Bosses, Babies and Breast Pumps
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 7 November 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Engineers showcase new technologies to help women return to work after maternity leave - but why is the engineering profession itself so male-dominated? Jane Wakefield attends a breast pump hackathon at MIT, speaking to businesses venture capitalists and campaigners such as Catherine D'Ignazio from Make The Breast Pump Not Suck. Jane also hears from engineers Emma Booth of Black & Veatch and Isobel Byrne Hill of ARUP about their experiences of returning to a very male-dominated industry after the birth of their own children, and the importance of networks such as The Women's Engineering Society. This programme was first broadcast on 19 July 2018.
(Picture: Woman holds up smart breast pumps; Credit: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I felt so excited to be able to go and sit at my own desk, have a cup of tea and finish it before it went cold, go to the loo without someone following me, and just actually to be back in the workplace. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Jane Wakefield. |
| 0:23.6 | Today we're asking women in the fields of technology and engineering how they fared returning to work after having children. |
| 0:30.2 | If you can understand that you will feel very vulnerable and so low in confidence in ways that you might not anticipate and that it's |
| 0:38.8 | normal to feel like that for a bit is a really good starting point. |
| 0:42.9 | Why you would want to hack a breast pump and what companies can do to encourage those returning |
| 0:47.9 | to work. |
| 0:48.6 | This whole project started because I was pumping milk on the bathroom floor of this institution |
| 0:53.6 | of the MIT Media Lab. |
| 0:55.0 | The breast pump is a really good example of a technology that sucks, frankly. |
| 1:01.0 | Pun intended. |
| 1:02.3 | Getting back to work after the baby. |
| 1:04.6 | Business Daily with me, Jane Wakefield from the BBC World Service. |
| 1:18.6 | Returning to work after having a baby is rarely easy. |
| 1:21.5 | It's an emotional and logistical challenge. |
| 1:25.8 | While tennis star Serena Williams getting back to business on the court this year after the birth of her child, |
| 1:27.7 | and new mother, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden, firmly explaining that her partner |
| 1:33.1 | will be the stay-at-home dad, have recently inspired many. Horror stories of post-maternity leave |
| 1:39.2 | discrimination or even dismissal are all too common. Here in the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission this year |
| 1:47.0 | said that 54,000 women lose their jobs unfairly while on maternity leave, |
| 1:52.5 | and this is despite regulations guaranteeing certain rights and paid maternity leave. |
| 1:57.6 | Over in the US, however, women have no guarantee of any paid maternity leave. It is one of only three countries in the world where this is still the case. The Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows employees to take 12 weeks of unpaid job protected leave, is the closest guarantee new parents have. So what does this mean on a practical level? |
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