I thought I was unsure about having kids, but could I even afford them?

1 in 4 mothers unwillingly quit work due to childcare pressures, reveals a new report by UN Women UK. And here I was thinking the biggest barrier to becoming a mother was my uncertainty.

Earlier this year, I wrote about being 33 and still unsure if I’ll ever want children. It’s one of my favourite stories, and it seems to be reader’s favourite, too. Being ambivalent about motherhood is in many ways still taboo, so discovering post-publication that there are tons of thirty-somethings (and twenty- and forty-somethings) who are as unsure as I am about whether or not to have children was a huge source of comfort.

And while the question of whether or not to have kids still rattles around my mind most days, the uncertainty allowed me to push biological and financial issues aside. Until now. I tackled the biological question head-on when I spoke to fertility experts about the haunting fertility cliff myth, but now another issue has come to the fore and I find myself again spiralling over a decision that may not even be mine to make.

Namely, could I even afford to have children?

Findings from a new report released at Monday’s Labour conference by UN Women UK reveal that 1 in 4 (25%) working mothers are forced to quit work while 26% of mums have unwillingly reduced their hours to accommodate childcare. The phenomenon is so common it’s been dubbed ‘The Motherhood Penalty’, and it affects roughly a quarter of a million UK mothers, according to the equal rights charity The Fawcett Society.

*Katherine Jones, a mother of two, is one of 1 in 10 women carers who have had to leave their jobs entirely due to care responsibilities. Jones spent most of her adult life building a career she loved in TV. She had her first child in her mid-thirties, but issues arose when she fell pregnant with her second child, who is now two. After her trusted line manager left, a senior staff member began bullying Jones and piling on work; when pregnant Jones raised this, she was told, “This is the job; deal with it”. She felt that reporting the bullying to anyone higher than her new line manager—who had shown little interest—would be professional suicide.

Kate Daly, a co-parenting expert argues that women being forced out of work creates a culture of dependency and poverty. As the co-founder of online divorce services company amicable, she’s seen first-hand how depending on a partner financially can be problematic if relationships break down.

Daly believes equal parental leave would help women return to work and progress in the workforce. The UK has the worst paternity leave in Europe, employers are mandated to give partners only 10 working days off, leaving many new mothers finding the first few days at home especially lonesome, says Becca Maberly, founder of A Mother Place. Increasing men’s entitlement to paid leave not only distributes unpaid care responsibilities, it’s also vital in reducing the gender pay gap, argues Daly, who campaigns for fairer family law.

Before Jones went on maternity leave, she was offered a promotion, which she now believes was a smokescreen for the harassment she experienced, which ultimately led to her being signed off work with stress.

After being promised a promotion and salary review when she returned from maternity leave, Jones felt she had no choice but to go to the office, baby in arms, to discuss returning, after a colleague not-so-subtly implied she was needed back at work. “In that meeting, I was told in no uncertain terms that the promised position didn’t exist and wouldn’t be available to me until the end of the following year.”

She returned in January to no promotion and no financial review; the only option to counter the cost of childcare was flexible working. That, too, was shut down by a more senior colleague who countered that she’d returned to work within three months of her babies being born as her own mother was around to help—seemingly unaware that having family nearby and willing to help is a privilege not available to everyone.

Jones recalls being in a glass-fronted meeting room for an informal chat about flexible working; “I was told they’d never accept flexible working requests from anyone on a production contract. When I looked the young twenty-something-year-old HR adviser in the eye and said, ‘This is a great shame for women’, I crumbled. At the end of the meeting, Jones was advised to go freelance, “I left broken and shaken”.

It’s not just new mothers who are affected. A survey of 2,000 people, commissioned by UN Women UK in partnership with media agency UM, shows that women across every age group have left the UK workforce or reduced their hours to fulfil caring responsibilities.

Despite my ongoing uncertainty about motherhood, I fall most closely in the bracket of women who currently don’t have children and say they aren’t planning on having them in the future. Of this 30%, 25% cited financial reasons as the influence. “Women who don’t have kids yet see that this is happening to women who have kids and so they’re trying to plan ahead,” says Ayesha Ofori, founder of Propelle, a female-focused financial investment platform. Ofori says that along with buying a house, childcare is one of the main investment goals of the Propelle community. “We now live in a country where childcare costs are so large it has its own saving/ investing bucket”.

Despite saving for her second child, Harley Dixon, 36, says nothing could have prepared her for the additional cost and caretaking responsibilities of having two children. It’s a sentiment shared by *Stacey Palmer, 31 who wanted to switch to a part-time role after her second child to help reduce the £1600 monthly cost of childcare in her area in the East Midlands. Her request was granted but capped to six months to help her “transition” back into work.

Palmer calculated that dropping two work days a week would not only put her in a lower tax bracket, it meant she saved £140 a week on childcare along with being able to utilise the new 15 hours of Government-funded childcare. Financially, looking for another job that would let her work part-time was a no-brainer, but the decision wasn’t without its difficulties. “As a woman who built a career, your career becomes a part of your identity and part of how you see your self-worth,” says Palmer, adding, “When you lose that it’s really hard. Even though your sacrifices are well worth it, it shouldn’t be necessary.”

Tabitha Morton, Executive Director of UN Women UK, says we need practical policies and initiatives to meet the needs of working mothers. Morton wants to see workplaces adapt to flexible working and better training for managers and leadership teams to foster a culture where flexible working is normalised.

*Amy, 37, couldn’t agree more. She has two kids under five and has worked at her company in London for over six years. The last four years have been hybrid working, but now the company is enforcing a full-time return to office. Amy says she’s forced to consider resignation due to “the stress, anxiety, and inability to manage childcare.” She’s saddened that so many working mothers have to choose between careers they love and wanting to be “present mothers”.

As Anna Whitehouse, aka @motherpukka, put it in an Instagram post titled “I’m not sorry” earlier this year—addressing the “apologetic” feeling many women experience when returning to work—“Raising a human isn’t a recreational side hustle. It’s a job.” Until the Government and businesses recognise care as an investment rather than a cost, we’ll all lose out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have kids, whether you want children or don’t want them or—like me—are maddeningly confused by the mere question, women being forced out of the workforce in droves is to the detriment of us all.

Sign UN Women UK’s open letter to the Government calling for an investment in the care economy here.

*Names have been changed to protect the identity of those interviewed