‘There’s no buffer’: One founder on why mothers are being failed

The numbers don’t lie. Every seven minutes, a mum or woman who is pregnant is fired, according to data published in February by Pregnant Then Screwed. Some 74,000 women each year lose their job for becoming pregnant or taking maternity leave – an increase of 37% on 2016.

But what happens to female entrepreneurs who don’t have the potential safety net of an employer and formal HR processes to rely on?

Entrepreneur and mum of two Grace Carter is founder of The Metamorphose Group, a collective of purpose-driven brands built focused on creating positive impact. The group includes Aphra, the creative agency Grace built from her dining table and launched in 2018 aged just 25.

The journalist turned creative strategist is also the founder of Business & Babies. Established in early 2024, the global community of more than 3,500 women lobbies for legislative change to improve the lives of entrepreneurial mothers.

The evolution of Carter’s purpose driven mission took root months into the launch of Aphra.

“I set the agency up in the January [of 2018] and by the March I was pregnant. That pregnancy I miscarried at three months and I was in hospital. I had a really bad hemorrhage and it was apparent to me at that point that if I wanted to do this, I had to have support from an employee. I couldn’t be just a solo founder,” she recalls.

There’s no buffer. There’s nothing in place if I had a miscarriage, baby loss or premature birth.

Grace Carter, The Metamorphose Group

Carter recruited for extra support and within four months fell pregnant with her eldest daughter, now aged five. She was back at work pitching three weeks post C-section.

“I didn’t tell the client that I had just had a baby, because I wanted to win the work and I just knew if I said it, I wasn’t going to get it,” Carter remembers.

She won the contract and never told the client she was just weeks postpartum, instead deciding to juggle the work with the stress of being a new mum. The business scaled quickly to a team of 15 and within two and a half years Carter conceived again.

“I had three miscarriages in that year. The first of the three was really bad and it happened at three months, but I ended up in resuscitation. I was hemorrhaging and was in hospital for a week. The level of interventions were very traumatic,” she explains.

“The doctor said to me: ‘You need to take three weeks of recovery time away from work. I’m happy to sign you off for three weeks and do you a medical note.’ I was like ‘I’m self-employed. There’s no such thing as a medical note. I am my HR team.’”

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Under pressure to keep the business growing, Carter was back at work within three days, including a weekend. Having no time to process her loss and the trauma of her condition, Carter experienced complex PTSD and depression.

After enduring the worst of her miscarriages, she decided to tell her team she’d lost her baby. The trauma of baby loss coincided with her business director leaving the business, which only added to the intense pressure.

“I remember Googling ‘How to tell my team that I’ve lost a baby’ and there was nothing out there,” she recalls.

“I felt very isolated and very alone. I had this environment where you just didn’t talk about these things. On LinkedIn, it wasn’t something where I could find other people that had gone through this. All the agency events I went to were predominantly male. All the business events I went to were predominantly male. All of my peers in agencies, I had great relationships with lots of them. They’re all male. I just didn’t have anyone to talk to.”

Surviving trauma

Falling pregnant with her second daughter, Carter spent the months leading up to her C-section getting the business ready to function without her. She employed a graphic designer, head of finance and salesperson, as well as setting up a recurring revenue model for the agency.

But things didn’t work out as planned.

The finance chief handed in her notice the day Carter gave birth, while the salesperson struggled to deliver on targets. She pitched the week before giving birth to secure work for the agency, only to find out the day of her C-section that Aphra hadn’t won the business. Carter managed to win the contract two weeks later, which meant jumping on sales calls a week after giving birth.

On the same day her daughter was born, a key customer on a 12-month retainer cancelled business worth £3,000 a month. In the following days, Carter also discovered another customer had racked up £30,000 worth of unpaid bills, still unpaid to this day.

“I’m going through the first four weeks of having a baby and knowing I’m now £30,000 down in cash, whilst trying to navigate a lack of sales. I ended up having a mental health breakdown,” she explains.

Carter recalls the health visitor walking in and feeling like she couldn’t function.

“My mood had crashed to the point of feeling suicidal, and I was just saying to her: ‘This isn’t who I am. I’m not this person. I go and pitch in meetings, I’m a strong person.’ I was just a mess,” she says.

The NHS struggled to support her as an entrepreneur fighting to hold her business together, who didn’t fit the mould of a typical new mum.

I’ve sat on so many panels where people have said ‘I don’t understand why women are being penalised’ and I’m like ‘It’s children.’ I don’t how many times I can say it.

Grace Carter, The Metamorphose Group

“I had one mental health nurse say to me: ‘Can’t your husband’s salary cover your wage so you don’t have to work?’ And I was like: ‘My husband is not my business. Yes, personally he adds to the pot, but it’s not about my earnings. It’s about my business overheads’,” she recalls.

“Then she said to me, and it’s always stuck with me: ‘If you’re clever enough to learn how to run a business, you’re clever enough to learn how to take maternity leave.’”

