The Netmums Podcast - S17 Ep8: What is the motherhood penalty? With Pregnant Then Screwed founder, Joeli Brearley

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

This week on The Netmums Podcast, Wendy Golledge and Alison Perry are joined by Joeli Brearley, campaigner, author, and founder of Pregnant, Then Screwed. This episode explores the challenges of juggling motherhood with a career while tackling the systemic issues surrounding maternity discrimination. Joeli shares her personal journey from experiencing pregnancy discrimination to launching a movement that has shaped policies and attitudes towards working parents. She discusses her new venture, Growth Spurt, designed to support parents as they navigate the return to work, providing practical resources and peer support. In this episode: - Joeli’s experience with pregnancy discrimination and its impact - The importance of peer-to-peer support for parents - Understanding the motherhood penalty and its implications - Joeli’s vision for accessible childcare and its societal benefits - The significance of having open dialogues with children about growing up This episode is sponsored by Aldi Mamia.  Stay connected with Netmums for more parenting tips, community support, engaging content: Website: netmums.com / Instagram: @netmums  Proudly produced by Decibelle Creative / @decibelle_creative

You're listening to the NetMum's podcast with me, Wendy Gullidge, and me, Alison Perry. Coming up on this week's show, a couple of days ago I was in the kitchen cooking and my youngest son came in, turned around, farted really loud at me, burst out laughing and I said, uh, that isn't funny. And he went, it's not my fault, you're almost 47 and walked out of the room. I look rude. But before all of that, this episode of the NetMexam. Mum's podcast is brought to you by Aldi Mammaia. One of my favourite things about being a parent is when clever people come up with genius solutions to problems we have. Oh my goodness, me too.

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And the nappies are really comfy and a flexible fit. They are. Plus, they're dermatologically tested and suitable for newborns. Brilliant. They've thought of everything. Get your Aldi Mumia Nappies in store now. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the NetMums podcast. Wendy, how are you doing this week? Well, I don't know about you, Alison. But I am feeling a little bit like September is winning. It is a month of admin overload and I am dropping all the balls.

All the balls. I tell you what ball you're dropping. It's not even September anymore. We're into October. So you're definitely dropping all the balls, Wendy. But I am with you. I am with you. Oh my goodness.

I saw a reel on Instagram this morning and it was basically a mum saying everything, by September, everything will be fine. You know, we'll get back into a routine and everything will be fine. And then actually, September just absolutely floors you. And I have felt it's been such a hard month. And I am so glad we're into October and we can just look ahead. And everything's going to be okay, isn't it? Well, my daughter's school has done bikeability this week. Oh, yeah. So on top of everything else, I've forgotten to invoice people to get paid. So I've got no money. I've forgotten to send the bike for bikeability. Then I forgot to send the helmet for bikeability. I would like, please, to talk to our guest, who I know is going to make it all better

because she is the woman in the no. No pressure. She's kind of pulling a face that implies that maybe she's with us on the dropping the balls. So let's have a chat. But today we are thrilled to welcome Julie Brearley, campaigner, author, founder of Pregnant then-Strell. grade, podcaster on to be a boy, and now creator of growth spurred, a new return-to-work program for parents. Over the past decade, Jolie has challenged systemic inequality around pregnancy and maternity discrimination. Her work has inspired change at both societal and legislative levels. She's credited with influencing the recent 5.2 billion investment in childcare, as well as changing laws on flexible working and redundancy protections. Now, she's turning her energy towards

helping parents bridge the gap between parenting and work through hands-on support with growth spurts. And while Julie has moved some serious mountains whilst juggling a family, it has come at a cost. Julie, welcome to the Netmum's podcast. Oh, hello. It's lovely to go. Oh, dreary October morning. Yes, October, Wendy, October. October. Now, listening to all of that, Jolie, that's a lot of balls. Do you ever give yourself a pat on the back? Or do you drop them as much? It sounds like you're saying it's a lot of balls. Like, it's a lot of rubbish, Wendy. Juggling balls. I was looking at it in a totally different way. I'll be honest, that's a lot of balls. The balls we've been talking about, ladies, don't trip me up. I'm already on the edge. Come on. Sorry. How do you juggle all your balls, Jolie?

