Tag Archives: Rights

Childcare during the pandemic has damaged my career prospects say 57% of mothers

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traveling in london while pregnant, traveling in london with pram, traveling in London with baby, with child, London, tube, step free access, babyonboardbadgetravelinginpregnantwhenpregnantAlmost 50% of working mothers feel forced to send their children back to school or childcare to save their job

 

New research from charity and campaign group, Pregnant Then Screwed, which has spoken to 3,686 pregnant women and mothers to understand what the impact of Covid-19 is having on their careers so far, found that  57% of employed mothers believe that their increased childcare responsibilities during the pandemic has impacted their career prospects or will harm them in the future. Techniques like the kidspiration in gorton adopted in reputed nurseries can help children be more creative and learn more at a tender age.

 

After 11 weeks in lockdown as nurseries and childcare facilities have begun to open up, almost half of all working mums (48.6%) have admitted they feel forced to send their children back.

 

Joeli Brearley, Founder of Pregnant Then Screwed explains, ‘We know from the London School of Economics that women are more likely to deal with homeschooling, childcare and chores around the house than men. What’s terrifying is the volume of mothers that we have spoken to who after just 12 weeks already feel that this will negatively impact their career.’

 

This research has also found that a huge majority (78%) of working mothers have found it challenging to manage childcare and their paid work during lockdown, and a quarter (25%) of these mothers explained that their work hasn’t been flexible to allow for them to complete their paid work and manage childcare duties.

 

Joeli Brearley explains, ‘It’s utterly disgraceful that employers haven’t recognised that working from home with children has been a case of absolute survival. Women are more likely than men to lose their jobs in the impending recession* and yet for a quarter of working mothers their employer has refused to give them the flexibility they need. This has resulted in women being pushed into unpaid leave, sick pay or furloughed as a direct result of having children. It’s no wonder working mothers aren’t thinking positively about their future careers.’

 

The survey also spoke to pregnant women, and found that 7.7% are expecting to be made redundant, of these women 20% believe their pregnancy is a factor. Not all pregnant women are able to adhere to social distancing measures, with 5% still going to work, rising to 6.4% for BAME pregnant women, in environments that are unsafe. 15% of pregnant women working in the NHS are still having face to face contact with patients who could have Covid-19, and 8.1% of pregnant women have been suspended from work on incorrect terms including sick pay, no pay, enforced annual leave or put on maternity leave early.

 

Joeli Brearley, Founder Pregnant Then Screwed, comments, ‘If you are being treated differently in the workplace than other women or men because you are pregnant this is discrimination and it is illegal. If your work has not completed a health and safety risk assessment to prove that you are safe at work, and will not come within 2m of other people, this is illegal. Pregnant women are in the vulnerable category, they must be protected, not penalised, and not put in harm’s way.’

 

The future could however be brighter where flexible working is concerned, as 58% of working mothers think that homeworking will be possible once normality resumes, this is an increase of 14.4% from pre-Feb 2020.

 

www.pregnantthenscrewed.com

 

Should You Change Your Name After You Marry? | The Wedding Diary

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We live in modern times and tradition is something ever-changing. Some traditional things last, and some just don’t. Others, like a woman taking her husbands name after they marry, actually become controversial. My favourite motto to live by in life is, ‘live and let live’. But, yet, it seems we can’t.

Some woman see submission or sexism when a woman changes her name. But where did that woman get her name? And where did her mother get hers?, and her grandmother? To stop it now feels like closing the stable after the horse has long bolted.

All of this does make me sound pro changing my name, I know. I am in a bit of a muddle with it to be honest. Part of my thinks it is something to do if you have children, so you can be a family ushould you change your name after you marry? wedding, weddings, name change, marriage, wedding diarynit, the stories of woman being stopped at airports because they have a different surname from their children are common. If I have children I certainly don’t want to have a different surname than them. It would just be too weird. This means I have to take my fiancee’s name, he has to take mine or we have to double-barrel our names. That is if we have children. If we don’t, does it really matter? Part of me thinks not.

There is a part in The Crucible when John Proctor has two choices: change his name or die. He chooses to die, “It is my name”, he says; “I cannot have any other”. This is a pretty extreme example but I remember watching TV with a friend. There was a woman with a very long double-barreled surname. My friend commented on the ridiculousness of her name; “Oh, just lose your ego woman!” But it is not just ego is it? It’s your identity. My name is me. Well, actually, my name is a stage name, albeit one that I use for everything now. It belonged to my grandmother, a Lithuanian who died when she was only 40 of kidney failure. Not surprisingly, I would like this to live on. I am only a handful of people in the world with the surname ‘Balavage’. An Anglo take on ‘Bullovich’. You see? Surnames, they change. As does identity. I even pronounce my surname differently than she would have: Ba Lav age, with a quiet ‘V’. At my friends Nick Cohen’s book launch, the amazing writer Francis Wheen complimented my on my surname, ‘Like a glamorous French actress’. I have pronounced it the way he said it ever since.

So when I marry I have a few choices: change my real name and keep my stage name, change my name completely and just keep Balavage for acting, or double-barrel my name. I have until next year to decide, but I am already in a pickle. What to do?

