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

I'm Ashley Miltight. This time on the show,

feminism was in the 60s and 70s the fight for the social, economic and political equality with men.

Today, I think it is the childless woman's same fight for the social, economic, and political equality with mothers.

Professional women, no kids. It's easy to feel left out of the conversation on women and work.

I was the only woman on the panel who was single and childless, and it just hit me. You know, these books that we're reading,

they don't capture my experience. They don't speak to me. And if you're married? People just assume

that women who are married want to have kids and are going to have kids. I just find that people

are very surprised when they find out that I don't want to have kids. I just find that people are very surprised when they find out that

I don't want to have kids. Coming up, three women in their 40s childless and child-free

on not being society's default setting.

I first interviewed Melanie Notkin for a public radio story about four years ago about why marketers ignore single women.

She's built a company called Savvy Auntie.

It's an online community for women who like children but don't have any of their own.

She's become a bit of a patron saint for women without kids.

And there are more of us now than there used to be.

In the UK, about a fifth of women now end their childbearing years without having had a child.

In their mother's generation, that figure was one in nine women.

In the US, it's slightly lower. About 18% of women don't have children by their mid-40s when fertility typically runs out. Earlier this year, Melanie

published a book about the lives of women who always thought they'd have kids, but by their

late 30s or 40s, are still childlessless. Basically women like her and me.

The book is called Otherhood.

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