How do I really badly, Wendy. And they, yeah, they fly all over the place. And it's really, it's just a disorganised chaos constantly. That's how I juggle them. That makes me feel better. You know, I just live amongst chaos constantly. Do you ever take stock, though, and actually look at what you've achieved and pat yourself on the back? Yeah. There are definitely, I mean, I am the type of person that's always going, what's next? I don't stop and go, that was great. I'm going to, you know, go to the spa and celebrate or I'm going to go and have a nice dinner to say that was, you know, what an achievement. That was brilliant. I finished something and then go, right, what we're going to do now. Which is probably one of the reasons why pregnant and screwed is just was relentless in terms of its campaigning because that.

That's my personality. And, you know, took us so far, but also simultaneously killed me. So, pros and cons. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that really is a matter con, isn't it? You have carved out a huge role in society, helping and supporting mums. And your sons, are they seven and nine now, your sons? They are, I forget, nine and eleven. Nine and eleven. Do you know what? I have written down that they're nine and eleven. I don't know why I said are they seven and nine. But there I go, dropping the balls. I know, it's all about the balls today, clearly. But I'm really curious, Julie, who has supported and helped you throughout all of this, as you have juggled all of this important work and the important role of being a mum across the years?

I mean, I don't live that close to family, which has been a bit of a problem. We lived in Manchester for years and didn't live anywhere near any family. I live slightly closer now to my mum, but she has a very busy social life, so far busier than mine. And so, you know, I have a partner who obviously, I was going to say, helps out. How sexist is that? He's a dad. He does the dad. He babysits from time to time. Yeah. You know, every sort of pat on the head and a little ruffle. And then in terms of pregnant and screwed work, I've had some amazing women behind the scenes that supported me.

In particular, Sophie Walker, who was the leader of the Women's Equality Party, Stella Creasy, the MP. when you're leading an organisation like pregnant and screed and campaigning and campaigning is relentless and it's constantly losing what you're doing every day is losing you're bashing your head against a brick wall and being told no over and over and over again until 10 years later sometimes you get a glimmer of yes but doing that and coupled with abuse because that's inevitable if you're campaigning. You need people around you who get it and have been there

and who can pick you up when fall over. And Stella Creasy and Sophie Walker did that for me repeatedly. So I'm very grateful to both of them. So take us back to that moment when you decided to turn your own experience of pregnancy discrimination into a public campaign. How did you get from, I'm really peed off about this to 10 years of being told you wrong? Well, first of all, do you want to do you want to? Tell us, Julia, but what actually happened to you?

Because I think not everyone listening will know. Actually, that's a good point. Yeah, okay. So I was four months pregnant. It was my first baby. I told my employer that I was pregnant. I sent him an email. I said, look, I just found out I'm pregnant.

And I was working on a year-long project. And I had designed the project. I secured all the income for it. And we were about three months into it. and I informed them I was pregnant. And the next day they sacked me by voicemail. And my employer was a children's charity. It was a woman that pushed me out.

And I then had to figure out what to do next. And the time I didn't even know the words pregnancy discrimination. But they just didn't exist in my vocabulary. So I was Googling pregnant and sacked or lost my job. I am pregnant. you know, not knowing the vocabulary. And I couldn't find anybody to help me. I called my partner's stepdad and he is a property lawyer.

So clearly he had no clue what to do. He was very nice about it, but I had no clue how to advise me. And in the end, I did find a lawyer. And the lawyer wrote that charity a letter and demanded I be compensated for lost earnings. Charity just threw that letter in the bin. that letter cost me 250 pounds and I had no idea where my next paycheck was going to come from so you know hemorrhaging that sort of money was terrifying

and then I said to the employment lawyer okay so what do we do now what's next and they said well you can take them to an employment tribunal said how much will that cost they said oh well it'd be about nine thousand pounds oh my goodness I mean who has nine thousand pounds just sloshing around in the bank account I certainly didn't. I mean, scraping together the 250 pounds for the letter was hard enough.