It is not about feminism or inequality. If a woman wants to take her new husbands name, she should be able to, if a man wants to change his, he should and if a woman wants to keep or double-barrel her name, she should be able to without rudeness: it’s her identity after all: Live and let live.

 What do you think? Will you change your name?

 

No offence- I swear!

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There’s been a lot of talk lately, mainly by comics, about the right to be offended. Think about that, it’s important: The right to be offended. What it means is that just because you think swinging cats by their tails is so ‘ hil-freakin-arious!’ You’re sure to be shortlisted for the Academy awards presenter’s job once Billy Crystal’s face has gone into spasm and he’s been rushed to hospital whispering in his own ears, I don’t have to. In fact I can be genuinely offended by your actions to the point where I want to gaffer tape your still-empty ball bag to an anvil and make you drag it around until it’s long enough to be tucked in your sock and you develop the first recorded case of ‘athlete’s scrotum.’

Pretty obvious premise, right? Those of us who didn’t look upon that mindless halfwit with utter hatred, as he spiraled his way into infamy, need to massively reevaluate their moral code or get back to wheel clamping.

But what if it’s not so straight forward? Swinging cats may be the most evil way to assess how big a room is but it’s illegal, so the offense in question is taken by society as a whole. The right to be offended is an individual thing so it’s an area greyer than Manchester.

I love swearing- one of my favorite words is ‘bastard’. I have a northern accent and do a lot of D.I.Y so, when I hit myself for the eighth time on the thumb with a hammer, there’s no other word that will do.

I got a lump of plaster in my eye the other week. A big, wet dollop of the stuff worked its way under my lid and round the back of my eyeball before it started to go off and turn into hard, sharp flakes. It was so painful I even tried scraping it out with a metal dental hook- the agony of which was like morphine compared to what was happening every time I blinked. You can imagine the kind of mood it put me in. Start at ‘angry’, then work out roughly where ‘happy’ is and get a long haul flight in the opposite direction. When you land, you’ll still have to hire a car with a sat-nav to get to where my mood had bedded down for the day.

The next day, as I picked the crust off my eyeball and squeezed some more of the anti-bacterial glue the hospital had dispensed to me under my swollen lid, I suddenly thought of my neighbors. The lovely, retired, gentle couple next door and wondered how much of ‘Hurricane Ian’ had rattled their porch.

I ventured round there with a bottle of wine, shamed by all the nasty, guttural swearing into mirrors I had carried out the day before, like a kitten with a hangover.

“Oh, hello dear,” Barbara opened the door with a smile, “are you alright now?”

It was obvious she’d heard everything. I smiled apologetically and pointed to my eye as her husband, Derek, came to her side.

“Oh it was your eye then was it?” He said, as Barbara turned to him with a concerned nod. “Sounded like you were getting fucked up the arse with a porcupine!”

I’ve never been so happy to hear filth from a pensioner before. I instantly knew that whatever I had said yesterday would be no big deal.

But it was pure luck.

They could have been god-fearing puritans who sleep in separate rooms and fart in jars and flagellate themselves for washing their own genitals- I could have had the Stondon WI at my gate with flaming torches and pitchforks or, worse still, the police.

In the house of Lords the other day Baroness Trumpington flicked the ‘V’s at Lord King. She’s 89 and, therefore, about as arrestable as Jack the Ripper. It should also be said that if your name’s Baroness Trumpington you’re bound to feel comically obliged to flick the ‘V’s, pick your nose and hand out whoopee cushions on a daily basis. Even so, she was advised to issue a humble apology and a, clearly made up, explanation along the lines of, “my hand jolted a bit,” or, “I nodded off and dreamt I was smoking a cigar.”

Who complained? What was the problem, really? Why does an 89 year old woman have to apologize for doing something that’s not only utterly inoffensive but quintessentially British?

It gets worse. Len Goodman, the ‘’ judge has had over 600 complaints via the BBC because he said ‘sod’. That’s right- there are 600 people with phones in this country that are so offended by the word ‘sod’ that they feel the need to use them in anger. Len Goodman judges ballroom dancing on the BBC! It doesn’t get more cultured than that and yet it was described as ‘appalling’, ‘over the line’ and ‘unsuitable for family viewing’ by people whose right to be offended gets so much exercise it could teach Zumba classes- although ‘zumba’ is probably a rude word to them too.

This isn’t the Sex Pistols getting childish kicks from swearing on TV and it’s not racist, sexist, ageist… Marxist… or any kind of ‘cist’ that needs 600 ‘harrumphers’ lining up ready to lance with their pins of righteousness.

Here’s my point. Everyone has the right to be offended, but that doesn’t mean that what offends them is actually offensive. Moreover, everyone has the right to offend, from Ricky Gervais to Frankie Boyle and even Len Goodman and Baroness Trumpton [Pooh, Pooh, Barmy McSpew, C**tbag, Dribble and Grope anyone?] But unless what they do becomes illegal, like hurting helpless animals, then they should be allowed to carry on without the fear that a call from, ‘Outraged of Ottershott’ could end their careers.

“Thank you for calling the BBC complaints department. If something genuinely offensive has happened please press one. For all other complaints please hold until a member of staff can tell you to fuck off in person.”