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Jo Swinson has a suggestion for anyone who thinks maternity discrimination is a problem of the past: read Pregnant Then Screwed. A website cataloguing women’s horror stories, it illustrates how pervasive this prejudice still is.

“It’s not like the gender pay gap, which is at least going in the right direction,” the former Lib-Dem business minister tells me. “This is actually worse than it was in 2005.”

Swinson, the new chair of the charity Maternity Action, can reel off a litany of complaints. The manager who reminded a mother of “contraceptive options” and made the woman work on the day she was due to be induced. The “dinosaur employers who see pregnancy as a burden” and try to force expectant mothers out of the workplace. Women returning after maternity leave to find their job has changed, with new responsibilities that make it impossible for them to continue. Managers making assumptions about what mothers want. “You get that all the time: ‘She’s got children so she won’t want to take on this project or travel.’” The strangest example — which reflects how pregnant temps often get the worst treatment — saw one woman denied use of a loo her pregnant permanent counterparts could use: “She had to use the ones on the other side of the building.”

Swinson was MP for East Dunbartonshire for a decade. She lost her seat in May as Lib-Dem support collapsed and the SNP turned Scotland a lighter shade of yellow. She had previously been tipped as a future party leader.

Post-parliamentary life seems to suit the 36-year-old, though. She looks surprisingly well rested for someone at the beck and call of an exuberant toddler (her two-year-old son Andrew). Her diary is still packed: she’s writing a book about the balance of power between men and women, and has founded her own business, Equal Power Consulting, which advises firms on how to make the most of their female talent.

Her (unpaid) role at Maternity Action — which campaigns for the health and employment rights of pregnant women and new parents — is almost a continuation of what she did in office. Two of her proudest ministerial achievements were to introduce shared parental leave and kick-start gender pay transparency legislation. And in 2013, Swinson enlisted the Equality and Human Rights Commission to do the biggest ever study into pregnancy discrimination, which was due out last year. Its release has been delayed, prompting speculation that the Government may consider the EHRC’s proposals rather onerous. Yesterday, the EHRC revealed that three quarters of working mothers had experienced workplace discrimination as a result of having children. Early findings had also shown that around 54,000 new mothers are forced out of their jobs each year.

Only about a tenth, Swinson says, are women being sacked. For the rest, “it’s made untenable for them to continue”. Sometimes this is rogue employers discriminating but mostly, she thinks, it’s businesses being “poorly informed or thoughtless”.

Later, some women feel unable to go to an employment tribunal due to the £1,200 fee. Since it was introduced in July 2013, claims have plunged. “The fees are acting as a barrier to justice,” Swinson says, adding that she and Vince Cable tried to get a review of the charges in the last parliament “to no avail from the Ministry of Justice”. It has now been launched, though. “The Government should focus on trying to reduce the need for tribunals by resolving problems earlier — not by making tribunals unaffordable.”

Swinson isn’t unsympathetic, though, to the struggle maternity leave can present, for small firms especially. When she was an MP there was a period when three of her six-strong team were off — and it was tricky to manage.

She herself took six months off work after having Andrew, with fellow Lib-Dem Jenny Willott covering her ministerial duties. Swinson still had her constituency work, though, and she recalls flights between London and Scotland with crying baby in tow.

I ask if employers should be more amenable to babies in the office. Swinson’s husband, Duncan Hames, another Lib-Dem ousted last May, was the first MP to take a baby through the voting lobby. “I don’t think that’s a magic solution but there might be circumstances where it could work.”

Another way to help parents is to address the cost of childcare. Swinson feels the money the Government is spending would be better used to provide more free childcare for those most in need. She also believes it should be easier for people to set up as childminders.

Does she think, as Anne-Marie Slaughter famously claimed, that female high-fliers have to be “deputy parents”, their partner the primary carer? “I read that and felt depressed. Different models work for different people but to assume that you always have to have one lead parent feels defeatist. Duncan and I have tried to share things.”

During the election, Swinson handed Andrew over to Hames when she was in London to appear on Question Time so that they both looked after him for three weeks of the campaign.

I note that last year, a headmistress, Vivienne Durham, said girls should be told they have to choose between careers and motherhood. Swinson rages at this. “Nobody says to boys, ‘You have to choose whether you want a career or to be a dad’. ‘Working Dad’ is almost not even a term — as though being a dad isn’t enough of a role.”

A future feminist front, she adds, will be helping fathers perform more caring responsibilities. Shared parental leave was a start but relatively few men have taken it. Swinson believes this will change over time. “If you’re the first man in your organisation that takes it, you are a bit of a pioneer. Then, it’s that little bit easier for the second man.”

She believes the Government’s decision to extend it to grandparents is an error, though. “The net result will be that fewer dads take shared parental leave. It’ll be: ‘Well, darling, parental leave won’t work for my career — but don’t worry, mother will help out’.”

Along with Nick Clegg, Swinson had also hoped to extend paternity leave to six weeks but this was shouted down by the Tories. “We did get a lot of change. But given that there were such a small number of women in politics, it was not always easy to get the changes you wanted because there wouldn’t always be other voices in the room backing you up.”

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What, then, does she think of the Women’s Equality Party? “It’s an interesting initiative. Having more energy of people campaigning for equality for women in politics is undoubtedly a positive thing. They want not to have to exist. I want them not to have to exist. But we are in a situation where across the different elements of society, power is concentrated in the hands of men.”

Swinson doesn’t believe quotas are the solution, though. “Even in the Labour Party, where they have more women MPs and all-women shortlists have helped, they still selected three men [in the recent contest]. I thought in all those contests the best candidates were women, yet not one woman won.”

The Lib-Dems now have just eight MPs — eight white men. Swinson grimaces at the memory of May 7 2015 (“a shocker”) but admits she wasn’t surprised to lose her seat. The nadir for her came watching Simon Hughes and Cable lose. Then came Clegg’s resignation speech. “It pointed out that we had — and I still believe this — achieved a huge amount in government.” She reels off raising the tax-free allowance threshold, introducing the pupil premium and stopping the snooper’s charter. “It was worth it. I still think we did the right thing.”

Swinson still has a flat in her old constituency, where her parents and sister live, but she now rents a house in Peckham too. “We don’t need to be so close to Parliament so we’ve got more space for Andrew to run around.”

Would she make a political comeback? “I don’t rule it out.” And would that be with the Lib-Dems? She laughs. “I have liberal beliefs, about trusting the individual and giving them the opportunities to make the most of their own lives — that’s how societies are best run. So, yes, I’m still a Liberal Democrat.”

Follow Rosamund Urwin on Twitter: @rosamundurwin