Devalued women,valued men: motherhood,class and neoliberal feminism in the creative media industries

Introduction

This article explores how class-based maternal practices have influenced how women are valued as creative workers. The past 20 years have produced a body of workforce data that exposes women’s consistent under-representation within the Western creative industry including studies from North America (CMPA, 2017; Lauzen, 2017), Australia (Raising Films Australia, 2018), Europe (European Women’s Audiovisual (EWA) Network, 2016) and the United Kingdom (ScreenSkills (Creative Skillset), 2010; Cobb et al., 2016; Follows et al., 2016). Emerging from this evidence is a narrative that attributes gender inequality within the creative workforce to motherhood (Antcliff, 2005; ScreenSkills (Creative Skillset), 2010). That a ‘maternal wall’ (Williams, 2004) exists within the paid labour market is widely accepted and there is significant literature that considers women’s continued vulnerability despite the existence of equal employment legislation (Cady, 2012; Cahusac and Kanji, 2014; Crompton, 2006). Feminist scholars interested in the gendered dynamics of labour force participation have turned to explorations of subjective experiences of employment to identify varied, subtle practices of exclusion that operate within the labour market (Acker, 2006; Stone, 2007; Taylor, 2010; Wajcman, 1998).

The data that informs this article has been taken from a qualitative investigation into the impact of motherhood on workers in the UK’s creative media sector (Dent, 2017). The term ‘creative media’ is used to refer to those sectors that are primarily concerned with the production of audio-visual material; film, television, radio, gaming, digital thus separating these sectors from other industries that can be labelled as either ‘creative’ or ‘cultural’ (see Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011 for a more detailed discussion on industry terminology). The investigation interviewed a total of 35 mothers who either worked or had previously worked across a range of creative media sectors. This article is based on a subset of eight interviews with women who were part of a ‘married team’, a term taken from Lisa Adkins’ (1999: 130) study on the tourism industry which found that within establishments comprised of married or co-habiting couples, the male partner’s economic value was based on the appropriation of a female partner’s role. The eight women whose interviews inform this article were part of a married team in that their (male) partner worked in the same company or occupied a similar occupational role within the creative industry. This parity enabled an understanding of the gendered impact of parenthood on both creative workers. It also provided an opportunity to compare their position within the industry before childbirth. Although this article is based on the experience of British creative workers, the discussion on classed maternal practice and its impact on women’s labour-market value provides an in-depth analysis of the operation of complicated, multiple inequalities within the global creative workforce.

Gender, class and the creative workforce

The creative industries have become the showcase sector for defining work in the contemporary knowledge-based economy. Associated with flexible and independent working structures, it has been described to be the best representative of the fluid, ‘liquid’ employment culture that has emerged in the post-industrial, neoliberal age (Deuze, 2007). As mentioned, there is growing critical debate on the boundaries of what constitutes as creative work (O’Connor, 2016) and the variable positions of how to value the various contributions of the creative industry to society (Belfiore, 2018). What is generally agreed is that, whatever determining label, this is a growing industry that appears robust in the face of economic instability (Belfiore, 2018).

In 2002, Richard Florida defined a ‘creative class’ that drove urban, economic and social development in Western society. Despite acknowledging the variable occupations within this definition, Florida argued that this ‘class’ was united across certain lifestyle choices, governed by values of meritocracy and progressiveness. There have been challenges to Florida’s celebratory paradigm (de Peuter, 2014; Gill and Pratt, 2008) with studies exposing how a ‘cool, creative and egalitarian’ notion of the creative class masks the unequal and precarious nature of creative work (Gill, 2002). The interest on workforce precarity challenges more optimistic conceptions of a post-industrial labour market as conceived by celebrants of reflexive modernity (Beck et al., 1994). The focus on flexible, individualized, non-institutional based employment was predicted to provide opportunities to those previously excluded from the traditional labour market (Beck et al., 1994). The entanglement of the individualist paradigm with the development of a neoliberal economic model has created a social world marked by ‘new realms of injury and injustice’ (McRobbie, 2009: 19). Employment inequalities across a variety of demographic characteristics appears to be a factor of the creative industry with women emerging as one of the main losers in the individualized, neoliberal, creative class (Adkins, 1999; Banks, 2009; Follows et al., 2016).

