Mariella Frostrup Quotes

A woman - even if she is the primary breadwinner - really needs to keep in mind that at some point, she may have a diminished earning capacity because of the fact that she will bear children. Of course, this is case by case. I had two kids, and it didn't really slow me down at all.

The reality is that family is on the cards in the future. But you know in motorsport if you take yourself off to have children, you won't come back, partly as you're quickly forgotten in this sport.

I'm one of the lucky few who never had to face the whole 'Oh, you've had a baby, and now work will have to suffer' bit. It just wasn't a big deal when I got married and had a baby.

I know women at work who don't talk about having a baby because they don't want to upset the apple cart, but unless people know what the problems are, why should they engage with it?

Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.

There are any number of reasons many talented people, particularly women, leave their careers for a period of time.

More women than ever are having babies at the peak of their careers. When will we stop punishing them for it?

A lot of women in New Zealand feel like they have to make a choice between having babies and having a career or continuing their career. So is that a decision you feel you have to make or that you feel you've already made?

Any woman in any career has to think about when they have children, if they want to have children, and how it's going to affect their career.

I just remember when my first child was born I called the personnel office and I asked them about their leave policies. And they said, "Leave policies? Women just leave and they don't come back." And I said, "But I want to come back." They said, "We have no leave policy." And then they said, "Why don't you apply for disability?" Well, having a child is not a disability.

The European problem is that it assumes that the minute a woman has a child, the mother identity subsumes the professional identity. Now she's the mother, above all, and we must give her all this time.

And in the future, you know, maybe there's kids in the future for me, I don't really know. The interesting thing with me is that there has never been a woman doing what I'm doing at this level for this long. So, it's like, would Vince give me maternity leave?

One of the biggest challenges is for women to find an organization that's willing to accept them back after they leave the work force to raise children without taking a cut in compensation and responsibility.

That's the main reason I gave up my career after John was born and I was pregnant with Andrew. I could not handle going away day after day. The thought of going away before they got up and coming back after they were in bed was intolerable.

There needs to be radical development in equality law to create the environment to allow women to stay in work.

Many of the big decisions over progression, promotion and future career trajectory are taken when people are in their late twenties and thirties, putting women at a huge disadvantage because this is the very time they are most likely to be having a break to have children.

There are really good reasons to leave the workforce or work less or take a different job when you want to be with your children. I just want women - and men - to make that choice once they have the child. Not years in advance, because... they don't get the right opportunities. They give up before they even start.

Women need to understand that it is possible to stay in the workforce. A lot of women decide to take a back seat in their professional careers even before they are pregnant or are ready to have children.

I know I did the right thing by taking time off to raise my son. But it also came at a price. I turned down many opportunities over the years because I didn't want to leave him for long periods of time. And in Hollywood, as in any business, the calls stop coming when you don't answer.

Everywhere in the OECD, childless women in their 20s earn more like men than older women with children. And in the United States, those women actually earn more than childless women in their 20s.

There's a motherhood penalty because we've been long taught things that are stigmatized about motherhood. As workers, we don't want to talk about our kids at work. We're afraid to, or that when we leave at 5:30 to relieve the sitter we're somehow going to be diminished.

I really thought when I was pregnant with my first that it wouldn't affect my work at all; it would just be a baby that grows up on set. And I was absolutely wrong. For women, the high point of their career and needing to have babies just don't really go together.

It's embarrassing to be in the only westernized economy that doesn't have paid family leave and flex scheduling, and that disproportionately helps women.

One thing I always want to clear up was the notion that I 'took time off to have a baby.' A lot people leapt to that conclusion because becoming a parent happened to coincide with film roles tapering off.

When I made 'A Few Small Repairs' and it did well, I followed that up with having a baby, and that was not received well at my record company. I was written off, and that had a bearing on my career.