 It's International Women's Day and welcome to the motherhood penalty at the British Library, feeling very topical as more kids go back to school and many of us collapse to our knees after a year of increasing gender inequality and unpaid labour. Luckily, this event is about how to challenge that. I'm B Rollat of the cultural events team at the British Library and I'm delighted to welcome the unvanquishable force of nature that is jolly brilly and her new book Pregnant then screwed and she will be in conversation with Eliane Glazer. Eliane is the author, among other books, of Motherhood and Manifesto which is available now for pre-order. Please do that. It's coming out in May. As well as writing books, Eliane also works as a radio producer. She's a research fellow at the University of London and writes for numerous publications. She's also a mum and it's her birthday. Happy birthday Eliane and thanks for joining us on this day. So everybody that's joined us via your Zoom links, please have an extra slice of cake for Eliane and with that I'll hand over to you. Thank you B and it's a nice birthday to have International Women's Day. So I'm really happy to be speaking to jolly brilly today. She is, as B says, an absolute firebrand, campaigner, mother and founder of pregnant then screwed. Joly writes for many outlets including The Telegraph and The Independent and the observer has named her as one of its 50 new radicals. She's also the winner of the Northern Power Women Agent for Change Award and her new book Pregnant Then Screwed, The Truth About the Motherhood Penalty and How to Fix It is really vital, timely and also brilliantly and hilariously written. I laughed out loud and read many bits out to my partner and kids. So really enjoyed it. But obviously so topical at the moment as the pandemic has highlighted so many of the issues around being a pregnant woman and a mother and trying to combine that with work. So we'll be talking about the pandemic later on but I'd like you really to start by telling us your story really how what propelled you to start campaigning on this vital issue and I should also say to the audience that there'll be a chance for you to ask your questions of jolly later. So please do send them in as jolly and I are in discussion. So jolly please start us off and tell us how this all began for you. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for having me today. It's a real honor to be asked to talk on this momentous day International Women's Day still swimming our way through a pandemic. So let me take you back to 2013 a far less jaded much less saggy version of me. I was at the time I had been working in the art sector and then I moved into the digital sector and at this point in time I was managing a year long project with Children's Charity which I had designed and had secured all the funding for. And I had discovered I was pregnant. I wasn't planned but we're going to too much detail about that. And I informed my employment I was four months pregnant and I did so by email I set everything out and realized of course that this could cause them a few administrative headaches but I thought right I've got a plan. There's nothing for them to worry about. I'll send them an email and then we'll discuss everything the next day and it's all going to be fine. So I emailed them the next day the phone rang I thought oh they're calling to congratulate me how lovely. And I couldn't answer the phone because I was actually brushing my teeth at the time. And when I picked up the phone to listen to the answer phone message all it said was I'm sorry to tell you Jolie but your contract has been pulled please hand everything over immediately. That's all it said. And I was completely shocked. I was terrified. I had no idea how I was going to pay my rent. I had no idea how I was going to pay for food. Obviously I was four months pregnant who was going to employ a visibly pregnant woman. So I really didn't think I had any chance of getting another job. And I thought this is absolutely insane. Of course this is completely illegal. The law is going to protect me. So I'm going to get a solicitor and I'm going to do something about it. I managed to find a lawyer. They said yes this sounds like discrimination. We're going to write a letter to the charity demanding you be compensated for lost earnings. So they did that. The charity just threw that letter in the bin. That process cost me 250 pounds and I had no idea where my next paycheck was coming from. So hemorrhaging that type of money was really frightening. And so then I said well what do I do now? And they said you would have to take them to tribunal. I said how much is that going to cost me? They said 9,000 pounds. And of course I mean I could barely script together to 250 pounds let alone the 9,000 pounds. So I said okay let me think about it. And a couple of days later I attended a routine doctor's appointment and discovered that my cervix had almost vanished. My tiny formanthal baby was hanging on by a thread essentially. And they suddenly panicked. I remember seeing the color drain out of the doctor's face as they were examining me and they said we're going to have to rush you into surgery straight away. Took me into surgery. Did this really delightful process where they tried to bolt my cervix together to keep the baby in place. And when I was in the recovery unit the doctor came over and said whatever you do don't get stressed. This bolting together of your cervix may not fix the issue. The baby still may come. It only works on about 20% of our patients. So you really need to reduce as much stress in your life as possible because that is what will trigger early onset labor. And if you go into labor now your baby will die. So within two days I had lost my job and my identity was so firmly attached to my work that it really massively felt like the rug had been pulled from under me. I was completely dependent on my partner to pay for my keep. I had no money of my own. And I felt like all I was good for was as a vessel to grow this baby. But actually I wasn't even doing that very well. I was failing at that. And so I completely gave up. And I remember lying on the sofa and just watching