She would like more companies to become like Diageo, which, she explains, now offers 52 weeks of parental leave, 26 of them paid, to all employees “regardless of gender, sexual orientation and whether the employee becomes a parent biologically, through surrogacy or through adoption”. Since the change in 2019, uptake by men has gone from 23 days to 105, sharing the responsibility of family life equally right from the get go, something she says younger men are particularly keen to do.
“I have quite an equal relationship with my husband” – the pair met on a charity trek in Nepal, when she was 39, they were married two years later. “He’s good with the kids, and he does a lot of cooking, but our entire domestic life, our social life, our holidays, all revolve around me doing it. So it’s not a fair division really. And that starts with shared parental leave because there’s no reason why a dad can’t do everything you can do.”
Bringing in more of these kinds of policies, the report argues, can have massive benefits for UK Plc.. “Women are leaving work in their droves,” Frostrup says, “and that’s talent business can’t afford to lose. Just a 5 per cent increase in the total number of women in employment could boost UK GDP by up to £125 billion every year. Did you know that a quarter of mothers leave the workforce in the first year and the majority are yet to return 10 years post birth….”
But what about the mothers who choose to stay home to raise their own children, I wonder. Or those women who, while they welcome doctors actually diagnosing their menopausal symptoms, don’t want to be seen through a purely menopausal lens?
For the first time she looks a bit frosty, telling me about an older woman she talked to at a dinner party. “She said to me: ‘I don’t know why you keep banging on about menopause, in my day we just got on with it’ and then two glasses of wine later she was telling me about her suicidal ideation and menopause-related depression.”
I want to ask her what her ambitions are from here but no sooner do we get started on her exciting idea for a books podcast featuring such huge names as Tom Hanks than she looks at her watch and announces: “I have to be in Kensington for dinner at 8.30pm”. As she puts on her scarf we go back to chatting about the BBC – how the Huw Edwards debacle and the fuss around Strictly Come Dancing make it seem that top talent there has acted with impunity.
“Well because we all pay for the BBC we have a much more vested interest in it than other big media companies,” she says. “But we’ve got the same basic problem everywhere, of elevating people and worshipping them for reasons that are gossamer thin. The idea of stars behaving badly is as old as time itself… But the BBC gets viewers from stars, so they let them get away with things they shouldn’t.”
As she puts on a coat to scoot out the door, she turns, surveying me thoughtfully.
“Fame is really toxic – it makes people feel like they can do anything and get away with it; it gives them a strange power – which they kind of do have on a day to day basis. But in the end it’s like Icarus, innit. They get burnt.”
And with that she is gone.
Eleanor Mills is the Founder of Noon – home of the Queenager and the author of Much More to Come, Lessons on the mayhem and magnificence of midlife published by Harper Collins