I AM making a lifestyle choice.

Even writing these words derives from a decision to involve myself in the practice of working for money while also bringing up two small children, now four and six years old. I don't know many working fathers who would consider their job to be a lifestyle choice but, since I became a mother, it's clear to me that the business of working has been reframed as lifestyle, one of a panoply of choices I make that might include whether to get a wood-burning stove or take a foreign holiday. George Osborne made that even clearer last week when he described stay-at-home mothers as having made a "lifestyle choice", and therefore not really deserving of any quota of childcare vouchers of their own in the new rejigged voucher system, under which all parents will be able to have up to a fifth of their childcare costs paid for by the state.

Stay-at-home mothers were outraged. One of the most vocal was Laura Perrins, who wrote in a newspaper column: "My husband Philip, 35, is a barrister and higher-rate taxpayer, and I have already forfeited our child benefit - now we're to forgo this new childcare subsidy, too."

In one sense I agree with the Chancellor: women who aren't working don't need childcare vouchers, because they don't need childcare. The reason this policy exists is not, as some seem to think, to give cultural approval and gold stars to working mothers, but because in this country we have a problem. We have almost the highest childcare costs in relation to income in Europe, with only Switzerland ahead of us. This may help explain why Britain is only 16th in Europe in terms of proportion of mothers going to work.

Stay-at-home mothers like Laura Perrins detect societal disapproval over their decision not to go out to work. Perrins feels it in the silence that occasionally descends when someone asks her what she does, and she says she is looking after her family. But what she doesn't acknowledge is that disapproval is there whatever you do as a mother. The working mother gets her disapproval partly within the workplace itself. According to a survey by law firm Slater and Gordon, more than one in four mothers feel discriminated against at work. Though 35% say they've worked harder since having children, one-third find it impossible to climb the ladder. Of course, these are feelings and they are self-reported, which leaves them open to question, but this information isn't new. In the USA, there are similar levels of discrimination. Sociologist Shelley Correll has found a 5% pay gap between mothers and women who don't have children, and discovered they were less likely to be hired if they left or tried to change jobs. We are a different country, with different attitudes, but on this count we seem to be rather similar.

Reading the online comments prompted by the Slater and Gordon research, it's clear a shocking number of people still think maternity leave is a huge burden on society and businesses; that women shouldn't take these indulgent maternity holidays; and that they shouldn't expect other workers to take up the slack. Worse still are the comments that cast mothers as devious and manipulative, prone to taking maternity leave then coming back and throwing in the job. This seems odd, given that almost every woman I know who has taken the leave has been anxious about whether she would keep her job.

Some of these commentors talk as if having a child were their own fault, therefore you can't expect anyone to support you through it. They seem to have forgotten that they once were children themselves and that, at some point in life, they might themselves be dependent on others.

I can't tell whether I've worked harder or taken my foot off the gas at work since having children. All I know is that life is a high-adrenalin, often anxious, blur. My working habits changed following childbirth. Lunch hours disappeared. Work-social events became an indulgence. I have travelled less. There have been weeks when I have squeezed into my four days what felt like several weeks of work, but also others when family-life expanded and I was less productive.

Many working mothers feel the need to make work count. If you're going to be away from your kids, it needs to be for something that matters. Mothers are much more likely than fathers to subtract the cost of childcare from their salary and wonder if it's worth it.

Whatever way you do it as a mother, it is going to be deemed wrong by somebody. For men, or at least men who work, this is still not an issue. There is very little talk about what "lifestyle choices" men are making. No-one ever describes the man who stays working late in the office as having made a lifestyle choice - or says that George Osborne, in pursuing a busy political career, has made a duff lifestyle choice.

But almost everything a woman does is described in those patronising terms, and we still exist with this default setting. Men are made to work, women to stay home and consume, to create lifestyles. There are many things wrong with this. Not least is the way it is framed by capitalism and consumerism, a sense there is nothing worthwhile that is not part of the market. It belittles all of women's work, both the traditional unpaid work of parenting and the contributions women make to the economic world of work. The term "lifestyle" is a trap for both genders. And one that should never slip so casually from the mouth of a politician.