My experience as a working mum at Brook

In this blog Brook’s Service Development Coordinator, Laura Horne, shares her experience of being a working mum at Brook and what the introduction of a four-day working week has meant for her and her family.

It’s no secret being a working mum is hard.

Juggling the daily commitments, emotional strain, guilt, and high (and unfair) expectations placed on mums by society; all whilst performing well at work can be challenging. The Pregnant Then Screwed charity reports that one in two (52%) mothers say they faced some form of discrimination when pregnant, on maternity leave or when they returned.

One of the things that attracted me to working for Brook (as well as my extensive experience within sexual health services and besides Brook being the leading sexual health charity in the UK) was the strong, female leaders in senior positions. I look up to many of these leaders as role models and I often find myself thinking ‘how do they do it all?!’

Even going back in time to our origin story, Helen Brook was a trailblazer for unmarried woman and fought for them to have the opportunity to access contraception when others wouldn’t.

I started my journey with Brook as a Health Promotion Coordinator, working on our Community outreach and HIV prevention contract in Southend-on-Sea. I was lucky enough to work in a great team, all inspiring in their own ways, including three other working mums. They were great colleagues, they were passionate, and wow did they work hard. In previous workplaces and before having children, I witnessed working mums face an unfair stigma. Maybe I was even guilty of thinking that way too? ‘Late again to the 9am start?’ I naively thought.

Now I understand that it wasn’t the working mums that were the problem, it was the inflexible and unrealistic expectations by previous employers, making it almost impossible for working mums to balance everything.

When working as a Health Promotion Coordinator, I was fortunate enough to be put on the Aspiring Leaders course by my line manager and receive workplace coaching. At this point I was pregnant with my second child, and I received some great coaching. One of my personal goals I identified from the coaching sessions was that I wanted to feel secure (I was at the time on a fixed term contract and was pregnant) and I wanted a new challenge. The coaching empowered and motivated me to apply for a more senior position within Brook, whilst pregnant, which I was apprehensive about and worried about the judgement from others. However, the recruiting manager took a risk with me and I was successful.

I am so grateful for the coaching I received, and the opportunity given to me by my manager, even when pregnant.

I feel I am in such a privileged position working for Brook. I’m on a salary that just about covers my nursery fees and am even more fortunately, when I was on my second round of maternity leave and faced with the really hard decision of whether I could afford to go back to work, my manager advised me Brook was introducing a four-day working week.

The four-day week has been great for me. It has allowed me to improve my work-life balance and spend more time with family, which I value above everything else. It has also reduced nursery costs for me, as I only have to pay for 2 children four days a week, instead of five.

Without the four-day week, I fear I would have had to completely abandon my career.

Brook has made me feel valued and supported, at a time when other organisations might have overlooked me or treated me unfairly. I think it is so important that organisations consider ways to make returning to work, and staying in work, more accessible for working mums. We are a vital part of the workforce and if we are forced to stay at home because of inflexibility or childcare costs, organisations miss out on the skills and expertise that we bring and have spent years developing.

To finish, I wanted to share some hard-hitting facts from Pregnant Then Screwed’s State of the Nation report from 2023:

• 1 in 4 (26.15%) parents say that the cost of childcare is more than 75% of their take-home pay.
• 1 in 10 (11%) parents now say that childcare costs are the same or more than their take-home pay.
• 1 in 5 (22.19%) parents say that the cost of childcare is more than half of their household pay.
• 1 in 3 (32.39%) parents who use formal childcare say they had to rely on some form of debt to cover childcare costs.