Catherine Petts, an economics graduate, started working at a chartered accountancy firm in the City of London in 1964. At that time, many women felt that returning to work after having a baby was impossible.

“There were no [childcare] facilities for you to work,” she says. In the late 1970s, the only option was to hire a full-time nanny, and there was little part-time work. “Generally jobs were full-time, for everybody at every level.”

Attitudes have changed, but an FT analysis of long-term data shows how decades of government policies in the UK and parts of Europe have had a significant effect in boosting the numbers of mothers who go back to work. The latest annual Eurostat figures show that in the UK, 73 per cent of women aged 20 to 64 are in employment — against an average of 66 per cent in the rest of the EU — a proportion that has been rising steadily for the past decade.