So I said, okay, I'm going to think about it. And in the meantime, I went for a routine hospital appointment. They did a scan on me and they discovered that my cervix had almost gone. And the doctor's face dropped. As she scanned me, she went, oh my God, your cervix has almost vanished. We're going to have to rush you into hospital. She said, we need to bolt your cervix together now because the baby could come any second.

Oh, that's not a sentence. Anyone wants to hear bolting their cervix together. I mean, exactly. I mean, it's delicious, just what you want. So I remember standing up from the bed and just passing out because I was, it was a lot. You know, there was a lot going on all at the same time. Anyway, they took me in surgery.

They did the operation. As I was in the recovery unit, the surgeon pulled up a chair next to me And she said, look, this is only about 30% success rate. So you need to rest and take it easy because stress is the thing that will trigger early on set labor. And if the baby comes anytime soon, it will die. The baby will die. It won't survive. That meant that I was left with a very stark choice because you have three months, less one day, to raise a tribunal claim from the point that discrimination occurs.

So I couldn't wait and see if my baby was going to be born safely before I started proceedings. I had to choose between accessing the justice I clearly deserved or dropping the case and protecting the health of my unborn baby. I mean, that's no choice, is it? No. It's not a choice. Obviously, I dropped the case. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself had I taken it forward and the baby died. But then I was, I just found myself unemployed.

lying on a sofa in my tiny Manchester flat, watching daytime TV, you know, Jeremy Callan Holmes under the hammer, if that doesn't send you crack as enough, then the fact that, you know, overnight I'd lost everything, absolutely everything. I had no job. I thought my baby was going to die. I had no way of paying my rent. I had nothing. And I was completely reliant on my partner, which is not something I was ever used to or ever wanted to be in that position. And thank God I had a partner because if I was on my own, I didn't know what I would have done. And lying there for three weeks radicalised me, completely changed the way I viewed the world. I suddenly realized that all this had happened because I was a woman.

That was it. That was it. It was all about the fact that my biology had meant that I was treated that way. And from that moment on, I just became an ardent feminist and realized I had to do something about what had happened to me. I couldn't just let it lie. And initially what I was going to do was post a poo through her letterbox, the woman that sacked me, you know, big dog poo through her letterbox. But I thought that's not really going to. Yeah, exactly. And she would have deserved it, but it wasn't really going to achieve very much.

So you felt a bit better afterwards. Maybe it would have felt slightly better for a short period of time. But I realized that it would be more constructive to do something to help other people. So how did you get from dog poo to public campaign? It's quite a leap, isn't it? I did get another job. So I had another job, a great employer who employed me. knowing I was pregnant. I was very obviously pregnant. And they were brilliant. They really looked

after me. And I looked after them in return because of course, you know, if you have an employee that supports you when you're pregnant, you give so much back. And it was a colleague at work. I was talking to them about the dog poo. And they said to me, do you really think that's going to make you feel better? And I was like, well, no, probably not. And they said, why don't you do something a bit more constructive with that anger, harness it in a different way. And that was a trigger. I started thinking about it. Came up with the name pregnant then screwed. It was going to be much worse to begin with. I'm sure you can guess pregnant then. But obviously that would limit the amount of press media coverage that you could get on a campaign. And initially it was a blog. It was a place

for women to tell their stories anonymously. And it mushroomed from there. So I never set out for pregnant and screwed to end up doing what it's done, I just wanted a place for women to share that anger. That was where it started. And then slowly we started creating services and then we start creating campaigns. But based on what people were telling us, it was all feedback. People saying this is a problem and us looking at it and then working together to try and create a solution to that problem. And obviously during all of that, Julie, you were also sharing your own experience of what happened to you. And whether it's you sharing that, or everyone else who was sharing on your blog, what happened to them?