Despite the immense strain, Carter decided the best way to support her business was to put herself out as a consultant. She secured a client worth £7,000 a month, however from the start, the project didn’t feel right.

Despite bleeding heavily – a serious concern given her history of hemorrhage – Carter delivered a day of consultancy in London. The client implied the sessions hadn’t gone well.

He went on to undermine her, questioning her memory and gaslighting her on multiple occasions. Despite knowing she was a new mum, the client showed no empathy for her situation.

After talking him around, Carter was asked to develop a 30-day campaign. She devised a 90-day strategy, including a 30-day campaign and three months to check the results. He fired her that day.

The Aphra founder also experienced discrimination from a former business coach. Four weeks postpartum, he chose to gather negative feedback from Carter’s clients within his wider networking group, which then represented 80% of her business. He kicked her out of the networking group, alleging she was “not meeting the standards” and claiming when challenged her team were lying to her.

“Within two months of having a baby, I’d lost £15,000 a month of recurring revenue,” she recalls.

“I had hit rock bottom. I basically had only a handful of clients that I could lean on for work. The economy had tanked and I had a new baby. I was like, what the hell do I do?”

Pushing for change

Determined not to lose everything she’d built and convinced she had nothing left to lose, Carter fought back. She took out a bank loan and spent last year building the kind of business she wanted to run.

“I pivoted the agency to work with social impact clients and to do more work in that space. I built out a number of brands, platforms and communities to support what I was doing under The Metamorphose Group – the agency header – and I started to run different campaigns fighting for better infrastructure for female entrepreneurs,” she explains.

Her experience revealed female founders have no support when they give birth. As Carter had taken maternity pay, for example, she wasn’t allowed to work in her business, except during 10 keeping in touch days (KIT), nor was she able to expense her childcare.

“How the hell does a business survive on 10 keeping in touch days? The maternity pay I got worked out at about £4,500 for six months. It cost me £50,000 a month to run my business. So how the hell is £4,500 for six months meant to cover the impact of taking out someone who’s responsible for bringing in £50,000 a month?” she asks.

“I realised I was not protected in any way from discrimination, whereas had I been employed, the experience I had with that client would have been an employment tribunal and I would have been entitled to a payout. I have basically experienced the worst kind of discrimination. I’ve got no protection. I’ve got no financial support. There’s no buffer. There’s nothing in place if I had a miscarriage, baby loss or premature birth.”

There’s so many positive things that have come out of it and I find my career a million times more fulfilling than I ever have.

Grace Carter, The Metamorphose Group

Carter has since made it her mission to bring about change at the highest level, submitting evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee and building out the Business & Babies community.

She suggests most studies on female entrepreneurs have a blindspot around motherhood.

“I’ve sat on so many panels where people have said ‘I don’t understand why women are being penalised’ and I’m like ‘It’s children.’ I don’t know how many times I can say it,” she says.

“It’s giving birth, it’s having children, it’s doing school runs. It’s being the default parent when kids are sick. It’s children, but no one is saying it.”

The push to equalise funding for male and female founders can also be misleading. Female-founded startups accounted for 2% or less of venture capital funding invested in Europe and the US in 2023, according to market data firm PitchBook. While she doesn’t dispute the funding gap, Carter questions the lack of investment in her as an individual.

“You try getting a loan when your payslip shows maternity pay. It’s even harder because they’re like: ‘You’re on maternity. Why on earth should we trust that your business is going to make money?’” she explains.

Entrepreneurial mothers would benefit from government-backed loans with a built-in grace period for repayment, Carter suggests. She also wants to see a dedicated taskforce and investment pot for mothers running their own businesses, funding research into why women are exiting their companies.

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Carter cites 2019’s Rose Review, which calculated up to £250bn in value could be added to the UK economy if women started and scaled new businesses at the same rate as men. The report found family responsibilities are “a barrier to entrepreneurship” and the biggest challenge for entrepreneurial mothers is the struggle to balance family and business demands.

The review suggested it would make a difference to provide targeted financial support, as well as subsidised and accessible childcare and co-working spaces with childcare. Carter has never seen anything done in response.

Her own recommendations are based on her experience and that of the Business & Babies community.

One female founder in the community gave birth to a stillborn baby at full term and was back within two weeks working in her agency. Another agency owner estimated the cost to her business of having a baby was £200,000. Other women have left their businesses entirely.

As it stands, Carter would not advocate entrepreneurialism as a potential career to her daughters given the discrimination she has faced. However, in spite of the trauma, she is hopeful, describing last year as being like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

“The outcome for me has been nothing but positive. My LinkedIn audience has grown to 20,000 plus now. I’ve had people asking me to do podcasts, keynote speeches, events, panel discussions. I’ve had leads come through it. I’ve built communities. I’ve built my brands. I’ve built my self-esteem back up,” says Carter.

“There’s so many positive things that have come out of it and I find my career a million times more fulfilling than I ever have. I would have never done it had I not got to my lowest point, so in many respects I’m grateful for the experience.”

Marketing Week will be exploring what more can be done to help working mothers as we continue our wider series.