God awful daytime TV and just crying for days and thinking I don't really know what to do next. And I just felt so powerless. All of my power had just been stripped within a couple of days. And it was that moment that completely radicalized me. It changed my perspective on everything. And before that happened I probably wouldn't have described myself as a feminist. You know, I always thought I had equal opportunities to men as a white middle class woman. I hadn't really fully faced discrimination until that moment. And that it just changed everything. And so it wasn't I didn't start pregnant and screwed there. And then it took a couple of years of letting the anger and the rage sort of drip feed. And I did eventually get another job. And actually it turned out really well for my career. But it never left me at eight away at me that this had happened. And it was International Women's Day 2015 that I woke up and thought, right, I'm going to do something about this today. I'm going to make sure that this never happens to another woman again. And so I scooped my baby out of the cot, Theo, who is now a very healthy seven-year-old. He survived. He was fine. Took him downstairs and while bouncing him on one knee and spoon feeding in porridge, I taught myself how to use WordPress and by the middle of the day a website was born. And it was called Pregnant Women's Grud. And it was a place for women to tell their stories anonymously of pregnancy and maternity discrimination. Hi. And so you managed to channel that terrible experience into this great campaigning effort. But I'm glad that you answered that question early on about, you know, I'm sure you must have had this question. Those are people asking, surely this is illegal, you know, how could your employer even do this? And actually what you really set out clearly in the book is that even though the law is there to protect women in theory, in practice bringing a tribunal is incredibly expensive. And after the reach of, was it 99% of women who suffer discrimination, as you say. So and after having set up Pregnant and Scrooge, you've heard the stories of lots of women who've had similar experiences. And I guess that discrimination has happened all along the way from informing that their employer that they were pregnant to, you know, dismissal during maternity leave and then further down the line, when mothers are asked to reduce their hours, they can face discrimination and even dismissal at that point as well. So what kinds of experiences have you documented? I mean, there's such a mix of experiences of discrimination and it can be everything from bullying and harassment to outright sacking. So I mean, my experience is actually extreme and quite rare. It tends to be what tends to happen to women is they announced their pregnancy. And this sort of subtle change happens where their personal development reviews will go from excellent to substandard. They're suddenly left out of meetings, perhaps they move their death or or they tell them they're not they're not welcome to a certain training session or and it's it's much more subtle than what happened to me. Obviously, there are lots of women that are made redundant because it's very hard to prove you've been made redundant because you're pregnant. There are lots of women that are demoted or just your career completely stagnates and all those promotion opportunities just vanish before your eyes. One of my favorite, say favorite, that's probably the wrong word, one of a story I like to tell because I think this is a good indicator of the types of things that often happen was a woman who was working for the same employer for six years. Her boss came to her and said, look, you're doing really well. We want to give you a promotion, but you have to go for an interview. It's just a formality. The job is in the bag. You just need to go through this process. Before the interview, she told him that she was pregnant. Went for the interview, didn't get the job. When she asked him why, he said he had discussed things with his wife and they had decided that her priorities would change, which is just so indicative of this notion that women will become distracted and less committed once they've had children that they just will not be interested in their job or their career anymore as if we can't have multiple priorities simultaneously or care about multiple things at the same time. And rather than speaking to her and airing these concerns with her in advance, he just decided that it would be best if he didn't put this pressure on her. You go from that story to a woman who told her employer she was pregnant and was bullied and harassed so viciously by her employer and her colleagues that she went into labor prematurely and when she was in the neonatal clinic with her baby who could have died, her boss called her and made her redundant. So there were these really vicious, horrific experiences and then this much more subtle sort of trying to be kind, thinking that this is just what women need kind of kinds of experiences. But alongside of that, you also get there was a woman who told us she was made to do a shot of vodka every morning to prove she wasn't pregnant. Her and her other female colleagues, her boss would sit them down, give them all a shot of vodka and say, we need to prove you're not pregnant. So you'll do that shot of vodka every morning. I mean, she didn't stay for very long. She left. I've had so many different stories from women who announced their pregnancy and their boss told them to have an abortion. Women who were told to get a coat hanger for that baby or that they were going to put some medicine in the water cooler to make sure the baby didn't survive. And then horrific stories about women returning to work and finding that their desk had vanished or somebody was sitting in their desk and they didn't exist on the staffing list. They've been completely forgotten about. They've been on maternity leave. They've done a staffing restructuring, completely forgotten that she existed. So there's these really odd, awful, awkward experiences and then there's really brutal discrimination. It's very interesting you're talking about these subtle barriers that