The development of a British neoliberal creative media industry can in part be seen as evolving following structural changes in the television sector following the introduction of Channel 4 in 1982 and the 1990 Broadcasting Act (Antcliff, 2005). These developments broke the duopoly of the two main broadcasters, legislating for the development of an independent television production sector (Born, 2004). At the time, this was considered to be a significant advantage for women (Antcliff, 2005), fitting the notion that independent organizations would offer opportunities to under-represented members of the workforce. However, the rise of an independent television sector and developing creative industry has not produced a proportionate representation of women within the workforce as illustrated in workforce monitoring. As the realization that gender equality was not being achieved through the independent market, a narrative emerged, attributing women’s under-representation to motherhood (Antcliff, 2005; Dex and Willis, 1999). In 2010, Creative Skillset (now ScreenSkills) legitimized this hypothesis, stating in a report on gender inequality, ‘women have been leaving the industry because of difficulty reconciling managing a career in the creative industries with raising a family’ (2010: 1).

Attributing gender inequality to motherhood reinforces a wider cultural ideal that children are primarily women’s responsibility. This creates a smokescreen, masking what Gill (2014: 510) argues are ‘processes and mechanism’ of ‘unspeakable inequalities’ that operate within the sector. Gill points out that focusing on motherhood fails to recognize that all women including those without children are under-represented within the creative industry (Gill, 2014). While I agree that the focus on motherhood as the cause of gender inequality is problematic, my interest was in how motherhood has become the issue and how situated concepts around mothering practice contribute to women’s economic value within the sector. The assumption that creative work and childrearing are incompatible re-frames maternal withdrawal from the workplace as being both inevitable and an act of individualized ‘preference’ (Hakim, 2006). The ‘preference’ claim has been argued by feminist scholars critical of the individualist paradigm as linked to a ‘retraditionalization’ (Adkins, 1999) of gender roles within the neoliberal economy. Scholarship concerned with the relationship between postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity has considered internalized forms of self-governance within this paradigm (Gill and Scharff, 2013; Walkerdine, 2003) as a means to understand the lack of collective resistance to the celebratory re-emergence of traditional gender roles. It is this understanding of the productive effect of internalization, linked to constructs of value that is relevant to this study. Internalized concepts can limit individual choices and it is the relative concepts of value in relation to practices of both parenting and work that I explore in this article.

McRobbie (2013) addresses the development from liberal to neoliberal feminism as embodied in the middle-class professional wife and mother and all eight women whose interviews I draw from in this article fit this model. Operating within a classed profession (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; Lee, 2011; Randle et al., 2015), these women represent the high-achieving ‘top girls’ (McRobbie, 2009) who were able to bypass class and race based (Holgate and McKay, 2009) entry barriers, yet whose gendered value is linked to the construction of motherhood symbolically ascribed to them. Rottenberg’s (2014) notion of ‘neoliberal feminism’ defines how celebrated corporate notions of gender equality draw upon feminist ideals of maternal and labour empowerment while simultaneously requiring the entrepreneurial, individual, self-governance capabilities that are criticized in the context of neoliberalism. Neoliberal feminism signifies a further turn away from questions of collective social justice to a focus on a highly individualized upwardly mobile privileged woman. Motherhood it would seem, for the middle-class, normatively white woman, is no longer a choice but a requirement of the individualist project, in stark contrast to her lower-class sisters (Lawler, 2000; Skeggs, 1997; Tyler, 2008). Yet, for the women in this study it was the associations of maternal practice linked to their privilege that operated against them in the creative media industry, even before they had children as evidenced in the discussion. Defining the classed constructions of maternal practice becomes an important tool for uncovering wider exclusionary forces.

Class has been a recognized issue in terms of creative labour markets with calls for more in-depth investigations into the subjective impact of class-based entry barriers (O’Brien et al., 2016). The rationale for determining class identity in this study was to consider each participant’s economic and social position applying a Bourdiuesian (2010) framework of class distinction. An observed relationship between common values attached to parenting fed into the consideration of the relationship between creative employment, motherhood and social class. All the women interviewed, despite having varied upbringings subscribed to a middle-class ideology of parenting practice, a definition identified through the application of scholarly interest on both motherhood and parenting (Hays, 1998; Lareau, 2003; Stone, 2007). Thinking about the creative workplace and motherhood as two separate fields enabled a consideration of how different gendered identities are valued in different contexts. A middle-class woman may occupy a segregated, devalued position in the creative media workforce (Banks, 2009) but in the field of motherhood she is the ‘subject of value’ (McRobbie, 2013; Skeggs, 2011) as evidenced by her position in public discourse (Rottenberg, 2014) and her mediated representation (Littler, 2013; Orgad and De Benedictis, 2015). Ironically, in the case of creative labour markets, it is this concept of classed maternal identity that contributes to women’s devalued position.

