The supermum who holds down a demanding career while running the family home is falling out of favour, a high-powered academic report said yesterday.

Most people believe that the march of mothers into work has been harmful for family life, it found.

Instead, there is ‘growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home rather than in the office’.

It added: ‘Opinions are shifting as the shine of the “supermum” syndrome wears off, and the idea of women juggling high-powered careers while also baking cookies and reading bedtime stories is increasingly seen to be unrealisable by ordinary mortals.’

Nicola Horlick, who combined a City career with raising a family of six in the 1990s, is often hailed as the archetypal supermum.

However her marriage crumbled and she divorced in 2003.

She later said: ‘Maybe the answer is you can’t necessarily have a happy marriage if you end up being a very high-powered woman.’

She has since remarried and runs an asset management firm.

The report, carried out by Cambridge University, will add to controversy over Labour’s push to persuade all mothers of young children to go out to work.

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High-earning, high-flying women workers are leaving the workforce in droves because employers aren’t managing their family ambitions. Virginia Matthews reports.

If the so-called ‘brain drain’ was the major HR headache of the 1970s, then the current ‘baby drain’ is triggering a full-scale migraine. Despite more than three decades of official equality of opportunity for women, and hundreds of management pronouncements over flexibility, organisations throughout the country are proving unable to hang on to their highest-flying women once the nappy years kick in.

That’s the stark message emerging from Diversity Drives Variety in Corporate Culture, a six-month study of senior women returners by management researchers at Durler Consulting, in collaboration with employment law specialist Denton Wilde Sapte.

The research finds widespread dissatisfaction among women wishing to combine £100,000-plus salaries with the demands of motherhood.

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