Eating your lunch in a toilet cubicle is lonely, uncomfortable and potentially unhygienic – but in too many workplaces it's the only spot women have to express milk or breastfeed.
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There are 112 Australian workplaces that do better and have been named "breastfeeding friendly workplaces" by the Australian Breastfeeding Association.
The Australian National University used to be one of the nationally accredited sites and just this week has ignited a campaign to restore its lapsed status.
Speaking in the Acton Theatre to a group of ANU academics with their bubs, ARC Future Fellow Dr Julie Smith outlined what best practice to support breastfeeding women at work looked like and analysed how the ANU stacked up.
She said in the 1990s ANU was one of the first organisations to get on board with the ABA initiative to recognise workplaces supporting women to do "paid work as well as the valuable work of breastfeeding".
"At that time ANU was a leader, but in the last decade or so things have stood still while other universities have really got on board more energetically," she said.
Dr Smith said it was disappointing her recent research survey found ANU staff were feeding or expressing in toilet areas on campus.
But she said the need to create spaces and time for breastfeeding at work was becoming even more urgent.
Trends show women are returning to work earlier and in the past decade there's been almost a 20 per cent jump in the number of women breastfeeding until their child was six months old.
"In the 90s fewer women, maybe 40 per cent, were breastfeeding their children at six months, that's what has changed," she said.
"There is even more of a clash now so it is nice to see the ANU has a renewed focus on gender equity."
ANU Pro Vice-Chancellor, Professor Richard Baker said taking on his new role overseeing university experience just weeks ago he couldn't comment on why being a breastfeeding friendly workplace had dropped off the radar at ANU.
But he said there was a renewed focus to regain the status.
"We have a new Vice-Chancellor that is a gender equity champion and he had made it very clear he wants me in this role, which he has created, to do as much as I can, as quickly as I can to support gender equity across campus," he said.
CEO Rebecca Naylor said the ACT represented a quarter of all nationally accredited sites but the majority, 19 of all 29 sites, were government run.
University of Canberra has accreditation as does the UNSW campus in Canberra.
She said qualifying could take several months, particularly with large and multi-part organisations such as a university, as workplaces must review policies and existing workplace culture as they establish practices and dedicated space for women to express and breastfeed.
"The process is not an onerous one but it is thorough. We want to know if a workplace is accredited that is meaningful," Ms Naylor said.
"The reason we want that is because breastfeeding is important. It has a significant impact on the health of the community so it is important that is acknowledged and supported."
Canberra comedic duo Sparrow Folk released a single in 2014 that fed into the public discussion on attitudes towards breastfeeding.
Ms Naylor said agitating for change in this area took various forms but it was crucial to address the views about the visibility of women's bodies and take practical steps to enable women to mother wherever they were.
