It was in Deauville that it first dawned on me that the previously rather comforting stereotype of the wildly successful career woman – haggard, friendless and childless, a masochistic slave to a blood-sucking corporate behemoth, no one to spend her money on except her back specialist and so on – is a malicious lie.

As I was to discover over the next three days, the wildly successful career woman is likely neither to be single, or a car crash in the looks department. Often she is beautiful. Usually she is married: “I met my husband when I was 19,” she’ll tell you, now aged 48, a mother of three and vice president of a large investment bank. What she’s really telling you is that what you see before you is a woman so A-type that she’d had it all mapped out as a teenager. In conversation, she’ll occasionally throw back her head – and with it a cascade of expensively styled and highlighted hair – and let rip a honk of lightly raucous laughter. The number of hours she’s put in to her career, she should look like mud. Instead the wildly successful career-woman looks like a shampoo commercial.

The Women’s Forum doesn’t sound like much. What it sounded like to me was a council-affiliated interactive resource for females at the tail end of a drug-related crisis, which of course it is if you live in Britain. But in France the Women’s Forum is quite another thing altogether. In France, the Women’s Forum is an event, claim its organisers, that will one day flower into the female equivalent of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Every October, about 1,000 powerful bankers, lawyers, managers, fund-raisers, entrepreneurs, marketing geniuses, politicians, scientists and managing directors from around the world descend on Deauville in Normandy, the manicured seaside resort that inspired the setting for Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.

On the train over from Paris, the photographer and I discussed potential themes and images: I expected brittle women with withered faces whose eminent careers had flourished at the expense of their now wretched private lives. The secret anguish of the outwardly successful career woman, we agreed, would make a good talking point. Women can’t have it all, we know from the papers, they are torn in two by the pressures of the “work-life balance”. The photographer said that he didn’t expect miracles, but if I saw anyone photogenic, could I let him know.

But, what was this? Already, on day one in Deauville, a sprightly American, Susan Nierenberg, had turned our world upside down. “Work-life balance is a very old term,” she said (Susan is big in research into women in business). “We’re more interested in the agile workplace now.” Susan said this in a way that made me understand that I was from the past, and that everyone else here had been beamed to Deauville from some sort of impossible future that we’ve convinced ourselves in Britain can never exist (there were a handful of British women at Deauville, by the way, and frankly, most of them looked a sight. But I’ll get back to them later).

The women of Deauville come from all over the world, armed with business cards and laptops, lipstick, hairdryers and at least one pair of £300 stilettos, the catchwords “trust” and “accountability” hovering on their lips, the phrases “career advancement” and “world domination” hovering in their brains. They come to “create our own networks” and talk about the big issues. As they cantered into the WF conference hall my heart sank. I noticed that none of them looked anguished about the fact that they were going to have to spend three days away from their kids. And the photographer was going great guns. The story was disintegrating.

To supply myself with some ammunition I leafed through the Women’s Forum year book – a great big brick of a book in which every single participant has her photograph printed alongside an abnormally long list of achievements. What a depressing revelation that was. On page 347, for example: the comely Zhenzhen Lan, fluent in five languages, worked as a tourist guide at Chendu Travel Agency, worked at Daya Bay Nuclear Station as an interpreter. Somehow currently vice chairman of L’Oréal China. A few pages on, I found a Belgian woman who listed her profession simply as “Princess”. When I asked Aude Zieseniss de Thuin, the founder of the Women’s Forum, a simultaneously kittenish and uncrossable woman in her sixties, why she had once set up the French equivalent to the Chelsea Flower Show, she said, “Because I was going through a depression.” In our country, I said, she would have been off work for at least a year with ME and have sued the company for contravening the Geneva Convention on the right to use Facebook.

Did the women here come to talk about the impossibility of combining a career with raising children? “If you have time to mess around with all this relationship and crying stuff, you’re not really working on your career,” said Nora Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur.

I presumed aloud that Nora was childless. “I have children,” snapped Nora. “But I didn’t want to be one of those women who says [Nora’s voice went up an octave as she parodied herself at 90], ‘Please come visit me, son,’ when I’m old and he’s grown up.” Instead, Nora followed her son to university and enrolled in a business course, then, naturally, set up a company that turned out to be a goldmine.

Did they go on and on about the intolerable guilt associated with coming home late at night after the kids have gone to sleep? “No,” said Isabelle Seillier, the crushingly glamorous head of investment banking at JP Morgan France. “I wasn’t there for every dinner when they were younger – I work until 10pm – but I think it was worth it. They’re proud of me now.”

How about the difficulties of finding a man? Or how, once you’ve found him, your man turns out to be useless around the house (there are always surveys on this kind of thing circulating in the British press)? “I met my husband when I was 16 years old and I knew it. You need to find the right partner. That is critical. You can’t do it alone.”

Can’t do it alone? This was troubling news. Husband is Essential To Your Career Shock. How did she feel, I said, scraping the barrel now for the non-existent defects in Isabelle’s life, about the lack of decent home help?

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