Lady who told mums: Go back to work and hire a nanny!
WITH her platinum blonde bun, piercing eyes and ruffle-necked tunic shirts, Barbara Judge has a presence befitting her formidable reputation as the ‘best connected woman in Britain’.
When it comes to matters she feels strongly about, the tough-talking American pulls no punches.
Just take the time she addressed a conference in London for women in finance on the thorny subject of maternity leave – and caused uproar by suggesting new mothers should hire a nanny and return to work as soon as possible.
Lady Judge, 71, said in a speech at the Wealth Management Association’s Women In Wealth Forum in 2016: ‘My mother used to say, when a baby is born it needs to be fed, bathed and diapered. An 18-year-old girl can do that. Your job is to get the money to pay the 18-year-old girl.
‘When you have to be there is when the child gets smarter than the nanny.’ She herself took only 12 days off when her only son Lloyd, from her marriage to her first husband, lawyer Allen Lloyd Thomas, was born in April 1983 – far less than the year off which women in Britain are allowed to take.
‘I know it’s counter-cultural but I think long maternity breaks are bad for women,’ she added as she explained how she favoured the US system, where companies with more than 50 employees are obliged to provide only 12 weeks of unpaid job-protected leave.
Her comments angered women’s groups, who said most women could not afford to employ full-time nannies even if they wanted to return to work.
Lady Judge’s views were, claimed Laura Perrins, the coeditor of the Conservative Woman website, ‘part of the elitist feminist agenda and their war on motherhood’. The Institute of Directors distanced itself from her comments, arguing businesses had a ‘legal and moral duty to support parents’.
Born Barbara Sue Singer in New York in 1946, she studied at the University of Pennsylvania, working her way through as a model and waitress before receiving a BA in medieval histies tory in 1966. She then took a postgraduate degree at the New York University School of Law, where she described herself as ‘a bit of a Leftie’, before graduating from there in 1969.
Ten years later she married Allen Lloyd Thomas and at the age of 33 she became the youngest person to be made a member of America’s Securi- and Exchange Commission. Seven months after the birth of their son, they moved to Hong Kong, where she became the first woman to be appointed an executive director of a British merchant bank – Samuel Montagu and Co.
In 1993 she became an executive director of News International. She wanted Lloyd to be educated in England and so the family moved to London in 1994 in order to send him to Eton while she worked for numerous private equity firms.
The couple divorced in 2001. She later met and, in 2002, married City grandee and multimillionaire Conservative Party donor Sir Paul Judge. Sir Paul died last year.
In 2004 Lady Judge landed a £60,000 job working two days a week as head of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, despite no previous experience in the sector. She was awarded a CBE in 2010 for services to the nuclear and financial services industries, before becoming the IoD’s first female chairman in February 2015.
Lady Judge, a gourmand who has written restaurant reviews for Forbes, lives in a vast flat in central London on the Embankment. Bought in 2000 for just under £4.5million, current estimates value the property at around £16.5million.
Addressing the Wealth Management Association’s Women In Wealth Forum in 2016, Lady Judge outlined how to make a good impression in the workplace, saying it was ‘70 per cent about looks, 20 per cent about how you sound and only 10 per cent about what you say’.
In light of the accusations she now faces, how woefully illjudged those percentages could now turn out to have been.
‘A champion of women’