In 2009, I was asked to send a Mumsnet blogger to join the media corps at the G20 summit. I immediately put the nomination to our online audience, who collectively chose one of Mumsnet's finest minds to represent us – a prolific poster who went by the name of Policywonk.
She was a smart cookie – highly educated with a particular interest in climate change. And, by all accounts, she had a high old time at the summit, rushing from one interview with a world leader to the next.
Afterwards, I quizzed her on what it was like. ‘Amazing,’ she confirmed. But there was something a little odd, she noticed. Whenever she introduced herself as a Mumsnet representative to a fellow member of the media corps, they would start speaking very slowly and deliberately. As if she were a child. But she wasn't a child, she was a mum – and that was the problem.
Over the past half-century in this country, women have made astonishing strides along the road to equality. Schoolgirls are more likely than their male contemporaries to apply to university – and to graduate with a first or upper-second-class degree. The gender pay gap has dropped from 45% in 1970, when the Equal Pay Act was introduced, to around 15% today. And feminism, which seemed to lie more or less dormant through the 1990s and 2000s, has reinvented itself for the digital generation via grass-roots projects such as Everyday Sexism and No More Page Three.
It is, in short, pretty much the best time in history to be a woman – until the moment you get pregnant, at which point all bets are off.
Leaving aside for a moment all the examples of real-world discrimination – and there are plenty of them – that women face when they have children, let's just consider what we've done with the word ‘mum’ itself. ‘Mummy’ is the first word in most children's vocabulary and, during their early years, arguably the most important one: its connotations, from our offspring’s point of view, are overwhelmingly positive. What happens, then, when we become mothers ourselves, and look at the word from the other end of the telescope? Why is it, when adults talk to adults, that we use it so negatively?
Read more of Justine's piece for the July issue of Red magazine here.