can emerge at work that, as you say, it's not outright discrimination, but it's these little incompatibilities between work and family life. So meetings arranged at five o'clock or kind of semi-mandatory after work socialising. And I'm really interested in that because what you say in the book, you make a really interesting point in the book about choice and the rhetoric of choice that we have today in that previously it was clear there were barriers to women working. But now if a woman leaves her job, she's supposed to have just walked out the door by her own volition. And therefore society and employers can kind of wash their hands of the problem and just say, well, it was her choice to spend more time with her children. So can you talk a bit about that rhetoric of choice and how it kind of obscures the problems that you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's the most infuriating thing. It's often the argument that you get back from people. Well, you know, women choose to spend more time with their children. So they are walking away from their careers. And then the notion of choice is kind of ridiculous because choices are influenced by so many different factors. They're influenced by legislation, they're influenced by culture, they're influenced by your friends and family. And in the UK women make very different choices to what they make in other countries and cultures. So if you look at Scandinavia, there are far more mothers in work than there are in the UK because they have better systems and structures to support mothers to go back into work. So when people say it's not the gender pay gap is about the choices women make, that's often what people say. Sure, some women do choose to stay at home with their children, but some women who desperately want to stay home with their children come because we live in an economy where both parents have to work to be able to survive, to be able to pay their rent. In 2016, in one income earning families, 46% of those families lived in poverty. In two income earning families, only 11% of those families lived in poverty. So we know absolutely that in the majority of families, mothers have to work. And yet at the same time we're told, well, you should really be looking after your children. One in three Brits that women with children under five shouldn't be working at all. Only 7% of Brits think women should with children under five should be working full time. In 2006, Boris Johnson said the children of working mothers are more likely to mug you. You know, we've got all of these subtle and not so subtle messages saying to women, get back and go and look after your kids. What are you doing? You shouldn't be at work. Your responsibility is at home, but at the same time, their responsibility is to bring money in so that their children don't live in poverty. So they're pulling these two completely different directions. And when I did a poll asking working mothers how many of them wanted to leave their job, quit their jobs and stay at home, I can't remember the exact statistics, but it was a very high percentage said yes, I want to quit my job and stay at home with my kids. When I stay at home mothers, what percentage of them wanted to be working? It was about 83% said they wanted to be working. So there isn't any choice. We have to play the best hand within the cards that we are dealt. And we have the second most expensive childcare system in the world. We have paternity leave that doesn't work. And that means that mothers are the ones that are taking time out in those early days to care for their children. Only 14% of jobs are advertised as flexible and the majority of mothers need flexible work in order to deal with all the unpaid labour and the paid labour they have to do, but there's so few jobs that work for them. So we're just trying to do our best. It's not really about choice at all. Exactly. Can we talk a bit about guilt? Because a free choice is not really free if one side is valued more than the other. So the public disapproval of working mums means that it's not a free choice. And actually, you talk about guilt a lot in the book, which is this endemic amongst working mothers who just, we always feel like we're not being proper mothers and also not being fully committed workers and failing at everything. And that's been obviously under the microscope and magnified during the last couple of months. But you also say in the book, you make the more general point about let's take the pressure off ourselves as mothers. And actually, this incredible statistic that is it sort of well, as maybe sort of better off parents spend more time with their children now than they did 50 years ago. So so how does guilt play into all of this? And how do we take the pressure off ourselves so that we can manage this combination of work and family more easily? I mean, it is like a pressure cooker. Christina Armstrong talks about this very well, actually, who is also an author, that we we the guilt is the guilt is ensuring we do we work really hard. And we work really long hours. The number the average number of hours that we work in the UK has just increased from nine hours a day, 11 hours a day. That's the average working day in the UK at the moment, 11 hours a day. And then on top of that, you've got your children that you want to spend time with. And as you just mentioned, we're spending more time with our kids than we did 50 years ago, yet we're made to feel like we don't spend any time with our children if we're working. That's not true. The statistics don't show that at all. We're actually spending more time with our children. So how we fit all this in is it is just impossible 11 hours of working all this time we're spending with our children and we're spending no time on ourselves. When actually, the research shows that spending time on yourself looking after yourself, the term self care, which I actually don't like, but but we'll use it because you all know what what it means is really good for kids. Women looking after themselves is really good for their whole families yet we just we don't have time to do it. So we are living in this complete pressure cooker room. We're constantly feeling particularly