£65,000 Poorer: The Real Price of Becoming a Mother (Part One)

Nobody hands you the invoice. But becoming a mother has a price, and it is bigger than you think. The cost of raising a child to eighteen. The 42% drop in a mother's earnings. The nearly £100 billion the economy loses every year when women step back. This episode puts numbers on the things that usually go unspoken. And as always, we flip the story. This is not about what women give up. It is about what the economy takes for granted and never pays for. Rose brings the data. Bianca brings the reality of doing this maths for the first time, in real time. If the sums have never quite added up for you, they don't. And it is not your fault. Part one of two.