Before Birth Work, There Was This

My experience of being a woman was always going to shape my working life…

Most people assume my journey into birth work began with motherhood.

That it was pregnancy, labour, or those raw early weeks that lit the spark. But if I trace it back honestly, the roots go much deeper. They reach into boardrooms and brainstorms, into long nights in agency offices, into the smoke-and-mirrors world of advertising.

Back then, I was young, ambitious, bloody-minded. I wanted to prove myself. I told myself that one day I’d run my own agency – that this was my passion, my purpose. But underneath, something else was at play. Something that had nothing to do with adverts on TV.

Because being a woman in advertising was never straightforward. There was the day my managing director made a “casual” comment implying that a promotion could be mine, in exchange for a favour of an entirely different kind. A throwaway for him, but for me it was a flash of clarity: my experience of being a woman was always going to shape my working life.

And it wasn’t just that.

It was everywhere.

It was the fellow manager who came to me, nervous about asking for a pay rise, needing to rehearse the conversation because she knew the men in the room would take it as a personal affront rather than a reasonable request.

It was the fresh-faced newbies trying to build their “personal brand,” asking me how to be taken seriously without becoming “too masculine” – as if credibility and femininity couldn’t possibly co-exist.

It was the women coming back from maternity leave, quietly panicked about how to assimilate their new evolution – motherhood, exhaustion, perspective – with the shiny, pre-baby work persona they thought they had to resurrect in order to belong.

It was the male client who got me chastised for being “too abrupt” because I didn’t nod along with his ideas for a campaign that the data clearly showed would fail. I wasn’t rude. I wasn’t unprofessional. I just said maybe we should rethink a new route. And that, apparently, was unacceptable.

These moments weren’t isolated. They were a pattern. A drip-drip reminder that to be a woman in that world was to be forever negotiating, adjusting, second-guessing. Some days I fought back. Some days I played the game. But always, I noticed. And the noticing grew into something more.

I trained as a coach, fuelled by the desire to empower the women coming up alongside me. I became the person people came to when they needed to rehearse a conversation, when they wanted to find their voice in a meeting, when they felt like they had to choose between being taken seriously and being themselves.

At the time, I thought my fire was about media.

The thrill of the pitch, the creative spark, the chase of the next campaign. But looking back now, I can see it clearly: it was never about advertising. It was always about women. About power. About refusing to accept that being female meant being sidelined, diminished, or silenced.

That fire carried me here – to the work I do now. The stage might have changed – boardrooms to birth rooms – but the purpose is the same. To stand with women as they step into their own power. To challenge the systems that tell them to be smaller, quieter, more compliant. To remind them that their voice matters – in the workplace, in the world, and especially in birth.

Because whether it’s a pitch meeting or a labour ward, the same question runs underneath it all: does this woman get to own her story, or will someone else try decide it for her?

That’s what lit the spark for me. And it’s why I’ll never stop doing this work.