The One Show’s Alex: BBC talks a good game on new mums – but they don’t even have a creche!
ONE of the BBC’s top female stars has criticised the corporation for its treatment of new mothers – revealing it doesn’t have a creche or a room where they can prepare for feeding.
Alex Jones, who presents The One Show, returned to work just three months after giving birth to her first child Teddy in January last year.
She said the BBC ‘talks a good game’ but lacks basic facilities to help new mothers.
The Welsh presenter, 41, added that the BBC’s ‘male dominated environment’ forced her to give up breastfeeding because there was nowhere for her to express milk at the New Broadcasting House headquarters.
Miss Jones said: ‘Companies say all the right things. They say yes we’re there – we’re going to support families, make it possible for dads to take paternity leave, for mothers to take extended maternity leave, to feed at work.
‘Actually the truth is, the facilities still aren’t there. They talk a good game but even at the BBC there isn’t a creche, there isn’t a room where you can express, there isn’t a fridge where you can keep your milk.’ She added with a laugh that she hoped there were no BBC executives in the audience.
‘Nobody says you have to keep up breastfeeding but that was just something I wanted to do,’ she said. ‘But I work in quite a male- dominated environment and it’s hard to be doing a meeting and trying to express breast milk. It just didn’t work and so I had to throw in the towel.’ Miss Jones was speaking to BBC radio presenter Clemency Burton-Hill at the Hay Festival.
Miss Burton-Hill, the co-presenter of Radio 3’ s weekday breakfast show, said she had a similar experience of being a new mother at the BBC.
She said there is a breastfeeding room at her offices in Old Broadcasting House – but that she would walk in with her breasts ‘about to explode’ only to find men sleeping on the sofas. She said: ‘I used [the room] every day in 2014. You have to really know what you’re looking for and it is down a corridor. You get in there, it’s dark, it’s smelly, it hasn’t been cleaned for a week.
‘I used to go in there at 9am and find these blokes on the sofa having a kip from overnight news channel shifts... the men would look resentful that I roused them from their beauty sleep.’ Miss Jones, who is married to insurance broker Charlie Thomson, added she suffered from ‘maternity leave paranoia’ over her job.
She said: ‘I rushed back to work three months after my first child and there was no need.
‘The BBC went out of their way to tell me not to worry and that they would keep my job.
‘But I was still worried about my stand-in, thinking what if they are amazing, what if they are brilliant.’
Miss Jones, who became pregnant at 39, is promoting her parenting book Winging It, which is aimed at older first-time mothers who continue to work after giving birth. A BBC spokesman said the corporation ‘already offers flexible working, job- shares and childcare vouchers’. They added that BBC Scotland director Donalda MacKinnon is leading research into what more can be done to support mothers, and women more generally, in the workplace.