Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milthight.

So I know I said last time I wasn't releasing a new show for a bit, but I wanted to release this short show that picks up on a theme I covered last year, professional women who aren't mothers.

This topic was really popular, much more than I thought it would

be, and it was personal for me. Today, I wanted to use some more of my interview with Melanie Notkin.

Melanie was one of three guests I had on the original show. She's the author of a book called

Otherhood. It's about women who are approaching the end of their child-bearing years. They always wanted kids, but don't have them.

And if you're a woman without kids, whatever the reason, you can get a little weary of those happy family ads you see all the time,

or the occasional comments about everything you're missing out on by not being a mother.

Particularly if you live outside a big city, you're unusual if you don't have kids by not being a mother. Particularly if you live outside a big

city, you're unusual if you don't have kids by your early 30s, and you feel it. But in countries

like Britain in the US, about 20% of women today end up not having children. That's millions of people

who aren't society's default setting. Melanie and I started to talk about the words women and mother

and how sometimes they're used interchangeably.

I think that we need to really understand what we say

when we say women in the workforce,

because often enough it's really about mothers.

Yeah, we're all conflated as if everyone is a mom

yeah and whether or not we want to be that woman whether or not we became that woman later in life

we are not the same woman and and and what happens in the workplace is because of that when a mother

and this idea of the most important job in the world, and more so often than her job,

when she has to leave that job, and I champion in support the fact that kids get sick and things happen and a woman gives birth,

...