All the policies supporting motherhood will fail if the corporate culture is hostile.
Last year, Raina Brands posted updates to her CV on Twitter. There is nothing unusual in an academic showcasing her work to the public. But in this case, the focus for the associate professor at UCL's School of Management was not professional but personal: "recurrent pregnancy loss" (2019-2020) and the birth of her son (2021). "Although one line on a CV cannot speak to the profound physical and emotional trauma of pregnancy loss", she wrote, "I believe it is time to update #academic CVs to be inclusive of women's whole lives."
She received some pushback about the wisdom of sharing such personal details in a professional arena, but largely the response was positive, with some saying they would follow suit. Almost a year on, Brands reflects she was "glad" to have done it. At the time she did not tell anyone. Had it been a death in the family, everyone would know and take it into account. But "academia is publish or perish. My productivity was affected. Once I worked through the grief it occurred to me that loads of women are not able to talk about [miscarriage]. I thought I should say it out loud and put it on my CV."
Reactions to such life events are intensely personal. Some people need to put a lid on their grief and anxiety so work becomes an escape. Others find it impossible to stop such feelings from seeping into their professional lives. You might turn out to be both. Boundaries are not necessarily fixed, they can change over time.
Burgess Mee, a family law firm, hopes that its new position, fertility officer, will help staff feel more comfortable with talking about planning for a family, pregnancy and fertility problems. Natalie Sutherland, the family law partner who has taken on this role, told me the stress of coping with such issues was brought home to her when she heard City workers speak at a seminar about the problems of navigating work while also dealing with infertility, IVF and miscarriage.