The Motherhood Penalty: How to stop motherhood being the kiss of death for your career

Problems are messy and complicated: you can’t give a full answer as to why women have unequal access to the labour market in 90 seconds. It…

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Thousands of mothers are being forced out of their jobs, and hundreds of thousands more face other types of injustice such as demotions, halted careers or an impossible workload.

Same-sex couples have a much more equitable share of the unpaid labour… until they become parents,8 which shows that gender stereotypes are only part of the problem.

Brilliant, skilled, hard-working women are being pushed out and pushed to the edge by a system that ignores their needs and by employers who undermine their abilities. The rising cost of living, and a benefit system that doesn’t consider caregiving to have worth, forces women into poverty for doing the most important job there is – raising the next

Once again, I have used the currency of friendship to leverage a childcare favour so that I can do some urgent work.

What many don’t see is the severe impact this is all having on women – the damage of pregnancy and maternity discrimination on our mental health, the pressure to be perfect, the physical exhaustion of attempting to do it all, the struggle with the lack of power and control because the system doesn’t work for us. It’s all too much.

‘What I am saying is that women don’t make choices in a vacuum. Choices are influenced by a number of factors: culture, your…

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Even before the pandemic threw a microscope onto the inequalities experienced by pregnant women and mothers, our ability to progress had flatlined. We can see this from the gender pay gap statistics, a decline of only 0.6 per cent from 2012 to 2019.14

‘If you look at other countries, which have very different legislative frameworks, women in those…

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2020 was the year we finally realised that the needs of pregnant women and mothers are often sidelined and ignored with sometimes disastrous consequences for families.