I love my children - but I refuse to bang on about them all the time. Why do women ONLY talk about their kids?

Settling into my seat at a women's networking lunch, it soon became apparent the guests at my table more than matched the billing of the event.

There was the corporate lawyer in a sharply tailored suit; the top banking executive with a scary haircut; the woman who ran a recruitment business placing people in six-figure salary jobs and another who did something inexplicably complicated in tech — a formidable band of females making great strides in their professional lives.

So, given the pedigree of my fellow diners, you might imagine the scope for absorbing conversation about, say, politics, work, travel or books would be limitless. Yet as the waiters poured glasses of crisp Chablis and offered round smoked salmon hors d'oeuvres, it soon became clear there would be no side order of lively conversation.

Not because these women didn't have much to say. Quite the opposite. In fact, they didn't shut up. The problem was each of these groomed, accomplished career women all kept to one topic: their children.

Good conversation between intelligent, engaged women should be as easy as child's play, not about it, writes Angela Epstein

The lawyer to my right gave an especially dreary account of her daughter's problems choosing GCSE subjects.

Meanwhile the tech guru to my left was bleating on about how her son — 'he's very bright' — was preparing for a Duke of Edinburgh Award.

On and on they droned, no detail too inane or vapid to be edited from their monologues, so any notion of making new business connections (my entire reason for attending) was shot to pieces. All I went away with was steaming pile of parental anecdotes.

Not that this was by any means an isolated incident. I've lost count of the times I've found myself among groups of women — at dinner parties, work engagements or social gatherings — who find themselves incapable of talking about anything other than their children.

Self-absorbed and bloated with the certainty that their offspring's every breath is a headline-grabber, they have no idea how to guide their conversation beyond the limits of their children's lives. Don't they care about the cost of living, the Oscars or coming U.S. and UK elections?

Now I've nothing against children — I'm truly blessed with four of my own. I adore their very bones, and as their mother am absolutely riveted by their daily lives.

Yet I'm acutely aware that while all this is a source of endless fascination and pride to me, the outside world is not equally enthralled. Sadly plenty of women don't understand this.

How, in this age of pioneering female accomplishment, did it come to this? Have we forgotten that we had to power our way through the glass ceiling, fight for the vote and battle for equal pay?

So, if you're one of those women who thinks everyone is fascinated by your child, take it from me — they're not, writes Angela (stock image)

Do you really imagine men indulge in self-absorbed conversations about their kids as they trundle across the golf course or network over a beer? Of course not. They revel in the freedom of their child-free leisure time.

One woman, high up in finance, has a knack of always steering conversations back to her children. Recently, she managed to hijack an impassioned group chat about whether Trump could be U.S. President for a second time towards a wearisome monologue about her son's first trip to New York. Who cares?

Is there any way to redeem these frequently brain-numbing scenarios? Trust me I've tried. I remember at a birthday lunch, emboldened by a G&T on an empty stomach, declaring that all talk of children should be banned.

'It's boring, boring, boring,' I stormed. 'Do you really think when our kids get together they waste time talking about their parents? So why on earth are we doing the same?'

It worked — for a while. By the time dessert arrived, like lapsed dieters, they fell off the wagon and back into the world of school uniforms, exams and uni applications.

On another occasion, close to absolute despair at the tedium, I found myself declaring: 'Anyone here still using the coil? I'm sure it's time for mine to come out.' It was the first thing I could think of to drag the other women away from obsessive child-centric chatter.

So, if you're one of those women who thinks everyone is fascinated by your child, take it from me — they're not. Good conversation between intelligent, engaged women should be as easy as child's play, not about it.