It's such a brave thing to do to speak out about it being sacked, especially when you're in that vulnerable place. Did you ever doubt whether anyone would listen or that from, you know, sharing all of those stories, change might happen? Absolutely. Yes. And the first, one of the first times I spoke about it publicly, I went on a parenting forum and I wrote a blog post about,

my experience of being pushed out of my job for getting pregnant. There was hundreds of comments in response to it, but the vast majority of them didn't believe me. And it was women who said, I don't believe you. I think they got rid of you because you weren't good at your job. And I don't think this really happens. I think it's nonsense. And thankfully, an employment lawyer came on and defended me and said, I deal with cases like this all the time. This absolutely does happen. That employment lawyer turned out to be Danielle Ayers who ran our free legal advice line for 10 years after it's how we met because she defended me on a blog post. But I was constantly experiencing people disbelieving what had actually

happened to me. And because I hadn't taken it to tribunal, I couldn't say, look, here's the evidence. And that's what happens to women so often because actually taking a case of tribunal is almost impossible. Few of than one percent of women who experience discrimination even raise a claim, let alone get it to tribunal, because it is so difficult to do. So you don't have proof and therefore people will disbelieve you, they will tell you what you're saying is complete nonsense and particularly people who haven't been through or know anybody who hasn't been through that experience themselves. That 1% you've just mentioned makes me think my next question, the answer might be no. But I was going to ask, has enough changed about maternity

discrimination since you started pregnant and screwed? No. We know that in 2015, the Equality and Human Rights Commission did the most thorough report on this that has ever been produced. And that found that 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs for getting pregnant or for taking maternity leave. So that's one in nine. It's a woman every 10 minutes, and 77% of working moms said they experienced unfair treatment in the workplace. So discrimination, bullying, harassment, being sidelined, demoted. Since that report, obviously that was a long time ago, it's 10 years ago. The government has barely bothered to look at this issue.

So the last government did pretty much naffle. They did a tiny, tiny tweak to employment law where they extended. did redundancy protection. So previously you were only protected from redundancy when you returned to leave. They changed it so that you were also protected when you're pregnant and when you, for six months after you return to work. But that protection really, you can still get rid of somebody. It's flimsy protection in and of itself. That's all they did the previous government in terms of this issue. And we did research again because we were so frustrated that we didn't have up-to-date data. We did a really thorough research report, which surveyed over 24,000

people. We made the data. It was really good quality data and that found that it's increased to 74,000 women every year. So the problem has got significantly worse in that time. It hasn't got better. And that's in part because we've done nothing to improve the situation. But also it's because when companies go through hard times, we know that pregnant women and women returning from maternity leave are the first to experience that hardship. They're the first to go or the first to be demoted or the first to not get promoted. And we've been through a bumpy ride over the last few years, you know, since COVID.

And so women are at the sharp end of an economy that isn't functioning very well. Yeah, and you often talk about the motherhood penalty, don't you? I mean, I think your book was called The Motherhood Penalty. Can you explain, like, you know, obviously you kind of just touched on it there, but can you explain kind of a bit more fully what that means and how actually it shows up every day for moms, not just, you know, pregnant moms to be, but for all of us. Yeah. Yeah.

So the Motherhood Penalty, it's a term that is coined by sociologists and it's official meaning. is the systematic and systemic disadvantages that mothers encounter in the labour market in terms of pay perceived competence and benefits. Now, that sounds very complicated. What that means is the gender pay gap. So the vast majority of the gender pay gap is caused by the motherhood penalty. Some research says it's about 80% of the gender pay gap is actually the motherhood penalty. The reason why we have this pay differential, so research I did,

found that mothers are paid on average 33% less than fathers over a week. That's the pay differential. It's massive. That's a huge amount of money. And the reason why this happens is it's a perfect storm of bias, outdated legislation and cultural norms. So it starts off with pregnancy and maternity discrimination, which we've talked about. Then we have an antiquated parental leave system where dads on average take two.

weeks leave, if that. Mums on average take nine months leave. So that firmly positions women as the primary caregiver. By the end of parental leave, it is very clear that the mother is now the primary caregiver. So when they look to return to work, they go to child care. And we have one of the most expensive dysfunctional child care systems in the world. It is completely unaffordable and often very inaccessible. And so it's women that make career sacrifices in order to make that work if they can't get it or they can't afford it, they step back from their careers. Then we have issues with flexible working. So well-paid jobs in this country are what the economist Claudia Golden calls greedy jobs.

