A UK advocacy group called Pregnant Then Screwed set up a shredder at a Westfield shopping centre in London and invited people to watch it destroy CVs in real time. The campaign, called The Career Shredder, launched on February 27, 2025, with a tagline that pulled no punches: “Mum, you’re fired.”
The number behind it
74,000 mothers face discrimination in the UK every year when pregnant, on maternity leave, or returning to work. That figure was 54,000 in 2016, a 37% rise in under a decade. Of those affected, 98% cannot pursue legal action. The problem is not shrinking. It is growing, quietly, while most of the public conversation around workplace equality focuses elsewhere. The Career Shredder was built to make that gap impossible to ignore.
The execution
The shredder appeared live at Westfield and was simultaneously streamed so people across the country could watch CVs being fed into the machine in real time. A companion website at careershredder.com let women connect their LinkedIn profiles and submit their own CVs to be shredded digitally. The act of destroying a CV is something every working person understands immediately. It does not need a footnote or an explanation. It lands as a gut reaction before the brain has processed the statistics.
Posters ran across the UK timed to coincide with the airing of The Apprentice, one of the most watched employment-themed programmes on British television. The timing was deliberate. A show built around hiring and firing, watched by millions on a weeknight, became the backdrop against which the campaign placed the reality of what happens to mothers in the actual workforce. Women’s stories ran in print media and on major podcasts alongside the outdoor and digital activity.
Creative director Gemma Phillips, who has served as consultant creative director for Pregnant Then Screwed since 2022 after 12 years at Saatchi and Saatchi, described the problem plainly: pregnancy and maternity discrimination “just doesn’t make business sense.” She has spoken about the instinct organisations have to soften difficult truths, saying “brands have an instinct to sugarcoat.” The Career Shredder was built on the opposite principle. The machine made the act of removing a mother from the workforce into something you could watch happen in front of you.
The awards and the Commons
The campaign was raised in the House of Commons and went on to win at the Creative Circle awards, taking eight Golds, three Silvers, and two Bronzes. That level of recognition across both the political and creative industries reflects what the campaign managed to do: it connected a legal and policy failure to a visual moment that stuck.
The wider series
The Career Shredder sits within a body of work Pregnant Then Screwed has built over several years to make systemic discrimination tangible at street level. An earlier campaign used billboard copy that read “UK paternity leave is a mother f**ker,” framing the paternity leave issue as one that damages fathers and families alongside mothers. The framing shifted the conversation away from a purely women’s issue toward something that affects the structure of how work and caregiving are divided at home.
The most recent campaign in the series placed giant neon “33% OFF” retail clearance stickers on women across billboards in seven UK cities to represent the pension gap. Women retire with pension pots 33% smaller than men’s on average, a direct consequence of the career breaks and reduced hours that workplace discrimination and inadequate parental leave policies push them into over decades of working life. The sticker campaign, titled “Thanks for your service*,” connects the financial endpoint of the same journey The Career Shredder made visible at its beginning.
Taken together, the campaigns form a single argument told in three acts. A mother is pushed out of the workforce. Her career is shredded. And at the end of her working life, the pension system marks her down by a third. Each campaign in the series operates on the same logic: take a statistic that is easy to dismiss and turn it into a physical image that cannot be explained away.
Campaign Name: The Career Shredder
Agency Name: Not mentioned
Brand Name: Pregnant Then Screwed
Location: United Kingdom