at the moment that we're not doing anything well. We are not doing very well in our paid work. We're not available 24 seven to our employees when we're made to feel like we should be and we're not we're not teaching our children nursery rhymes and how to cook chocolate cakes and you know I don't know how to play the piano and be Mozart by the time they're 10. And you know there is there is more pressure I think on mothers now to be better mothers than there was 50 years ago. I mean you know I didn't live 50 years ago and perhaps there'll be some slightly older mothers than me saying that's not true at all but I know when I was a kid my mum just threw me out of the house first thing in the morning and I'd just cycle around and play with other children and then turn back up for me dinner a bit later and of course you can't do that anymore that doesn't happen so much anymore and we're also have this enormous pressure to stimulate our children constantly and it's it's tough it's really hard and it means that we feel horrendously guilty a lot of time and that's no good for anybody. That brings us nicely to the pandemic and how that has exaggerated these problems that you've highlighted that have been going on many years before this last year and and I suppose the pandemic you know it's really shown up lots of different things you know it's it's been the removal of school which is if you like the state helping women with childcare as much as anything else but and it's also shown up you know these tensions between work and home life but also it's shown up these gaping inequalities between men and women in the home and actually there's been some really depressing statistics that have come out and there's a mum's net poll released today that where they showed that 73% of women are doing the laundry 70% did homeschool and so and that was really surprising to me how those inequalities were revealed this is a new situation it's not just about ingrained patterns but actually you've got this new situation which is children at home and and yet you know these equalities are if anything getting worse so that's very worrying I think and so let's talk about about dads and inequality um so what what well how did dads fit into this um and um you know obviously we don't want to set up mums and dads in a sort of zero sum game um and that there is the state and employers that should be helping as well but what about the pandemic and what it's revealed so I think when the schools first closed and we were all in lockdown we were all sort of trying to feel our way with work paid work and all this unpaid labour that we had to do and what we found from the research the Institute of Fiscal Studies found that for every one hour of uninterrupted paid work done by women fathers we're doing three hours of uninterrupted paid work and that the only time the unpaid work was being shared equally between a mother and a father was when a father had been furloughed so he wasn't doing any paid work and a mother was continuing to do her paid job I mean that that's just not on is it that's not okay and of course that's had a really serious impact on women's employment their earnings have depleted massively and redundancies are really high for mothers and will continue to grow over the coming months the positive thing I think we can draw from this is that for some I mean for the majority of dads they've been exposed to all of this unpaid labour in a way that they never have been exposed to it before they've seen the dirty side of looking after the kids because dads are usually the ones that do the bath time and the play time and the fun stuff I'm not just saying this this isn't my necessarily my personal experience all of the research shows that that their dads are fun-time dads the moms do the scraping of incrustive porridge and the telling off because they've the kids have sworn I don't know so they they have been exposed to this other side of looking after the children and all of the dirty homework that has to be done for some dads they've had to take on all of that work because they their partner will be a key worker and so they've had to be out of the home and this work has to be done and so I would hope that in on some level this will start to hack away at those deeply entrenched gender stereotypes but the key point to make I think is that dads aren't just I don't they're not just holding their hands up and saying not my responsibility it's not about them just being completely lazy the whole system and structure is set up to push mothers into this role and so we have a shared parental leave system that is naffal use to anybody it does not encourage dads to take time out in those early days to care for their children only 2% of eligible dads use it yet we know 85% of dads want to spend more time with their kids and if we had a parental leave system like they have in Scandinavia where they have ring fence properly paid paternity leave we know that the numbers of dads taking time out in those early days would rock it it would be enormous in Iceland it's 90% of dads take three months out to care for their kids in those early days and that starts to close the domestic labor gap so it would mean that dads are continue to do more of the child care more of the cooking more of the cleaning and so that would have if we'd have had that in place before the pandemic we wouldn't have seen those horrific statistics we just they just wouldn't have been there so yeah I mean it's really important to say that I mean dads are trying and a lot of them are working their absolute socks off to bring home the bacon because the mother doesn't have equal access to the labor force she's so she either is staying at home with the children or she's working part-time in which case she'll be paid on average five pound less per hour than her full-time counterparts so she's earning not what she's worth and so the the dad often has to work his absolute socks off in order to bring home the money to keep a roof over their head so it's not that they're being lazy it's that the system isn't working for families yeah and we're going to talk about solutions in a moment but just staying with the pandemic pregnant then