They absorb a huge amount of your time and they're incredibly inflexible. If you're a primary caregiver, you cannot do those jobs. It's not possible to do those jobs. So you are cut out of doing those very senior, very young. very high paid jobs. We also have a real issue with part-time working. There are very few decent part-time jobs in this country. If you work part-time, you've paid an average £5 less per hour than if you paid full-time

and you're half as likely to be promoted. And then finally we have unpaid labour. So we know that women do the vast majority of the unpaid labour. They do the cooking, the cleaning, the relentless sock pairing. We're back to the balls. Back to the balls. It's always back to the balls, Wendy. And that means that we, it limits our capacity,

our mental and physical capacity for the paid work. So we have to. We are forced to take a step back in our careers. And this is, I mean, it's not just a problem for women. This is a problem for children because children aren't poor by themselves. They are poor because their mothers are poor. And that pay differential is what makes us poor. We cannot access decent work.

And it's a problem for the economy. And business, because we are not utilising the skills and expertise of the people that are available to us. Just a reminder that this episode of the NetMams podcast is brought to you by Aldi Mammaia. As well as award-winning nappies with P-Zones that enhance absorption, we love Mammaeer wipes. Plastic-free and gentle enough to use on your little one from birth. They make nappy changes so much easier. Head to your nearest Aldi store to check out the entire Mammaia range. And another big thing that you have campaigned for over the years,

such an important one, is the cost of child care. It's been a huge focus for you. And I've seen you repeating the message that it's essential infrastructure of our country, just like roads and hospitals, which seems to be ignored by so many. And we've seen big changes recently, but is it enough in your eyes?

No. It's nowhere near enough. And interestingly, the Prime Minister was on the radio today talking about this is one of the flagship changes, that they've made. And even he didn't understand it. So I think when we have a prime minister that's saying things about a child sector that isn't true, we're in a bit of a pickle, the $3,500 hours is only accessible to parents when both parents are in work and they're earning over the minimum wage for 15 hours of work and under £100,000 a year each.

It's not accessible to students. It's not accessible to people that are training to work and it's not accessible to job hunters, which is a really, really big problem. It's also the notion that it's 33 hours is nonsense. It's term time only. Not many people work term time only. Teachers, you know, that's probably about it. The vast majority of his work all year round. So it actually works out at about 20 hours. And it's not free because you pay on top of those hours consumables charges. So for food, nappies. But also lots of providers increase that charge because they're making up the shortfall of the funding from the government. So we know that lots of people are paying still for those free hours, you know,

£20 a day, for example. So the costs haven't decreased significantly for the vast majority of parents despite the fact that there's been a £5.2 billion investment in childcare. So it's costly for the taxpayer and it's not saving parents the money that's required. We need to just scrap this whole thing. It's just not working. Scrap the whole thing and start again. Like, we did, I did a report with the New Economics Foundation looking at what would happen if we charged families no more than 5% of household income for their child care. So everybody, nobody pays more than 5% of household income.

The cost to the Treasury would be slightly more, like a tiny amount more than it is now. And that makes so much more sense to me. That means it's accessible to everyone. every single family and that it works better for child care providers. So I think we're just sort of been bolting on these schemes to appease the electorate and actually what it's done is made the whole system just completely and wealdly and a load of nonsense. So that's the one change that you'd make.

