Shirley Conran, the high-wire queen of the work-life balance, has called on working women to fight their way out of the recession with grit, guts and guerrilla tactics.

After 30 years of championing a woman’s right to have it all, Conran fears that, if women aren’t careful, the economic downturn will drive them away from the top jobs. “I think we’re slipping backwards,” she told The Sunday Times. “There are still only 12% of women on the top 100 FTSE boards and the gender pay gap is getting wider.”

Conran, whose books Superwoman and Down with Superwoman promoted the idea of women combining motherhood with fulfilling careers before the term “work-life balance” was a scrawl on a flipchart, has been a formidable force in workplace politics for decades. She founded the charity Mothers in Management in 1998, founded the Work Life Balance Trust in 2001, which she set up to raise the profile of flexible, family friendly working, served as a government adviser to the Department for Education and Employment from 2000 to 2002, and was awarded the OBE for services to equality in 2004.

Apart from the depressing statistics for women at the top, add a fear-driven long-hours culture and a recession that the TUC says is decimating women’s jobs faster than men’s, and it’s no wonder Conran is worried.

Nonetheless, she insists that recession is no reason for anyone to abandon the work-life-balance dream.

“We’re all going to survive – it’s not as if we’re at war,” said Conran. This recession is also more democratic than others, she believes, with firms deliberately introducing shorter working weeks to try to save jobs. “Last time there was a three-day week it was just grim,” she said. “This time there is a sense that you’re cutting back on days to save someone else’s job, or that someone else is doing it to save yours.”

Conran is a classic phoenix, having survived unemployment, divorce and illness, often all at once. “I haven’t been very good at being rich,” she said, “but I was absolutely brilliant at being poor.”

During the 1960s, after splitting from her husband, the design guru Sir Terence Conran, she found herself out of work. “I was handed £14 from the till, £7 for the week’s work I’d just done and a £7 payoff,” she said. “Today I would be able to take Terence to a tribunal, which I would love to have done.”

She reinvented herself as a journalist and despite having two young sons to look after and none of today’s equality or employment laws, became first the editor of the Observer magazine and then the first woman’s editor at the Daily Mail.

Conran is a pragmatic campaigner. When she was a government adviser she was anxious to get the bosses acting on flexible working, but without success. She soon realised she couldn’t start at the top.

“If I started at board level I couldn’t get through the door – I couldn’t get them to open even a chink,” she said, describing how she spent £6,000 of her own money trying to get chief executives to think about work-life balance. “We organised an event at this delightful Queen Anne house in the City owned by Peter Palumbo and arranged the most exquisite lunch, hosted by Eddie George [a former Bank of England governor] and Joanna Lumley [the actress]. It was the most unmiss-able, irresistible invitation but I got a 100% refusal from the bosses I had invited. I was just bashing my head against a brick wall.

“Instead I decided to infiltrate from the bottom up,” said Conran. So she contacted students in their final year of university and planted the idea of a work-life balance in their minds. It worked. By the time the milkround interviews came up the students had got the message and in the space of a year she had them all focusing on it. “They all brought it up in their interviews – it had become as important as pay,” she said.

Conran practises what she preaches. She delegates a lot. In the space of our 25-minute conversation she delegated to her assistant (to dig out and send me her CV) and to a colleague at Working Families (to dig out some statistics). She also changes what she can but deals with what she can’t. Her philosophy is, if you can’t change the problem then you can change your attitude to it.

Flexible working had yet to be invented when Conran became the single working mother of two young sons. Instead, she had her mother, who looked after the boys during the week while Conran lived alone in digs in London.

“I wouldn’t have survived without her,” said Conran. For that reason she envies today’s generation of girls entering the workplace with rights and choices she could only have dreamt of. “We all had children fairly quickly after getting married because that’s what everyone did and it was before the pill,” she said. Now she fears women are forced into choosing between family and career until they risk being too old to be mothers.

“There is an underground resistance still being fought by some men,” she said. “There are some boardroom dinosaurs who don’t want to see women in top positions.”

It was those dinosaurs that she came face to face with when she was trying to woo them with Eddie George and Joanna Lumley. “But they’re dying out. They’ll be gone in 15 years and they’re being replaced by men and women who expect both parents to be around to help raise their children,” she said.

Conran remains optimistic. “The key to personal work-life balance is time management and realistic expectations, plus life coaching and mentoring,” she said. In her Superwoman days she would have described them as “self-improve-ment courses”.

SHIRLEY’S TIPS FOR WORKING WOMEN

Be realistic. A woman can have it all, but probably not all at once.

Dump feelings of guilt over not being at home all the time. Remember you are dumping them to protect your psychological health, your spouse or boyfriend – if you have one – and any children.

One-parent mothers need to remember that no man – however wonderful – can replace a child’s father, so help it to see as much as possible of his or her father, and have a bit more time to yourself, too.

Try to be a bit healthier than you are at the moment. Any higher aim is unrealistic.

Plan on paper. Keep a diary and plan your weekends and evenings as carefully as you do your weekdays. Use an index card to plan your day, with not more than three things to do and three telephone calls to make. If you add something, cross something else off. List everything that needs doing and delegate all except five important items.

Don’t take on too much. If you do, get out of it firmly. Just say no and keep saying no.

My gran told me that you can’t get a quart out of a pint pot, and this is the key to self-management. Things haven’t changed. To get through life you need a fast, adaptable sense of priorities to achieve your particular work-life balance.

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