Time to go back to work?

A report this week claimed that most of us would be happy to pay higher taxes to help mothers return to work. But what do mums themselves think?

Working motherhood isn't getting any easier - and in some ways, it's more difficult than it's ever been. That's the depressing message behind a series of studies currently in the news. Last week, a report from the Equal Opportunities Commission said around 30,000 women every year are sacked, made redundant or leave their jobs because of pregnancy discrimination. Next week, it will publish another report saying too many women are channelled into dead-end jobs or forced to abandon their careers after giving birth.

Meanwhile, a new paper from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) argues that, while around half of women with a child under five now work - compared with just 5% in 1990 - their home-based workload isn't diminishing as their economic role grows. But there was a bit of good news - survey respondents said they'd pay higher taxes if it made working life easier for mothers.

Next month, US sociologist Sylvia Hewlett will brief MPs on her theory that, while there are too many "off ramps" for women to quite their careers, there are nothing like enough "on ramps" to help them back into the workplace.

The tragedy is that mothers want to work - and economic experts argue that billions of pounds of skills and experience could be added to the country's economy if they did. So why is working motherhood, for so many women, such a miserable and fraught experience? We asked the real ex perts what's going wrong - and what could make a difference.

Kathy Wittet, 43, lives in Oxford and has two daughters aged 13 and 11

I'm not working at the moment but that's not through choice - I feel I've got lots of skills, but the fact that I've taken time out of the workplace to have children and to bring them up has left me hugely disadvantaged. If I had a professional skill, if I was a lawyer or a physiotherapist or a journalist, it wouldn't be so difficult because I'd have something I could get back into and build on. But I've done a number of jobs - I've been a careers adviser and a training officer and a parliamentary assistant. I'm one of those people with what they call a portfolio career. What we hear from politicians is that this is what everyone needs these days - but when you're a mother with children, the story seems a bit different.

The basic problem for me is that I need both recent and relevant experience to get a job, but I need a job to get that experience. Every week I scour the papers for ads for jobs I could do, and every week I'm disappointed: it's not that there aren't jobs I could do, but those jobs wouldn't fit in with my needs as a mother. Either they're full-time and I'd see nothing of my girls, or they're part-time and extremely menial. The interesting, flexible, with-prospects job for the 40-something woman returner is totally elusive in my experience.

What would help is a scheme to give women in their 30s and 40s work experience. This would help us to either get back into a similar-level job or to try out alternative types of work. We hear about work experience for younger people, but it's not generally available for people like me. I'd be happy to do unpaid work experience but it would be nice if it led to a recognised qualification.

Another thing that would help is more job-sharing - a job-share would suit me, but most managers can't be bothered with them - the perception is that they're more trouble than they're worth. It's all a question of whether the will is there - and making managers realise that a bit of effort on their part could stop the brain-drain of mothers like me who are really keen to work again.

Mandy Taggart, 35, lives in Northern Ireland and has two children aged six and three

When I had my first baby, mothers only got 14 weeks' maternity leave. I left work at 36 weeks, and my daughter arrived a fortnight late, so I ended up with the prospect of leaving a 10-week-old baby, which I wasn't prepared to do - so I resigned.

But at the time we were living in Berkshire and it soon became clear that we both needed to work full-time for financial reasons. We don't have family living nearby and childcare is ridiculously expensive: in the end I went back to work as an IT technical writer when my daughter was eight months old, and my husband - an IT programmer - did a three-day week so he could look after my daughter two days a week, and then she went to nursery for the other three.

After that my husband went back to working five days, and the situation became intolerable - my daughter was miserable at nursery where she was spending eight hours a day, five days a week. My work was an hour's drive away and we were constantly stressed by the simple practicalities of picking her up from nursery on time - if we arrived after 6pm we faced a fine, and if it was after 6.30pm they contacted social services!

We moved back to Coleraine in Northern Ireland, where I'm originally from. Downshifting to a rural area has been a double-edged sword - the housing is less expensive but there are far fewer decent jobs available. I'd have to travel 50 miles to Belfast to get a job comparable to the one I had before and I don't want to take a menial job to prove a point - I want to return to some sort of professional work.

Employers need to be more tolerant and to understand that you can be productive at home - I have proved in the past that I can be. It would be good not to have to be on site every day, as travelling takes so much time.

If you are on contract and working for yourself, it is much more likely that you will be able to work from home, but you also need much more flexibility in childcare. It would be great to have on-call childcare - when my eldest daughter was at nursery she was often quite ill and I felt I had overstretched the tolerance of my boss and colleagues by repeatedly taking time off to look after her.

April Brooks, 25, lives in London and has a six-month-old son, Ruben

I've spent the past three months agonising over whether to go back to work. I'm a nurse, which you'd think should make it easy. They're desperate for nurses, and they do everything they can to make it easy for you. You can go back part-time and you can virtually choose your hours - when they're crying out for your skills, it's amazing how much an employer will bend over backwards to make it workable for you.

So for me the problem isn't flexibility or opportunity, it's childcare and - specifically - the economics of childcare. If I go back to work and have my baby looked after in a nursery or by a childminder, I'd end up with a tiny amount of money left over at the end of the month.

I've decided to work one day a week in a clinic. I'm going to earn around £450 a month and after taking the childcare costs and tax out of my paypacket, I'll be making around £200 a month for four days' work. I'm doing it so I keep my registration and I love my work. But it shouldn't be this way - I'm willing to do a job, at least part-time, and I've got a skill society needs. It should be economically practical for me to do it - but it isn't.