It's a big change, but you'd start from scratch. Scrap it, have another go, do it differently. To the childcare system, yeah. Start the whole thing again. New Mexico in America is the first state that's just implemented free universal childcare. And the reason why they've done that is because they did a tester where they offered free childcare to about 50% of the population, the lowest income. And they found it reduced poverty. It improves their economy.

And it meant families spent more time with their children because they could access childcare and weren't paying a fortune for it like they are in the rest of America. why are we not doing something similar? Why can we not see the benefits to the economy, to families, to well-being, to happiness if we improve our child care sector, rather than just doing these nonsense schemes that nobody understands apart from anything? Like, it's so complicated. So complicated. So, Julie, you left pregnant and screwed last year, and we touched earlier a little bit on the fact that you experienced burnout. What led to your decision? I mean, what led to that happening that obviously then was the pivotal moment in you deciding to leave the organisation that you'd built up from scratch?

It was a confluence of things that all happened simultaneously. So it was, I had been there 10 years. That's a long time. And in that time, I've been through a pandemic with pregnant and screwed. And going through the pandemic with a frontline organisation is brutal, absolutely brutal. And at the time there were two of us, two paid members of staff and the workload quadrupled overnight and both of us had our kids at home. So we were trying to manage our personal stuff as well as dealing with trauma, every day dealing with trauma. And during the pandemic, it wasn't just people losing their jobs. It was that.

But it was also pregnant women dying and trying to keep those women safe from dying. And it felt like nobody was. was talking about it. There were a cohort that was being completely ignored by everybody. And so dealing with that for three years, solidly without stopping, you know, took its toll. Definitely really took its toll. And then I felt like we'd achieved a lot much, March the Mummies, was one of the most glorious things that I've ever seen in my entire life.

I'll remember it till the day I die. I was there. You were there? I remember you. And I felt that my, what I am good at is moving campaigns forward at speed and that the organisation needed a different kind of approach because of the scale of it by the time that I left. Pregnant as good is a very wide remit, you know, solving the motherhood penalty, something. country has managed to do. So the notion that a small charity of like eight people could solve it, it's a massive, massive remit. And it meant we spread ourselves quite thinly. And what I wanted

to do when I stepped down was focused on something that I felt was very solvable. So there was an end goal, like a genuine end goal within a few years. And what I heard repeatedly a pregnant and screwed was the period of time where it often goes wrong is the return to work phase. And I did a research project with five and a half thousand parents and found that there were five and a half thousand parents that returned to work in the last three years, found that 89% of them said returning to work was hard, more than three quarters said they didn't get the support they needed when they returned to work and one in four left their job as a result. that's massive. That's a huge glaring issue. And it's a problem for women because it means you leave your career,

you leave your earning potential, your opportunity to progress because you don't feel you can make it work. And it's a problem for businesses because they're hemorrhaging talent at Fright and Centre. And I just think that's really solvable. And we've just sort of ignored it. You know, these women go off on these long periods of maternity leave.

You come back to work and you are in. highly different human to the person that you were before you left, you come back and your bus is like, all right, crack on, good, you're back, there's your desk, see you for lunch maybe. And you're like, uh, what? Who am I? Why am I here? I've got sick down my front. What, what is a computer? I forgot how to use Excel. That was the thing that happened to me. Excel became an uncharitable, complete car. I just couldn't use it anymore after. Intentanyl if I was like, I don't know how to do this.

I don't know what's happened. And I think that's what happens to everyone. No, everyone's like, I don't know how to do this anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, well, Excel is, you know, I still don't know how to use Excel. I have to say. No, me neither. So that's why you decided to start Grosbert.

Can you tell us a little bit about Grosbert and kind of, what you're aiming to do. Yeah, well, we call it the life-changing support program for those with a career in a baby. So it's not just for mums. It's also, it's for any parent, no matter how you become a parent, because men also experience significant challenges when they go back to work. And they are completely ignored.