screwed to set up an SOS line to record women's experiences during the pandemic so pregnant and women and mothers and I think we're able to play an excerpt of some of those recorded experiences reach the pts sos line this is the pregnant then screwed scream or shout line this is your chance to rant rave scream or shout about your experiences as a mum during the pandemic let rip and tell us what this year has really been like for mums I have hit my mummy limit I told my five-year-old tonight I am done with being a mummy for today please please please make me stop I just can't keep going this has been it's been relentless every single one of us pregnant or new mums have been absolutely and utterly failed we told him he shouldn't go to school that day and I literally saw the moment in his trust in our shattered he ran away from us and buried himself in bed sobbing just as he'd seen me do on the kitchen floor he gets spent lots of time with them though don't you that's really magical of course artificial magical and wonderful but also they're catered up animals and they're not their usual self mom mom mom mom mom mom hold on a second wait a minute he says mommy must be more than a minute if you want my attention and I have to do my bloody job and I have to do everything this is just not possible had enough of going to gross scans had enough of going to consultant appointments having that having the rest of having reduced movements with my baby and being worried sick and going into the day assessment unit and having to go on my own it's not good enough is depressing and frightening to be honest furious angry furious upset I'm at a loss financially yet I raise these tiny humans and do my job on the minimal amount of support no I'm sorry mommy is done absolutely done so that was really harrowing testimony there that you have recorded from women on on your on the SOS line that pregnant then screwed set up to to hear about women's experiences and mother's experiences during the pandemic so I'm just wondering how this connects to the broader issues that you're talking about yeah I absolutely agree with you and talk about this quite a bit in the book that flexible working is seen as this panacea but actually I mean flexible working is a broad term and it can mean lots of different things what we find is that in the UK 40% of women work work part time which is a really high number it's really high compared to the rest of Europe and as I said before part-time work is paid £5 less per hour than full-time work and you are half as likely to ever be promoted if you work part-time than if you work full-time so you end up on this mummy track and it's a key problem for the gender pay gap this is part of the course of the gender pay gap you you come back to work after having kids you have become the main carer because you're the one that's taken maternity leave you're the one that's doing all the domestic labour you know you can't return to work full-time and be a good mum you feel well you don't feel like you can at that time I'm not saying it's not possible of course it's possible but you don't feel you know you need a bit of slack don't you and so you go back to your employer and you say please can I come back three days a week with your begging bowl please sir please could you let me come back for three days a week knowing that you'll be absolutely amazing for those three days a week and sometimes that's accepted sometimes it's rejected often what we find actually is employers try to push you into four days a week because then they don't they don't feel like they have to change your job at all and they just pay you less and so you just become enormously stressed because you're trying to do a full-time job in four days and trying to look after your children yeah and and being paid less as a result so part-time work is not necessarily the solution what I see as a better solution is that we all all of us start to work fewer hours we work the longest hours in Europe we were crowned in 2019 the unpaid overtime capital of Europe I mean great that's what a crown to be given and and we know that this is really bad for our economy it's really bad for our productivity that actually if we work fewer hours our productivity would be higher there is a direct correlation between the countries that work fewer hours and then having higher productivity it just makes absolutely no sense that we force people we feel with that as employees we feel we have to sit at our desks and that will make us look at look good to our boss if we're working million long hours maybe natural fat for a big chunk of that time we're probably just messing about on facebook but mothers cannot compete in that sort of environment because they've got to go and pick little Johnny up from childcare you can't just leave him on the streets for a couple of hours and hope that he'll be all right when you get there we have to leave on time because we have these jobs to do and so in order to create a labor market that works for mothers we all need to work fewer hours but as a result that will be really good for our economy and really good for our productivity so I sort of feel that the flexible working the notion of flexible working needs to be pulled apart a lot more I mean that it's also very important to say of course that for some women the notion of flexible working is completely one-sided it's only for it's only for employers if you're in a zero hour contract so you're in other types of precarious work the notion of flexible working is really damaging because you don't want to work flexibly you want to have some some certainty about when you're working so that you can manage your childcare but you're not given it because you want a zero hours contract so I'd like to see zero hour contracts abolished I'd like to see us all to move to a four day working week or a six hour working day and I think we'd see enormous benefits as a result yeah and as you say de-stigmatizes working less if it's a solution that's imposed on men and women you're not perceived as being less committed as a mother so just a reminder that we're going to come to your questions very shortly so do carry on sending those in but just finally