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

We have the second most expensive childcare system in the world, after the Slovak Republic, which makes it prohibitively expensive for many parents to return to work.3 Our own research of 20,000 mothers in 2021 found that a third pay more for their childcare than their mortgage, rising to almost half for respondents from a Black ethnic background.

Many mothers look for part-time and flexible work so that they can manage all of this extra unpaid work, but only 10 per cent of jobs are advertised as part-time, with just 1 in 4 jobs specifying any type of flexible working,9 so many women are forced to work in jobs that are well below their skill level. On top of this, part-time work is paid at a

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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‘Let me give you some examples. In the UK, 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs due to pregnancy or for taking maternity leave, and 77 per cent of working mums face discrimination – that’…

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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.

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

‘A mother’s choices are limited by extortionately priced, inflexible, inaccessible childcare. A mother’s choices are limited by maternity pay that is well below the national living wage. A mother’s choices are limited by the rising cost of living, which means most families need two incomes to cover their basic costs.1 A mother’s choices are limited

‘Women choose to take time out of work to care for their children, or they choose to work fewer hours after they’ve had their kids because…

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It’s my standard pre-interview ceremonial dance; I’m like Anthony Joshua with gender equality data for boxing gloves.