Motherhood as a multiple and relational construct

A typology of mothering practice can be traced by reviewing literature on the maternal emerging from second wave feminist discourse on motherhood as a form of regulatory, institutional control (Oakley, 1981; Rich, 1986). Charting the history of this literature illustrates how concepts of motherhood have evolved from a fixed, passive site subject to overt patriarchal control through the recognition of divergent experiences (Jeremiah, 2006) to contemporary accounts of corporate, competitive parental determinism in the context of neoliberal ideology (Furedi, 2002; Lee et al., 2014). Motherhood can be understood as a socially constructed practice (Ruddick, 1989), one that is subject to situated identity (Hill Collins, 1994; Skeggs, 1997) that challenge the dominant Western discourse of what a mother is and should be.

In terms of classed maternal practice, the relationship between paid work and maternal behaviour has been a useful indicator for exposing a privilege gap in maternal identity. Stone’s (2007) study Opting Out was based on highly educated US women who had left successful careers in traditionally male occupations following motherhood. This specific group of women have been labelled within media discourse as the ‘opt-out generation’ (Stone, 2007: 5; Bould et al., 2012), defined as women who, through access to certain privileges enter traditionally male-dominated workforces then face a maternal wall (Williams, 2004) which results in their exit from the workplace. Socio-economic status and a related racial identity are the characteristics which enable both entry into these professions and the type of mothering practice that they are subject to.

Stone draws from Lareau’s concept of ‘concerted cultivation’ and Hays’ ‘intensive motherhood’ (Hays, 1998; Lareau, 2003; Stone, 2007) to reveal how a classed practice of childrearing has become more intensified, individualized and gendered. Hays coined ‘intensive mothering’ following her study of working mothers and textual analysis of parenting manuals in the early 1990s. Her research revealed a prevailing set of cultural norms that prescribed mothers should ‘expend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children’ (Hays, 1998 in Stone, 2007: 42). Both Lareau and Hays made the point that mothers from all different social and cultural locations were subject to the ideology of intensive mothering, but that it made the biggest impression on women from middle and upper class backgrounds as these are the women who have the necessary educational and financial resources to perform the requirements of intensive motherhood.

Postfeminist media discourse has contributed to the classed construction of valued motherhood (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009). The women in this study were part of a generation influenced by discourses of empowerment and opportunity that provided them with the means to excel professionally but also be subject to celebratory, market-driven and mediated celebrations of ‘active . . . sexually confident motherhood’ (McRobbie 2013:13 see also Tyler, 2013). As stated, this study’s participants disclosed being subject to middle-class intensive mothering practices, however, as will be discussed, their situation exposes contradictions in concepts of choice. This article provides an example of a clash of values, both economic and social in relation to middle-class working women and how concepts linked to maternal practice work to devalue their economic worth as creative media workers to the advantage of both their male partners and the industry.

The operation of value

Applying a framework that exposes the multi-dimensional constructions of motherhood requires a consideration of what practice of mothering is being referred to when we speak of mothers who are creative media workers and how that maternal practice is valued in society. In developing this argument, I have considered the idea of value and its contextual variances. Skeggs (2010) explains that the term value can be split into two constructs: concrete and abstract. The concrete concept of value focuses on the economic relationship between objects, the abstract relating to concepts of what matters to people and how value can be attached to an object or a person (Skeggs, 2010). Much of Skeggs’ (2011) work on class shows how it is the middle-class subject who is defined as the ‘subject of value’, the ‘subject of entitlement, acquisition and appropriation who moves across social space with ease constantly entering fields for the conversion and accrual of value’ (p. 9). My research was conducted with women who had middle-class subjectivities and in mediated maternal discourse, they are considered the valued subjects (Littler, 2013; McRobbie, 2013). These women embodied Rottenberg’s construct of ‘neoliberal feminism’ having access to the economic, social and cultural capital that could, theoretically, enable them to ‘lean in’ (Sandberg in Rottenberg, 2014) to both work and motherhood. This bodes the question of why in the case of creative media labour, they don’t? Cahusac and Kanji’s study of professional women’s retrospective accounts on their decision to leave paid work after motherhood describes how this notion of ‘choice’ does not occur because of motherhood but is ‘a process that is extended over time’ (2015: 1416). This article extends that argument; in addition to structural inequalities, it is the construct of motherhood associated with middle-class maternal practice that acts as a devaluing mechanism for women within the field of creative media work, creating a cycle of value production that impacts all women’s economic position in the industry.

