Last year The Irish Times commissioned a widely publicised opinion poll that tried to answer one of the most clichéd questions of the 20th century: what do women want? The answer, it seemed, is financial independence.

That poll is now backed up by a hefty new study from the Economic and Social Research Institute, which finds the average age of childbirth for Irish women is now 31 and that 36% of women over 45 who gave birth were having their first child. Commenting on the study, Christina Engel from the National University of Ireland, in Galway, said more women were putting off having kids until their thirties so as to concentrate on their careers and ensure financial stability. In fact, it’s not merely women’s child-bearing age that is rising, so is the age at which they marry (probably to be expected, because marriage and children still go hand-in-hand). The average age at which an Irish woman first marries is now 31, whereas in 1986 it was 24.

However, if women are delaying getting married and having children, so too must men. Irish men now marry at age 33 on average, and that is also up by seven years compared with 1986. That is a huge change in the way people organise their lives, and it’s happening across the western world, so it can’t be attributed to conditions peculiar to Ireland. Why, then, are people so dramatically delaying getting married and having kids, compared with barely 20 years ago?

You’ll be relieved to know that sociologists have put a bit of thought into this and have even come up with a term for it: “emerging adulthood”. I prefer the term “delayed adulthood” myself.

Basically, people are delaying making the big commitments in their lives until they are much older than they used to be. One reason for this is that many people are spending a lot more time getting an education than they did in the past. Another reason is their desire to enjoy their freedom. Getting married and having children has a strange habit of stopping you doing what you like, when you like.

So, like butterflies in their larvae, 21-year- olds all over the country are waiting for their “adulthood” to emerge. Careful, though, don’t rush things: we don’t want something premature and malformed to emerge, do we? Give these caterpillars enough space and time and something beautiful will emerge of its own accord and in its own way.

You would imagine that having taken all this time turning themselves into well-rounded, well-educated and self-actualised adults, our thirtysomethings would have no further problems because they’d spent so long working things out to the last detail. Not so, apparently. A study released last week by Cambridge University has confirmed that a new set of concerns begins to dominate the lives of people who get married and have children. They start worrying about issues such as work/life balance and whether family life is harmed by mothers having to work full-time.

So what do we want? It seems we want to be footloose and fancy-free in our twenties, but in our thirties we want the freedom to organise our family life and our work life in our own way. This conclusion is backed up by another finding in the same Irish Times poll, namely that 42% of women who work outside the home do so out of necessity, not choice. You could bet the house that this percentage soars when the women in question are mothers of young children. Indeed, I would be surprised if it’s not above 60% for this group.

The finding that women value financial independence above all else takes on an entirely different complexion when put alongside this second poll result. In the minds of some women, financial independence might mean bringing home a big, fat pay cheque at the end of each month. But in the minds of other women — namely, mothers — it may mean having the freedom not to work at all, or else to work part-time because their spouse earns enough money to give them that freedom of choice.

I’m watching Mad Men on DVD at the moment, the latest critically acclaimed series from the US. Set in the 1960s, the Mad Men in question are Madison Avenue men — that is, advertising execs. The main character is the mysterious Don Draper. Don’s gorgeous wife, Betty, lives in the suburbs raising their children, but she isn’t happy. She’s bored, depressed, alienated and anxious. She lives through her husband and children and is radically unfulfilled.

The scriptwriters have obviously been reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963 and described housewives as a “waste of a human self”. She painted a picture of millions of bored, isolated and depressed housewives wasting their lives away and yearning to escape into the workplace. But there are an awful lot of unfulfilled people in the workplace as well — both men and women.

The big feminist lie is that paid employment is always more fulfilling than staying at home and raising children. But this has always assumed that all women would be able to find high-powered, high-status, highly paid jobs of the sort enjoyed by many high-profile feminists, women politicians and female executives.

We shouldn’t have to point out that the vast majority of jobs are not a bit like that, and many women have cottoned on to this fact. They compare their often unglamorous jobs with the task of raising their own children in their own home for a few years. They weigh up the pros and cons of each choice and evidently very many of them are coming down in favour of dropping out of the workforce full-time or part-time in order to raise children.

Surprising as it may seem, some women appear actually to like babies and being around babies. Maybe that is one reason why Hello magazine has reportedly paid millions of euros to “Brangelina” for exclusive photos of their newborn twins. It won’t be men who are buying Hello.

The problem is that many women can’t exercise their choice because society and the economy are set up in a such a way that the wish to enter paid employment is encouraged much more than the wish to stay at home raising the kids. In turn, this is because the government and policymakers make the huge mistake of thinking that women in high-powered, fulfilling jobs — the sort they typically meet day-to-day — represent all women. It’s obvious that they don’t. It’s also obvious that many women want to be able to choose between work and home, career and motherhood. We should be doing a lot more to enable that choice.

Brenda Power is away

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone