'Bosses bullied me over maternity leave'

A public relations consultant and mother-of-three has quit two jobs because of the treatment she received after becoming pregnant.

Half of working pregnant women faced some bias, a survey found

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, suffered in different ways at the small agency she was at when she had her first child, and at the large company she moved to.

Since launching her own business, she has had to deal with the birth of her third child and one of her own staff taking maternity leave.

In the wake of a report suggesting discrimination over pregnancy forces 30,000 women a year out of their jobs, she described her experiences:

When I got pregnant, working for a small PR agency, they were really quite unpleasant, making me feel very uncomfortable.

They had never had an employee get pregnant before. They thought it was going to cost them a lot of money and disruption, and they took it out on me.

It was made patently clear that they would rather I wasn't there. I had to find out the information [about reclaiming maternity pay from the government] for them before they would get off my back.

As the months went on and my time to leave came closer, I really got the feeling that they didn't want me to go back. It was like, 'You don't matter to us any more'.

Bullying

When my baby was just four weeks old, they wanted to discuss with me when I was going back. It was just such a bullying attitude towards me and that I was an inconvenience.

Employers don't want to invest their time on people who might not come back

I just thought, 'I don't want to go back to that'. I really didn't think they would cope very well with the problems that a new mother can have - if they had been that bad when I was pregnant, what were they going to be like if my baby was ill and I had to take time off.

So they lost me - I found myself another job with a large tour operator.

It was lots better there when I became pregnant with my daughter. At the corporate level, they knew exactly what they were doing.

But my direct line manager wasn't 'family friendly'. I wasn't given any latitude for being pregnant.

There is work to be done in big organisations to make sure line managers know how they should be dealing with pregnant staff.

Value

If he hadn't been so off with me, I would probably have gone back.

Now I am an employer and I have had one of my girls go on maternity leave.

What made it work was we were able to talk about it properly, she appreciated that I wanted her back, and we kept in touch in the six months she was away.

A lot of maternity leaves go wrong, and people don't go back, because they don't feel valued or they don't think their future needs are going to be recognised.

In some employers' minds, you have effectively left the minute you go on maternity leave. They don't want to invest their time on people who might not come back.