The research process

The results that inform this article were taken from a larger study that explored the under-representation of women in the UK’s creative media workforce. A total of 35 women were interviewed using a semi-structured interview approach (Kvale, 2006) and the data were analysed following a grounded theoretical approach (Charmaz, 2014). This article is based on a sub-section of interviews with eight women who were part of a ‘married team’ (Adkins, 1999). Each of the women, whose interview data inform this article, had a (male) partner who worked in a comparable or identical creative occupation, in some cases, within the same company. For data protection reasons, all names in the study have been changed and job titles have been withheld or altered to ensure anonymity. Participants ranged in age from 32 to 40, where all white, based in either London or the South-West and occupied or had previously occupied creative content making roles including Assistant Producer, Producer/Director, Storyboard Artist, Visual Effects Producer, Director.

The grounded analytical approach applied to this research project followed Charmaz’s framework of developing integrated theoretical concepts from examining the conditions under which injustice develops (Charmaz, 2005: 508). This procedure allowed an understanding of the subjective changes that had taken place in the participant’s concept of themselves as a result of motherhood. It was through the coding process that a concept relating to value emerged alongside the observation that many women in the study had partners who occupied either an identical or similar role. This parity (all the couples were heterosexual) provided an opportunity for the participants to compare their career experience both prior and following parenthood to their partner and consider their relative, gendered value both as parents and as creative workers. The following discussion illustrates the tensions articulated by the women of participating within a precarious labour force. Alongside the clear gendered divide linked to parenting roles, there were secondary findings on the impact that this had on the women’s sense of self and the wider repercussions for all women’s value within the creative industry.

Devalued women

Maddy had risen to the position of Assistant Producer (AP) in Documentary Factual Production. She is White British, defined herself as middle-class and, in our first interview, expressed a desire to have children with her partner who worked in a comparable creative sector. This comment, made to her by a senior colleague within the television sector, reinforced her notion that the investment in women as creative workers is futile because of the widely-accepted assumption that they will withdraw from the industry following childbirth (Antcliff, 2005; ScreenSkills (Creative Skillset), 2010). Feminists criticism of neoliberalism has exposed the impact of internalization and self-regulation in the individualized social sphere (see Rose, 1989 and 1992 in Gill and Scharff, 2013; Skeggs, 2004). Comments like this can have an active effect on how an individual can consider her position, which in Maddy’s case it did as a follow-up interview revealed that she did withdraw from the industry after the birth of her child.

This internalization of a devalued position can have an impact on individual’s position even when they have concrete evidence of structural inequality. The following extract is from an interview with Helen, a Television Director who at the time of interview had been out of work for a 3-year period following the birth of her child. Helen framed her decision as one of choice and asserted that she had felt valued by the industry until she became pregnant. However, she acknowledged a gender divide between her and her partner’s pay that was in operation before they became parents:

She later returned to this subject in the interview:

Helen had met her husband on a postgraduate course. They had similar educational backgrounds and their levels of social and economic capital were equal on entry to the industry. They occupied identical roles within the industry and Helen reported exceeding her partner in terms of promotion but not in pay. The question of how men’s economic value increases in the workplace following parenthood has been previously discussed (Acker, 1990; Wajcman, 1998); however, my research examined in further detail how women like Helen acknowledged their lesser economic value in comparison to their male partners even before they had children. Naomi, who had become a Series Producer for the television sector in her early 30s, and at the time of interview was working part-time to support her young child, noted this gender gap in her career:

I was interested in how she framed this inequality as ‘in [her] head’ or as ‘part of my competitive nature’ similar to Helen’s consideration that her partner was ‘better than her’. Internalizing individual self-worth and development has been criticized as a byproduct of neoliberalism, the psychological regulation of the individual as the ‘constantly failing subject’ (Walkerdine, 2003: 241). In Naomi and Helen’s examples, both could recognize the existence of gender-based inequality even before motherhood and yet there is a lack of resistance. The internalization of a devalued subject position contributes to this cycle of value production whereby women’s positions within the industry are so vulnerable that motherhood becomes a viable alternative; a field where, due to their privileged class status they are valued (Skeggs, 1997). This situation is problematic as it suggests that women’s economic value in the creative media industry is undermined even before childbirth, that the assumptions of maternal withdrawal work to devalue all women’s economic position within the industry, whether they have children or not. In Maddy, Helen and Naomi’s situations, their partners continued to work full-time following parenthood and the impact of their caregiving role within the home positively affected their male partner’s value.

