Every night, as I rushed out the door to meet my spouse so we could wrangle three different kids in three different places, this bloke would farewell me.

"Thanks for dropping in." That was his daily remark as our family tried to juggle family love with working life.

Of course, as a youngish mother, those remarks pushed all my buttons. Was I good enough at anything? Would my working life hurt my relationship, hurt my kids?

Would my family love hurt my job prospects?

Now, the truth is out there.

Working mothers are good for their children. They are even better for society.

In fact, working mothers are a "silver bullet" for reducing inequality at work and at home.

Working mothers are not just reformers, we are revolutionaries, in the front line of changing the culture and our hard-wired patterns of behaviour.

The New York Times reported over the weekend a new study of 50,000 adults in 25 countries, which showed that daughters of working mothers completed more years of education, were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles and earned higher incomes.

Baby, we are going to smash the gender wage gap – at least for our daughters. The sceptics are saying that it might be more to do with the other things working mothers did (such as have an education) – but my guess is that after they have unpicked the details and looked for the causes – our role as working mother models will stand up as one of the causes for the shift.

It will be as influential on children as having parents who read. We are reading gender role models and then rewriting those models. This year's model –this generation's model – should be a family where we all share the workload. There is no question that the family which does the housework together stays together. Blokes who do more housework get more sex and stay in relationships longer.

Now, working mothers didn't influence the careers of sons – because, well, men have always been expected to work hard and have jobs. But there is one significant impact – those boys do more child care and housework.

It's what you see at home that counts. If you see two parents shouldering the workload jointly, that's what you will do yourselves. My kids copy what their parents did, although none has produced a grandchild yet (ahem), so it could all fall apart at the nappy bucket.

But what one of the authors of the study says is so true, particularly when it comes to the way we feel about working when our kids are little.

Kathleen McGinn, a professor at Harvard Business School told The New York Times: "Part of this working mothers' guilt has been, 'Oh, my kids are going to be so much better off if I stay home,' but what we're finding in adult outcomes is kids will be so much better off if women spend some time at work."

And that's great for the children – but the broader impact of working mothers and their role in society could be magnificent. Actually, it already is magnificent.

McGinn says: "This is as close to a silver bullet as you can find in terms of helping reduce gender inequalities, both in the workplace and at home."

In the US, the research showed daughters of working mothers earned 23 per cent more than daughters of stay-at-home mothers. Sons spent seven-and-a-half more hours a week on child care and 25 more minutes on housework. I'm assuming that's more than the sons of women who stayed at home. The figures were not quite as good when averaged across all 25 countries in the study but were still there.

How did it look in other countries? The researchers did a brilliant job of grouping countries according to a whole range of data as they tried to find out whether working mothers had an effect on their kids. They looked at mothers' employment, whether they were supervisors, what they earned, who did what in the household, including looking after the kids. And they categorised countries by attitudes toward gender equality, at work and at home.

Across 25 countries, 69 per cent of women with a working mother were employed, and 22 per cent were supervisors, compared with 66 per cent and 18 per cent of those whose mothers stayed home. Daughters of working mothers earned 6 per cent more. That, at least, would make a significant dent in the gender pay gap.

You'll be envious to know that, according to Forbes magazine, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, and Slovenia fall into the "Liberalising Egalitarians" group – pretty egalitarian in 2002 at the stage of earlier research and more so now.

Australia – you will be sad to know – falls into the "Stagnating Moderates" group.

We got all feminist in 2002 (!) but haven't done much since then (hello, 18.8 per cent expanding gender pay gap) and we are joined by Israel, the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and Taiwan.

While Chile, Latvia, Mexico, Philippines, and Russia are what they "Stagnating Conservatives". In other words, women, fabulous places to visit but if you are interested in gender equality, you wouldn't want to live there.

As for the person who made me feel terrible every single day, not sure what happened to him. But here's the best response.

Working mothers, cast aside your guilt. You are doing a great thing by your own children and their partners. You are recasting society and reshaping culture.

No bloody wonder you are exhausted.

Twitter @jennaprice or email jenna_p@bigpond.net.au