That is outrageous about the extension. I must say my supervisor etc have been very accommodating wrt my having a baby and my dept is generally very child-friendly - that is one way in which I have been lucky.

Well done managing all this with two young children - I fnd it hard enough with one.

Your comment that they might expect to see a man made me laugh, picturing a pregnant woman coming into the interview--! I think that pregnancy should be a non issue. It is too bad that in this day and age it is, and that you have to walk around on eggshells about how to deal with what, HELLO, is part of the human condition. And the assumption that a pregnant woman or a mom does less than other women without children or men without any regard for whether they have children is just plain wrong. As said, in my own limited knowledge of this, pregnant women and women with newborns in my law school had the best marks on average.

You could always offer any objectors the idea of my gap decade( decade and a half?) from the age of 18, in which case these dilemmas, if they do exist about women bearing children would be a non issue, or minimised, because of the timing of the gap decade! Why should you have to shoehorn yourself around some antiquated system and Neanderthal views on women? I think its well time for the system to change.