I recently read that women would own 60 per cent of this country's wealth in 20 years' time. I can believe it.

Girls are out-performing boys in school and professional women have learned how to juggle their high-powered careers with motherhood. Women are even excelling at traditional male jobs like plumbing and building work.

Take, for example, my rubbish builder who never turned up when he said he would, smoked dope in my flat, did a scrappy job and absconded without finishing it.

Compare that to my new female builder, Lila, who came round to do the salvaging work last week. The surprise was she turned up on time, dot on 8 o'clock, just when she said she would.

I can't pretend I didn't have my own preconceptions on how she was going to look and was intrigued to find that she was a petite woman who looked like she enjoyed plenty of personal grooming. Not the dirty-nailed, dungareed hulk that I'd envisaged.

Anyway, she pulled out a notepad and purple ink pen from her rucksack and started taking notes of all the jobs I wanted done. What joy. Not like my previous errant builder who kept saying things like: "I've got it all stored in here" as he pointed to his head whenever I reminded him of something he hadn't done. He obviously had anything other than my instructions stored between his ears.

Anyway, Lila walked around the place, occasionally tutting at what a shoddy job he'd done, but said she could redeem the damage over a couple of days the following week.

While I was delighted to hear this, there was a tiny atavistic part of me, a niggling voice that began to question whether she was actually going to be strong enough to saw all that wood, lift big things and do all the rest of the stuff that we consider "man's work".

I needn't have indulged my own latent sexism - she went into the bathroom and lifted my new, heavy duty ceramic toilet which the male builder had forgetten to screw down without even a flinch. She told me she did her fair share of lifting in a former job as a trapeze artist.

So not only was she polite, interesting and organised, but she was also built like a Russian gymnast.

A friend related a similar tale of talking to a female plumber about the sexist presumptions of clients and whether it puts people off to have a woman turn up with a plunger. The plumber seemed to have had no complaints so far and was deluged with work.

"People are actually grateful if I turn up on time," she said. "They're just not used to it."