Valued men

In 2014, the UK’s Children and Families Act introduced a new system of shared parental leave which enabled fathers to share part of the 39 weeks of previously defined statutory maternity pay. This act would not have been applicable to many of the participants in this study who had children prior to 2014 and still not relevant to those on self-employed contracts (Campaign for Parental Pay Equality, 2019). However, reports show that there is a very low take-up of shared parental leave by employed fathers in the United Kingdom (BBC News, 2018), creating questions on why fathers are not taking on more caregiving responsibilities. All participants referred to in this article had taken leave of at least 6 months following the birth of a child and had either left the industry or returned to work in a reduced/downgraded role rather than their male partners. In the extract above, Naomi, who remained in the industry at a senior level following motherhood albeit on a part-time contract, mentions that despite a model of shared parenting available, her partner had declined to ‘offer’ to jointly share caregiving responsibilities. This was a consistent pattern in the data from married teams within the creative sector, despite both couples occupying comparable roles, the female partner took on the caregiving responsibilities:

It was following parenthood that Eleanor’s partner’s earning power increased, and hers decreased, as she struggled to find part-time work that would be both economically viable and compatible with caregiving. She cites ‘feeding’ as another factor for her inability to return to work correlating to feminist arguments that the female, maternal body is unwelcome in the patriarchal workplace (Gatrell, 2013).

The factors that increase men’s economic value in the workplace following marriage and parenthood are also linked to the unequal domestic division of labour in the home. Hochschild’s (2012) study on dual earning couples with children in the late 1980s exposed how women did significantly more domestic labour than their male partner even in cases where the woman was the higher earner. Hochschild’s (2012) coined the term ‘the second shift’ undertaken by working mothers to represent how their time is divided between work and the home. This evidence of the second shift emerged in my research. Amy, quoted below ran a company with her partner. As a co-owner, she had equal pay and maintained her position of seniority following motherhood. She described being able to work from home and continue breastfeeding and work thus creating a workspace that was compatible with her maternal identity.

Skeggs (2010) states that ‘women’s domestic labour has been central to the reproduction of capital but that it has been made invisible, surplus and naturalized’ (p. 29). In Amy’s case, she demonstrates how her husband’s career is not only enhanced through her success but also through the domestic support she takes on with managing childcare. The naturalization of this situation was apparent by her delivery of this information, representing the double burden (Hochschild, 2012) required of her in the home and the workplace.

Amelia, who worked in post-production and had worked at the same company as her partner (at the time of interview, Amelia was on maternity leave with her second child) commented that:

Amelia had returned to work on a part-time contract following the birth of her first child and like Amy she performed the second shift. She notes that their home life is better ‘when I don’t work’ not that it would be better if her partner shared the domestic responsibilities. Amelia’s failure to recognize the gender divide in her relationship fits a pattern of denial that emerged in Hochschild’s study. She did however recognize her devalued status within the company:

Amelia recognizes that her economic capital had been decreased. Her role had changed because of the time that she asked to work however she expresses her frustration of her situation. In her interview, Amelia referred to other instances which confirmed her devalued position within the company. One being that she was no longer invited to attend events that she had previously been invited to before children and thus barred from the networking opportunities that are necessary for maintaining creative careers (Lee, 2011). She mentioned a conversation with a colleague where she stated: ‘I feel like I am more valuable to this company now as my husband’s wife than as a Producer’. At the time of interview, she was on maternity leave with her second child and considering leaving her job, stating,

What is interesting is a recognition of how her value is appropriated by both her husband and the company that they work for, a similar situation to the one articulated by Amy. Her husband benefits from the work she carries out in the domestic sphere, enabling him to perform the working conditions required of him, but that company benefits from the professional advice delivered via her husband. Her value remains hidden, legitimizing the decision not to give her a pay-rise or invite her to industry events. Within the ‘politics of value’ (Skeggs, 2011) her husband is the ‘reflexivity winner’ (Lash in Adkins, 1999) and yet his value is dependent on his wife’s domestic and professional support.