So I know, we know what works. We know what makes that return to work process better. I am not reinventing the wheel. There's loads of research, loads of evidence, loads of companies, have trialled, different things,

they seem much effective. And the top things that work are peer-to-peer support. There was a big research report done by King's College London that found that if parents get peer-to-peer support when they return to work, it reduces incidents of post-nacital depression,

that improves mental health, it improves confidence. Peer-to-peer support, when you get it right, is magic. And that's why NCT works, right? because you're buying friends who will be going through the same thing at the same time as you.

The second thing that really works is career coaching because you come back to work and you go through these big philosophical questions of, is this where I want to be? Why am I here? Does this make sense for me now? I don't feel connected to my career

because I'm missing my baby, all of that sort of stuff. And working that through with a professional really, really helps. Then finally, the mental load. So you come back to work, you're not only adapting back into work, so figuring out what work is again and meeting the new people that have joined and getting these ready new systems. But you're also dealing with all of your stuff externally,

like figuring out child care, like all the laundry, new laundry that you've got to do, they're coming a cook you've got to do, the fact that your baby isn't sleeping. All of this stuff is happening at the same time. And this. then you have the mental load. So you come back to where you're figuring out work again. You're figuring out meeting the new people, figuring out all the systems again. And then you have all of the other home stuff happening that you didn't have happening before. So you've got you've got child care complexities. You've got all the new laundry. You've got to figure out what everybody's is eating. You know, all there's just lots of stuff happening all at the same time.

So Grosford tries to solve all of those three things under one belly. So it offers career coaching to parents, it's peer-to-peer support so people can support each other on very specific issues. So if you have a child with special educational needs, if you're from the LGBTQ Plus community, if you've been through IVF, you know, that sort of thing. We have different groups for people to be able to support each other. We do weekly career coaching with specialist career coaches. We do ad hoc events for things like how to get your baby to go to sleep. You know, or how to deal with how to identify burnout because so many new parents burn out when they go back to work. And then we've got 40 workshops that look at all of the practical stuff.

What conversations should you be having with your employer when you return to work? When you find out you're pregnant, when you're on leave and when you return to it, how should you do a handover document? How do you access childcare in this country? What benefits you're entitled to do and how do you get them? how to have a better split of the unpaid labour. What strategies can you use to make sure you are not doing everything and that you have an equal share in the house?

And we're looking at doing mentor programmes as well as part of that. And so far we've been running it for a week, be testing it with 200 parents and they are loving it. I did the welcome event and three people cried with happiness because it was the first time they said that they felt they had an opportunity to just be themselves and talk about the crapness that is being on maternity leave, because maternity leave isn't all joyous, lushness. It's bloody hard. And it's bloody lonely at times. Motherhood is so lonely.

I found it desperately lonely. And I didn't talk to anybody. I just cried in the toilets every day when I went back to work for the first three months and then pulled myself together and went back out and smiled like everything was fine. And I don't want any other mothers to have to go through that. I mean, it's so brilliant and so needed.

And we know that businesses benefit when they look after and nurture their talent and that includes women and mums. Why do you think that it's so often overlooked and seen as like an unnecessary expense or a benefit that they can't stretch to providing? Because it's women and because they haven't been through it in simple terms. The vast majority of bosses are men and they have wives at home who suck it up.

And so when you don't know what that experience is like yourself, you care about it less. and when I talk to leaders who are women and have been through it, you don't need to tell them anything. You just need to say what it is and they get it immediately. But of course, there is a knowledge gap there for the vast majority of people that are running companies. So, taking you forward, you're hurtling towards the teenagers. What kind of conversations are you having with your boys?

We saw you talk about buying your first smartphone recently, and Alison and I have had all the smartphone conversations on this podcast over the last couple of years. But what's going on in your household when it comes to kind of growing up boys? Oh, God. I mean, yeah, it's a world, isn't it? A couple of days ago, I was in the kitchen cooking

and my youngest son came in, turned around, farted really loud at me. burst out laughing and I said, that isn't funny and he went, it's not my fault, you're almost 47, and walked out of the room. How rude. So that's what's going on in my household.

