She had her life planned out: an MBA from New York, a job with an international bank, the seamless transfer to India following her marriage to a Delhi-based businessman. Everything was on track. And then S, who didn’t want to be named, got pregnant.

Back then, the Covid-19 pandemic coupled with technology hadn’t made flexi work and work-from-home the buzzwords they are today. So, when her daughter was born, it became clear to S that like many other new mums, she too had to hand in her papers.

Feminist economists have a neat phrase for what is an everyday life for far too many women around the world. They call it the “motherhood penalty”: the price paid by young mothers when they have children and, like S, drop out of paid work.

The data tells its own story. At just 47.6%, mothers of children below the age of five had the lowest employment rate globally. This was well below the 54.4% for women with no children, and 87.9% for fathers (with or without kids), according to a study of 90 countries by the........

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