The lost tribe of childless women | Jody Day | TEDxHull

1 in 5 women in the UK over 45 don’t have children – a much bigger number than most people realise. Misrepresented or ignored in the media, marketing and politics, the butt of social jokes such as ‘the crazy cat lady’, and denied the status of ‘real’ women because they aren’t mothers, this is the biggest diversity issue HR hasn’t heard of. Yet this lost tribe, hidden in plain sight, have a lot to teach us about how scared we are of what we don’t understand, and how, as a society, we are missing a huge trick by excluding them from
the mainstream.

Jody Day is a British author, trainee integrative psychotherapist and the founder of Gateway Women, the global friendship and support network for childless women which has a reach of two million women. She’s a founding and board member at AWOC.org (Ageing Without Children) and a former Fellow in Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge Business School. She is the author of 2016’s Living the Life Unexpected: 12 Weeks to Your Plan B for a Meaningful and Fulfilling Future Without Children (Bluebird/PanMac), which the British Medical Journal has recommended as “the book to recommend to… patients when they face coming to terms with unavoidable childlessness.” She lives in London with her cat, a stereotype that she warmly and humorously subverts.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx