It’s not as simple as encouraging more women to train and apply for jobs in the tech industries because the dynamics of those jobs are all wrong. Leaving aside the crippling, off-putting cost of transport and housing in the capital, legacy presenteeism, a lack of female managers and role models and outdated HR make it unappealing.

Equality demands and deserves the support and engagement of men, which is why I find women-only networking events to promote women rather futile. Parental leave is a great example of the equality we should be aiming for: most men take only a few weeks’ leave, so it’s the woman who takes the year out, and who no longer has a voice at work. That may well be the best thing for her family, but wouldn’t it be nice to have the choice? All businesses serve women, and need more women to inform what they do.

A new realisation of the world dawned after the birth of my first child, overwhelmed as I was by my redefined life, relationships and identity. It was that busy, delirious tiredness of a mother doing essential but silent work away from the world for weeks and months and not represented in it or by it.

A medium where many of the most prominent women are being leered over or judged for some failure. Unrepresented, unheard, unimportant to the still male world of industry and establishment.

The internet, with all its claims of democratic potential and openness and opportunity, has reflected and then amplified the squalor of human behaviour. The most recent episode of online misogyny is the GamerGate scandal, a vicious, calculated campaign of threats and abuse directed at female video games writers, some of whom have had to leave their homes. How little progress have we made that women cannot speak, be heard, assert themselves without being subjected to bullying and violent threats?

Equality isn’t a women’s issue, it’s everybody’s issue. It’s not for someone else to sort out — it’s for us to sort out. We can’t let complacency take the place of acting on something we know to be wrong, or unfair. Whether it’s GamerGate, or cat-calling, or a conference line-up with no women, or talking over a woman in that meeting, it all matters. I’m writing this with five minutes to spare before we have to leave for nursery. My son wants me to finish a dinosaur jigsaw puzzle. I’m 100 words short …