I've got daughters. There's none of that, but I think I'm quite glad the universe gave me a girl all of a sudden. It's different problems, isn't it, with boys and girls. I think often. My eldest has just started secondary school. I was so scared about him starting.

He was less scared. I was terrified. So far it's been okay. I've seen slight glimmers of him getting a bit more of an attitude since he started. But we've been on it, you know, when that's happened. and now that he has a phone, at least we can threaten to take it away from him if he misbehaves.

It gives us something that's quite accessible to say, right, no phone, and then he's devastated, and he sorts himself out. And the whole navigating the internet with kids, obviously, is something we didn't have to go through as, well, if you're my age, I mean, God, the first time I really saw a computer,

I was about 18. So it's a world And obviously with boys There's the questions about porn Which are terrifying And Trying to get ahead of the game Feels really challenging

So I'm constantly talking to my kids about sex And they're 9 and 11 And I started years ago Because I want I want to be the person to tell them what sex is. I don't want the internet to tell them what sex is. And I am constantly trying to teach them critical thinking skills because we can't escape the internet.

And, you know, when I talked about giving my eldest a mobile phone, I got a lot of grief from parents online saying, I was an idiot and that was a stupid thing to do and why I had it, isn't it? I don't think banning things when all of their friends have them work. I think they're going to access that stuff anyway. and you're best getting ahead of the game and trying to teach them the skills that they need so that when they see stuff that either is misogynistic or racist or violent, that they can process it.

I mean, you can never process deep, you're violent, racist, misogynistic content, but at least be able to think about it critically and at least have the confidence to say, I don't want to see that. That's horrible. So that is a constant battle. I also think that the narrative for girls has become very wide-ranging and that's brilliant. You can be anything you want to be.

You can go to space. You can work in STEM. You can be a mechanic. You can be a ballet dancer. It's so, it's much bigger than it was when we were girls, that narrative around who you are and what you can be. is for boys it feels like it's actually getting smaller and smaller and smaller and that has a really negative impact on all of us I think we don't talk to boys about

working in childcare we don't talk to boys about what whether they want to be fathers and what sort of father they want to be and they still boys still behave in a very stereotypical boy way and anything outside of that you know all the boys around here all just wear black and black backpacks they all look and sports wear yeah no none of them dare stand out and be a bit different and you know i hear all the time oh well that's gay not from my kids but you know when you're out and about or um you know you just you you have to behave in a very stereotypical male way and I think that's really damaging and so I do my best to try and give them more scope of what it means to be a man in this world and that but I am a woman and I need we need more men

doing that so that they can demonstrate to them that there is many other possibilities of being a man than this very stereotypical straight way of behaving Yeah. It sounds like you're absolutely winning at parenting there. They're having those conversations with your boys. And we know that you're winning, you know, launching things like GrowthSpirt. What's next for you, personally, professionally? What's coming up for you, Julie? Hopefully some sleep.

That would be nice. You deserve some. I mean, I'm really focused on growth spirit at the moment and making that work and getting that off the ground. It's a lot of work. It's a startup, essentially. So I'm sort of starting again and rebuilding. But hopefully rebuilding something that is more sustainable for me and has real tangible outcomes.

Not the pregnant and screwed didn't have real tangible outcomes. It had some amazing tangible outcomes. But I want to be sure that Grosberg really is constantly doing what we set out to do with it. So for now, I'm trying to not push myself too. hard like I did previously because I made myself very unwell and I can't do that to myself or my family again. I want to create something that still benefits people that still does something to start to end the motherhood penalty. Thank you Jolie for coming to chat to us. It's been lovely to chat to you. Thank you for coming and telling us about what you've been

up to. Thank you, Julie. Thank you. Lovely to see you both. Thanks for having me. Don't forget you can get in touch with us on all social channels, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, just type in Netmoms and you'll find us. And if you liked what you've heard today, we'd love for you to give us a five-star rating. Press the follow button and share the podcast on all your socials.