At the best of times, balancing motherhood and a career in TV is incredibly tough. Every year many find that it is simply too hard to juggle the competing demands leading large numbers to drop out every year.

This past two years has, of course, been far from the best of times and a new report lays out how Covid has affected TV working mothers in bleak detail: Locked Down and Locked Out: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mothers working in the UK television industry.

The report, published by The Institute for Screen Industries Research at The University of Nottingham, in partnership with Telly Mums Network, SMTJ and Bectu, finds that the pandemic has had multiple impacts on working mothers’ lives:

49 percent of survey respondents said they had been unable to accept work due to childcare related issues.

Over 55 percent had been part of a production that was either cancelled or postponed.

And 54 percent said they had not been able to find enough work.

The report provides some key recommendations for immediate and longer-term actions that they say must take place to mitigate the effects of disrupted working lives of mothers in TV in the future.

Will they happen? It’s over to broadcasters and production companies; now is the time to take up the challenge.

You can read the full report here.