so we talked about working less and reducing that overwork culture that's affecting everybody months and dads but what about childcare and I guess the question about childcare is that good childcare with well trained staff is expensive and those Scandinavian countries that we all look to they have committed to spending a lot more than we are on childcare and there's the studies have shown contrary to the idea that childcare is bad for kids the studies actually show as you say that's that childcare is really positive for kids and results and better outcomes so how do we solve the the childcare issue is it we're looking to sort of childcare at work or was it a state solution I mean really the best solution is a state solution it is investment in childcare and this this would be an investment not a cost when I talk about childcare publicly you will I always get somebody saying why should my money pay for your lifestyle choice as if it's like a day out to the spa I'm asking them to pay for rather than the education and care of the next generation in our society and we know that for every pound invested in childcare you get three pounds back because childcare means that parents can work they can go to work and therefore contribute to the economy and contribute to their families but it also has really good benefits on the education of those children once they move into schools they do better in the school system particularly children from more deprived backgrounds what we're actually seen with our childcare system is that the government is hacking away at it and they're doing trying to do it quite subtly so during the pandemic they've actually reduced funding to the childcare sector which is complete madness because the childcare sector was already on its knees and they've done it in a really subtle way where they've they've come out singing and dancing that they've invested I think 60 million in the childcare sector what they haven't come out singing and dancing about is that they have started to fund childcare based on current occupancy levels and of course childcare people aren't sending their kids into childcare at the moment the occupancy levels are about half of what they usually are so they're they're losing all of this money and so the the solution really is investing in the sector so that we pay staff properly so that the standard is really good quality it's got to be good quality for it to make a difference you know it's got there's no point in investing in crappy childcare you need really good quality childcare and and as a result you know we will see enormous positive benefits yeah okay so I'd like to bring in some audience questions now and and also talk a bit about what employers should be doing both in terms of carrot and stick and so we have a question from Victoria here I'm going to use first names and Victoria says you know thank you Jo Joly for sharing your sharing your story I'm so sorry that this happened to you my question is that my current employer does not pay any enhanced maternity paternity or adoption pay just statutory and she's looking to challenge this as she can't afford to have to have a child and she knows that others have left the company for this reason and for 21st century company that claims to be such a responsible business and she she and others feel that this is okay so what advice could you give to people like Victoria who want to challenge this and so the first thing to say of course that it they have no legal obligation sadly to pay you anything above statutory and statutory is appalling it's six weeks at 90 of pay and then it's 151 pounds a week for the next for nine months until you've been off for nine months and then it's nothing after that we have the third worst maternity pay in Europe it's below minimum wage so yeah many families cannot survive on it and they get themselves into enormous amounts of debt and the number of companies offering enhanced maternity pay is actually depleting as a result of the pandemic and they've obviously see equality is a nice to have and so it's the first thing to cut as soon as the finances are looking a bit more ropey but what employees need to understand is if they offer enhanced maternity pay and their female employees will return when they're ready rather than when they feel that they have to and all of the research shows that employees are more likely to stay with the company if they offer enhanced maternity pay than if they don't and that's why companies do it because they're aware of that they understand that if they offer enhanced maternity pay it will mean more they retain their female workforce and if they lose women at that point in their lives they're losing all of that money they've invested in them which is you know often tens of thousands of pounds so it doesn't make any sense to scrimp and scrape when it comes to this very short amount of time if you really invest in women at this point then you'll you'll see the benefits financially so I'd give them some of those figures and say that this will have a negative impact you know of course on your mental health and your experiences in you woman you want to feel that you are being supported and being looked after but show them some of the hard statistics as well about women more likely to stay and how much it will cost them if they lose women at this point in their careers. I'm interested in just as a follow-up that you know you'll work at Pregnant and Scrooge and do you work with employers to to hear you know they're I'm interested in their challenges that they find implementing legislation and they're also under financial pressure as well so is is your work about you know engaging with employers to try and change practices or is it trying to you know constrain them top down through you know beefing up legislation and making access to tribunals easier for women. Both of those things so we do have a arm of Pregnant and Scrooge which is called Gendering Change which is our training programme for companies so we do go into training them on all different aspects of gender equality and how to keep and retain women in the workforce so yeah we do both and we do lots of talks as well to companies as well to help them