What a lot of old tosh and I'm not talking about what the PO with 20 years service did after finding juggling 2 kids and a job although it was a tad misguided. If any of you lot are personnel managers, flt commanders, bosses etc then I suggest you take a long cold look at what you have written and think about what you are implying in your posts. I wonder if you would have reacted any differently if it had been a guy who was in this situation and taken this action....... Maybe we should ban all women from having children for their period of service - have you been smoking crack!! This woman worked for 17 years before it became a problem. Sod it we might as well just ban all relationships/families entirely as they get in the way of the services needs. Lets face facts, the Forces are crap at looking after the needs of their personnel including families, which is a tad unfortunate seeing as people are the main asset we have to work with. Luckily some of you hide behind your somewhat outdated and frankly sexist attitude that the service knows best and who cares its always been this way. I'm damn glad I don't work for you and I live happily knowing that you treat everyone in the same way ensuring that people who do sport, get their cars fixed, run errands, pick kids up from school, go to school play etc etc do it all in their free time and never during company time and that no flexibility will be tolerated as we're so busy. In a short stretched airforce the attitude of like it or lump it simply drives people away. The vast majority of women don't have kids because they want to get out of the service or work shorter hours although that may be a revelation to some posters. For you X factor junkies maybe the horse crap that some of the girls have to put up with whilst juggling motherhood and a career kind of justifies it. This case could probably been avoided by some intelligent (wo)man management at the immediate supervisor level, not gone all the way to a tribunal. Sorry but I think it shows the poor leadership/management and outdated attitudes that are prevalent in an organisation which pays lip service to looking after its personnel. Hide behind the 'woman know your limits' attitude if you want or have the balls to do something about it. Good leadership costs nothing!!!!
Rant off.