Liz Flanagan, 31, lives in Brighton and has a 15-month-old daughter, Molly

Looking back, I had my head in the sand when I found I was pregnant. I honestly expected everything to just fall into place - I thought I'd be able to work three days a week and everything would be fine.

There were lots of things I wasn't being realistic about, but maybe the biggest one was the shift in your priorities when you have a child. How you feel about work just isn't the same any more, and it never will be quite the same again. But that doesn't mean you haven't got lots of skills to offer, or that you don't want to use them. It just takes more imagination than it did in the past to make it all possible, and that imagination isn't always there, especially from the employers.

From the outset, the playing field could be more even if fathers had better paternity leave. If mothers took the first six months off work and fathers took the second six, for example, then the childcare needs would arise when the men were returning to work and they would have to get more involved in searching for the right carer, whereas at the moment it is seen as a mother's task (and a cost that comes out of a mother's pay packet). The financial help with childcare isn't great, but it would be a lot better if it was easier to understand! We've found it so difficult to work out what we're entitled to

Anna Head, 29, lives in Leeds and has two daughters aged three and 10 months

For me it's not financially possible not to work - but having said that, working is barely financially viable. Around two-thirds of what I earn goes out on childcare - it's really disheartening to get my pay packet each month and think how much I've had to shell out just so I can go to work.

I work mornings only as a primary school teacher: it sounds great in that I get each afternoon with my girls, but the downside is there's a lot of other work around the edges. I spend at least an hour every evening marking, and there are parents' evenings to go to - which I'm not paid extra for. I love my job but it's really taxing working and looking after two young children. My youngest daughter often wakes at night and then I'm going into work after a broken night's sleep, it takes its toll. And while I'm not saying I put the same time in that full-time teachers do, I think I do a lot more than I'd have to in many part-time jobs.

Jennie Pitt, 38, lives in Kent and has two children aged five and two

When I had my eldest child, I worked in advertising. It was a privileged life with a lot of glamour, but ultimately the industry is loaded against mothers: there is a systematic process that is basically unlawful, but it wasn't possible for me to complain. In the company where I worked, eight women had babies in five years - but only one came back, and not for long. They weren't openly discriminatory - it was all underhand. They didn't do anything to help you to make life easier because ultimately they didn't want you there if you were a mother because it meant you had another life outside work, and they didn't want people like that - they wanted people who were trading their hearts and minds and souls for their salary. Advertising bosses don't want mothers - they're a nuisance. So they undermine you, they don't help you out. I asked for an extra hour off a week so I could spend just a little bit more time with my baby when I went back after having him, but it was refused.

When I was pregnant for the second time I split up with my partner: I knew I was going to be a single mother, and I decided I didn't want to spend the next 20 years of my working life paying off a huge London mortgage and never seeing my kids. So I opted out: we moved to Kent, and I'm working from home for a charity. It's nothing like as well paid, and it's well below my skills level, but if fits in with my life.

What mothers need, I believe, is a body that monitors equality in the workplace. What I'd like to see is a body like the Health and Safety Executive that you could go to with a complaint if you saw bad practice in your workplace. Companies would change their ways if they knew they were going to be audited by a body that had teeth.

Susie Johnson, 34, lives in Surrey and has an 18-month-old baby

I went back to work in quite a senior position and I work three days a week. The job is hard to do part-time and it could easily be a full-time job. Sometimes you have to step back and avoid getting in a situation where you take on too much responsibility for the time you're in.

Employers don't always do all they can quickly enough: it's taken my company 13 months to set up a good support team for me - before that I didn't have enough time to do my work properly.

Childcare is fraught and as my daughter is young there aren't many options. We tried a childminder but our baby was just sitting in front of the TV all day. She's now at a private nursery but I'm not happy with it. She doesn't get the right food - she was even given doughnuts and crisps before she'd been weaned.

More flexibility would make a big difference to me: the change in the law means parents can ask for more flexible working hours, but the request isn't necessarily granted. The technology available now means there's no real reason for people to be in the office between 9am and 6pm - many employers are mistrustful of women asking to work from home and assume they will just use the time to look after their children instead.

Sarah Miller, 32, lives in Bristol and has a nine-month-old son

I've been back at work three months and I'm shocked by how difficult it is. I'm a senior accountant and I've worked hard to get to where I am. I knew working with a baby wouldn't be easy, but I had no idea it would turn out to be impossible. It's got so bad that I'm considering handing in my notice and looking for something easier - and no doubt less well-paid.

I work four days a week, but it's not enough. I've got targets to meet and clients to look after, and there aren't enough hours in the day to do it working just those hours. So I come home and I bath my baby and I put him to bed and I have supper: and then I go back to my computer, and I work there until 10pm or 11pm at night.

What I'm hoping is that things will get easier, but to be honest I don't believe in my heart they will. I'm not ready yet to admit defeat because I can't help thinking there has to be a way. I'm very aware that if I ask to go down to three days, which is what I'd like, that I'd be putting up a white flag and admitting I don't take my career seriously any more.

What could make a difference to me? The whole culture would have to change: more managers would have to believe that women could work from home and do a proper job. Going part-time could be seen as a temporary necessity, not a shorthand for saying it's all over.

· Some names have been changed