understand what they should be doing and how to do it. We we did a big programme in Manchester with the Manchester Mayor with Andy Burnham lovely Andy Burnham King of the North and the Equality and Human Rights Commission trying to help greater Manchester companies understand the importance of looking after women and eliminating pregnancy and maternity discrimination from their workforce and we managed to get 140 companies to sign a pledge to say that they would do all of this work and it was about half a million employees it worked out at so we were really chuffed and then we put them through this programme so they went through a programme to kind of get rid of all the because it's it's not easy particularly for big organisations you know you can have policies coming out of your ears but actually it's about how those policies are implemented so it can be really complex but and companies need to invest in this properly and they need to be constantly monitoring it in order to understand where they're at you can't just implement a policy and go there we go that's that's done so we've sorted gender equality because we have a policy you know it needs a lot more work and thought than that. Yeah so this being such a wide-ranging discussion and I suppose problems that women have combining work with family are really kind of the sharp end of the whole problem of motherhood and how badly it's managed by society even now so I've got a couple of questions that that sort of speak to that broader issue one is that how good do you think is support for new mothers mental health which is a huge issue in maternity and support for mothers you know post-native depression is incredibly widespread as you know and another question that relates to that is do you feel that the hashtag choose to challenge for this year's International Women's Day focuses too much on individual acts in individual cases without starting to address the fundamental structural inequalities faced by women and you know how can people make a difference the status quo what campaigns are there so sorry two very broad questions but they speak to kind of feminist equality in motherhood problems with motherhood more generally. So post-natal depression I'll pick up on that first there's actually debate happening tomorrow in Westminster exactly on this topic and the Liberal Democrat MP whose name has just gone out of my head anyway she's leading on this and they're doing some research before the debate actually that might have closed that survey might have closed now but she is really flying the flag on this and it is a massive problem there's very little support for women there are some great organisations that do some excellent work supporting women who experience post-natal depression I had terrible post-natal depression after Theo and after Jack not as bad with Jack but certainly after Theo and I walked into hospital with both of them Jack didn't sleep you work every 42 minutes for the first year of his life oh my word it was horrendous and I walked into A&E with both of them and thought I'm not leaving until they fix the problem because I can't cope anymore I literally cannot cope anymore and I waited for four hours with both of them got called into the doctor's room explain the problem and she said this is not an emergency and you're in A&E and I said this is an emergency like I cannot cope anymore I'm losing my mind and they threw me out of the hospital but and there was nothing and thankfully I was fine but we know that not everybody is fine and there are these black holes across the UK where there just isn't this support for women in Manchester I was the new Manchester at the time Manchester is one of those black holes so there is a postcode lottery with post-natal depression and how women are looked after after they've had babies in Australia they've just invested millions of pounds in a new programme for the mental health of mums because they understand the pressures the pandemic has had I keep clicking refresh on the government website waiting for them to announce the millions of pounds they're going to invest in mothers but it just doesn't seem to appear so we need we absolutely need more investment in women and obviously the depression is about isolation and you know which can you know creep up on many mothers in maternity leave and then perhaps they're working from home you know they're more isolated so they might go back to work but then have all of those pressures that come from combining the two so but the other question I guess was yeah about so the things that individual women can do you know you have a great section towards the end of your book about you know what you what knowing your rights and not being kind of grateful to your employer for whatever kind of scrap they throw you and so it's really important to know your rights as an individual what action you can take but also as a society you know as women how can we combat these forms of structural oppression that women and in particular mothers and working mothers face and one of the key things you definitely do is get to know your MP and if you're unlucky like me you will have an MP who kind of has completely polar opposite opinions to everything from you I'm sure my MP has a little file in his office where he gets emails from me and they just go in there never to be touched again but you may find that you have an MP even if they are on a different political party to what you would usually vote for there may have some sympathies with some of the issues that you're talking about so I would contact them right to them tell them about things that the issues and challenges that you are facing and they they may run with it and they may support that in parliament and you know really a lot of it really does come down to the political it comes down to legislative change and so MPs do hold the power to keep raising those things in parliament as you said you know really do understand your rights you should always have a really good grasp of your legal rights and share that information with other women make sure they understand their legal rights talk to your family and people that are around you about gender equality about some of