My boss, a woman in her late forties and one of the ‘I chose not to have children’ brigade has some downright diabolical views regarding maternity leave, and it’s usually down to me to protect the female members in my team from her horrible directives.

Take a recent event, a Project Manager with an excellent track record for on-time delivery within budget, had the audacity to reveal her pregnancy. After witnessing the side-lining of other visibly pregnant women in the office, she’d managed to hide her bump successfully for several months in order to get her project to its delivery stage. My boss’s public reaction to this news was a clenched-teeth smile and mutterings of ‘didn’t know he had it in him’.

You see Project Manager’s husband is the IT Director, so she was on pretty safe ground. H