Valued, classed maternal status

This research presents a paradox of labour patterns emerging within the creative sector. Given the claims of meritocracy associated with this relatively modern workforce (Florida, 2002) a logical assumption would be that caregiving roles are shared equally, that married teams could construct alternate system of project based labour and caregiving. In each of these study participants’ situations this was not the case, in part due to the women’s previous economic position within the industry. Motherhood simply increased either the participants’ burden or devalued position, in direct contrast to their male partner.

In Skeggs’ (1997) research on working-class motherhood, the women in her study displayed awareness of their marginalized position and used it to construct alternative concepts of value. For the middle-class women in my study, there was little recognition of othering because they considered themselves to be the norm of maternal practice. Transitioning to the maternal field produced affirmations of empowerment, even pride that their classed maternal identity produced new opportunities for pleasure and fulfilment. Very few acknowledged how their socio-economic privilege contributed to their situation. Kim, a successful Documentary Producer/Director, articulated how her ability to remain at home was enabled through her financial position, albeit precariously:

On the face of it, this devalued status reinforces traditional roles of heterosexual couples that are enabled through the couple’s access to affluence, however, as Kim demonstrates, when the married team operate within a precarious employment market, there is a cloud of unsustainability over both their home and work life.

This internalization of a devalued status is a form of symbolic violence, whereby subjects are denied a language to articulate their position, reflecting postfeminist concepts of entanglement and repudiation (Gill, 2016; McRobbie, 2009). Yet, in this data, there also emerged a cognitive sense of loss. Helen described how she had felt after meeting a former colleague in her place of work:

There was also a rejection of the ideal middle-class mother. Director Susan articulated this with a sense of frustration,

Helen and Susan’s references to frustration, boredom the tediousness of childcare were factors that informed second wave feminist discourse on oppressive motherhood (Oakley, 1981; Rich, 1986). Susan articulated a need to feel valued as a worker and recognizes that motherhood is a lesser valued position in society. Like other participants in the study, she internalizes this situation,

Susan and others that have been referred to in this study were highly successful and, in some cases, award-winning creative workers. The inequalities that operate within the industry are masked through this process of internalization, exposing, as McRobbie (2009) has argued, the psychological impact of self-reflexivity. As discussed, many of these women occupied devalued economic positions before they had children, even despite their relative success, a fact that they could recognize but not challenge. The individual internalization of this devalued position is productive of the symbolic and consistent cycle of injustice that operates within the creative workplace. Women are devalued as creative workers from the start, the transition to motherhood provides them with a sense of value as a middle-class mother. They can articulate that sense of value through the emotional and domestic labour that they provide for their partner and children. Yet their lack of resistance or collective action contributes to the continued devalued status of women across the industry.

Conclusion

This article feeds into the wider academic discourse of the need to develop further in-depth qualitative research to understand the operation of inequality in the creative media workforce. Considering how class-based parenting practice has an impact on how women are valued as mothers and the impact of that value on their experience as creative workers exposes how gendered identity feeds into structural injustice in the creative media industry. Looking at the experience of female creative workers in a heterosexual relationship with partners working in a comparable role or sector not only reveals how women’s caregiving responsibilities operate to devalue their economic position within the field but also provide wider benefits to both their partners and the industry through the support they continue to provide. It would be interesting to consider the relationship between fatherhood and creative work and why structurally, men or non-birth partners who occupy creative careers are not equally valued as caregivers.

The reproduction of neoliberal feminist discourses of individualized empowerment and privilege show how motherhood is no longer regarded as a choice for middle-class women, but a requirement for individualized fulfilment. However, unlike the corporate women of neoliberal feminist discourse, the creative workers in this study found they were unable to lean into both work and motherhood due to the devalued economic position they occupied within their sector. The women in this study were trapped by their class and the construct of neoliberal feminism and their situation has a negative impact on the value of all women within the industry, whether they have children or not. There is already emerging evidence to suggest that the internalization of the myth that creative work and motherhood are incompatible is affecting future generations of potential female creative workers (Allen et al., 2013). The legacy of this loss therefore extends not just to the industry, or to consumers, but to future working generations.