these issues when I first started pregnant and screwed I had some really awkward conversations with members of my family and you know my mum some of her opinions were a little worrying but we talked and talked and talked about it and now she gets it and she understands and now flies the flag for pregnant and screwed and the work that we do so you were only going to really break down some of those deeply and transgender stereotypes and those ridiculously held beliefs when we have these conversations so just keep talking about it no matter how awkward it is those are those are probably the two main things I would say. Yeah and we're going to close shortly but just wanted to ask you a question about international women's day and I sometimes feel that it's a bit of a double-edged thing that in some ways it's fantastic to have this day where women's issues and concerns and injustices are highlighted but on the other hand you know it can function as a kind of safety valve you know will give you one day out of the whole year so I'd be happy with that so what do you what use do you think international women's day is? I tell you what is really frustrating we know of loads of companies who win awards for gender equality who behind closed doors as soon as a woman gets pregnant they kick her out they say you've lost your job and they make a sign of non-disclosure agreement to gag her and then on international women's day they're all over Twitter and social media talking about how brilliant they are for women all the brilliant things that they do but at the moment we're really actually watching the supermarkets because we've been very concerned about pregnant women and we we have written to all the supermarkets to ask them how they're looking after pregnant women during this pandemic and had the various responses back and some of them have been appalling so we're watching what they say today to see how that contrasts with how they're actually looking after women during the pandemic so there there is it's used a bit like mother's day as an opportunity to like sell a brand which is incredibly frustrating and it is important though it's absolutely important to have a moment in time where we all coalesce around the fact that inequality still exists and we talk about some of the data and some of the statistics and try and again remind people that we're really not there yet even if you as an individual feel that you have equality which we know lots of women feel that way that actually there are vast inequalities across the world for women and that we need to work together in order to solve those inequalities I was on a debate at the weekend the big question and I really wish I hadn't done it actually because who won't you know it's so ridiculous debating gender equality why are we debating or bad yeah I mean what a ridiculous thing but there was there were two women on there one who was a stay-at-home woman said that you know the the notion of patriarchy is completely nonsense and she has complete equality and has never experienced inequality another woman who and said it was making some sort of slightly odd argument about equity and equality which is a valid you know it of course it's about equity more than equality it's about you know and but it it was so frustrating being putting pitting women against each other in a bid to talk about gender equality we all want the same thing we all surely every human believes inequality every human believes that other humans should have the equal opportunities and that they have and so I guess international women's day really is just an opportunity to have have our voices heard again and if and if one more man says when's international men's day today I think we're all going to lose our minds one more question and it's so interesting that a debate about equality you know I think it's you know there's often it's not a debate for against but actually so many particularly young people think that women have already reached gender equality that we've got that to that stage of society so therefore really it's about raising awareness that the problem is still with us and you know even though even if the argument's been one about you know what's right and so so it's really yes and all these problems that you raise in the book are I think so hidden so that you're still and that the SOS line that you set up those recordings those incredibly painful experiences really really illustrate that so vividly that we've really only just started to scratch the surface of what mothers are having to shoulder the burden that they're having to deal with so one last question before we close and the quote from Boris Johnson that you sliced earlier wasn't very encouraging about the children of working mothers being more likely to mug you but if you if you can say one thing to the present government one change that you would like to see or what one priority that you'd like to highlight what would it be? Can I have two? I mean although I do like Sophie walk I've heard Sophie Walker answer this question before somebody asked her one thing she'd like to change and she always says I will not stand for there just being one thing for women women deserve everything which is a very valid point there there are two changes I'd like to see implemented immediately those are ring friends properly pay pretend to leave and investment in our childcare system so that the workers that do this critical brutal job of caring for our children are paid properly and valued for the work that they do and so that we have a childcare system that works for everybody and ensures that parents can work and ensures that children receive critical education at the time when their brain is fusing together you know we know that 85 percent of brain development happens before the age of five so let's give these kids what they need and let's give parents what they need and invest in that childcare system. Great well Julie really thank you very much for joining us and do order her book Pregnant Then Screwed which I thoroughly recommend and thank you to the audience for your questions and enjoy the rest of International Women's Day I hope it lasts all year you know so thanks very much bye bye