Lily Allen says having children ruined her career – and why so many women feel the same

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Singer Lily Allen has stated that “you can’t have it all” and that having children “ruined her career”, in an interview on the Radio Times podcast.

The 38-year-old is mum to Ethel Mary, 11, and Marnie Rose, 9, with ex-husband Sam Cooper.

“I never really had a strategy when it comes to career, but yes, my children ruined my career. I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop-stardom, they totally ruined it,” stated Allen, who rose to fame with hits Smile and The Fear in the mid-Noughties.

The singer launched her newest album (her 4th) No Shame, in 2018, and married David Harbour in 2020. “It really annoys me when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can’t,” she stated.

“Some people choose their career over their children and that’s their prerogative, but my parents were quite absent when I was a kid.

“I feel like that really left some nasty scars that I’m not willing to repeat on mine. I chose stepping back and concentrating on them and I’m glad that I’ve done that.”

It’s a conundrum many women must weigh up, as a result of, pop star or not, having children does have a huge effect on women’s careers – way over males’s on the entire, statistically.

Research commissioned this month by the charity Pregnant Then Screwed discovered that the ‘motherhood penalty’ is worsening – with UK moms incomes £4.44 much less an hour than fathers in 2023.

The evaluation – which in contrast ONS knowledge from January to March 2023 with the same interval in 2020 – discovered that the median hourly pay was £18.48 for fathers in contrast with £14.04 for moms, rising by 93p an hour since 2020.

But it’s necessary to notice that whereas this hole is essentially reflective of the proven fact that many moms take a year-long maternity depart, return to work part-time, turn out to be a stay-at-home mum for a interval, or just feel unable to progress at work as a result of there’s so a lot occurring at dwelling, it isn’t so simple as saying this can be a ‘choice’ women make.

As Joeli Brearley, CEO and founding father of Pregnant Then Screwed, suggests, they aren’t selections made in a vacuum – they’re made towards a backdrop of bias, discrimination and laws.

“The notion of choice is a complete misnomer,” she says. “It’s just not the reality at all. We’ve been polling mums and asked stay-at-home mums if they’d like to work, and they’ve said yes. We asked working mums if they’d like to stay at home with their children, and the majority said yes.

“We know that in other countries where you have a completely different legislative framework, the women make very different ‘choices’ – in inverted commas. Because it’s not a choice. It’s influenced by so many factors” – like the insurance policies at your office, childcare prices, what your loved ones and pals do and assume. “They’re not real choices that anyone is making, [it’s] the best option within a limited spectrum of choices.”

The phrase ‘You can’t have all of it’, that Allen alludes to, might feel infuriating, as a result of why ought to women have to decide on between a career and a household, when males don’t often must?

But Brearely says: “I think it’s absolutely true. I’m glad she’s said it. As a woman, you can have it all, but not at the same time.

“When you have children, inevitably it’s going to have an impact on your career in a way that it doesn’t for men, because of bias, pregnancy and maternity discrimination, because it’s expected that women will hoover up the majority of the unpaid labour.” A 2021 examine estimated women undertake 3 times extra care and home work than males.

Brearley says that this implies many women are basically working two full-time jobs. “You will have to make some sacrifices, because it’s just not possible to do all that unpaid labour, and all that paid labour. It’s not feasible.”

So why not?

“The whole system is set up to ensure that women continue to be the main carers of children,” explains Brearley. The commonplace two-week parental depart, the place many males don’t even take the two weeks, means women take lengthy intervals out of the office to do the preliminary child-rearing.

This is regardless of the proven fact that Shared Parental Leave was launched in 2015 (the charity Maternity Action have estimated that take-up is 3-4%).

“The way that our legislative framework is set up is saying to couples, it’s the mother’s, not the father’s, responsibility to do the child rearing.

“Once you take that long period of time out of work, [the woman] immediately becomes the primary caregiver, because you are the one that figured out how to get them to sleep, what they like to eat… When it’s time to go back to work, you’re the one that’s making sacrifices about who’s going to do the pick-ups, who’s going to take the hit, because childcare costs too much.”

Plus, there’s a bias typically that women ought to do the majority of care work, she says. “Women feel far guiltier than men do if they’re not spending a certain amount of time with their children or they’re not prioritising their children. So we embody the notion that we are the primary caregiver, because everything in society tells us that we should feel guilty if we’re not prioritising our children.”

Meanwhile we glorify the ‘superwoman’ ideology, that expects women to have the ability to succeed of their careers, whereas additionally choosing up every part at dwelling – effortlessly and with out grievance.

Helen Sachdev, director of WOMBA (Work, Me and the Baby), says: “As a society, we still have wildly outdated presumptions and expectations about what women want and what they should be. It’s this expectation that contributes to women feeling they must prove they can do everything and be everything, to everyone.

“For working mums in particular, the constant shift between mum mode and worker mode can be really challenging and, in reality, is in sharp contrast to the ‘superwoman’ ideologies that many women feel they need to attain.”