This is how you shut down parental discrimination in the workforce

Lorraine Murphy is the founder of the Remarkables Group and a Business Chicks Premium member. She’s the formidable social media gun who recognised back in 2012 the power influencers have on what we buy. She created an agency where brands and influencers could work together to amplify their reach. In short, she creates brand magic. If you want people to talk about your product, you talk to Lorraine.

Right now, she’s in London for business meetings with her three-month-old baby Lexi in tow. But one of her scheduled meetings didn’t go ahead as planned when an email about accomodating her newborn baby was accidentally sent to her by mistake.

“Someone I was supposed to be meeting with next week accidentally emailed me instead of their assistant this morning. If women can’t support other women then the future for working parents looks pretty dire,” Lorraine posted on her LinkedIn page.

Here’s the email trail:

She describes feeling like she’d been “punched the guts” while reading the email.

We know the pregnancy and parental discrimination statistics are dire, but it’s especially crushing when it’s a female limiting another women’s career path or ambitions.

Lorraine has been a loyal supporter and member of our community for years, and we know first hand that she is deeply passionate and committed to helping other women start their own businesses. She gives back and she pays it forward.

I had a very interesting experience on Friday… I had arranged to have a lunch meeting with someone next week, and let her know that I’d have Lexi in tow. She then sent me an email meant for her assistant, which indicated she wasn’t super impressed at this fact. Reading the email, I felt like I’d been punched the guts. The fact that it came from a fellow woman made it all the worse and it immediately reminded me of this quote by Madeleine Albright. If you want to see the exchange, check out my story. I would never expect someone to sit through a meeting with a cranky or demanding baby, so it brought out my mama bear massively when I know how angelic Lexi is in meetings! The upside to all of this is that it’s started a conversation (50,000 people have seen my Linked In post), I’ve had the most lovely comments and messages, and Lexi and I have a whole hour freed up in our calendars next week. 😝

A post shared by Lorraine Murphy (@lorraineremarks) on Sep 10, 2017 at 1:21am PDT

The upshot is that this incident has sparked a conversation about flexibility and how we view new mothers in the workplace. Within days, 50,000 people had viewed Lorraine’s LinkedIn post and she was flooded with comments and messages of support.

After hearing about ‘Emailgate,’ the Founder & Global Executive Creative Director of One Green Bean, Kat Thomas, invited Lorraine and Lexi to meet for coffee in London.

lorraine murphy