How Mumsnet transformed Britain
Twenty-five years since it launched, Mumsnet has evolved from advice forum to campaigning giant to pillar of online British life. There you will find informed and occasionally eccentric advice on an astonishing range of subjects: pregnant guinea pigs, husbands who 'dunk their penises' in mugs after sex, how to deal with post-natal depression, the Lucy Letby case, the war in Ukraine. It's all there.
'The thing that makes me happiest is that it gives ongoing support and community to complete strangers every day,' says founder and CEO Justine Roberts. 'A lot of the internet is an unfriendly and quite depressing place these days, but there are large pockets of mums that give the lie to the fact that humans are polarised and essentially self-interested. People go out of their way every day to help complete strangers.'
While other early internet forums have been superseded by social media, Mumsnet has endured. Today it employs 70 people and turns over nearly £9 million in revenue. With more than eight million monthly users, it is far and away the UK's most popular parenting website.
Mumsnet is also one of the most influential political forums in the UK, with the power to help politicians rise and fall and bring fringe issues to mainstream concern.
MPs on the rise expect to submit to a Mumsnet Q&A. A rich lexicon has emerged from the more than six billion words on the site, particularly a potent battery of acronyms, including AIBU (Am I Being Unreasonable, the most popular topic on the site), SAHM (stay at home mum), DH (Darling Husband), SWI (Shagging with Intent), LTB (Leave the B------).
Several policy changes have been brought about by Mumsnet activism. In 2011 the Mumsnet campaign for Better Miscarriage Care led to a change in NHS guidelines. The following year they turned their attention to sexual assault with a 'We Believe You' campaign. Other initiatives have fixed a spotlight on anything from school funding to pandemic support and getting retailers to stop selling products that project adult sexuality onto children.
Just as important as any single campaign, Mumsnet serves as a permanent reminder to anyone seeking election that parents, and mothers in particular, are a powerful and motivated group of voters. Roberts has been careful never to reveal how she votes, although she has not ruled out some kind of direct political career.
But the overall political stance that emerges from the forums is a compassionate, common-sense kind of conservatism, rooted in the members' experience of what works when it comes to doing best by your family rather than grand ideology. Ignore them – and Mumsnet – at your peril.
It all started in 1999, when Roberts went on a first family holiday with her nine-month-old twin sons. It was not a triumph. 'I made some very, very poor choices – about where to go, what time zone, how far the flight was,' she recalled recently. 'And the resort, as it turned out, wasn't at all family-friendly, even though it was supposed to be.'
It must rank as one of the most successful disastrous family holidays in British history. This was during the first dotcom boom, when everyone had an idea for a business that would harness the power of the internet to meet some pressing need and make everyone rich. Not all of them worked out. For every Lastminute.com there was a Pets.com, for every Google an AskJeeves.
Sitting around the pool, commiserating with other parents about what a mistake they had all made, Roberts had a 'lightbulb moment'. She could create a forum where parents who had already made similar mistakes could share their accumulated knowledge.
After earlier work in investment banking and journalism, Roberts was ready to make the change. A few months later, in early 2000, after she had enlisted a friend, Carrie Longton, to be a co-founder, Mumsnet was born – a place where strangers might answer the 'awful lot of questions' Roberts had, and for which 'my immediate circle of family and friends couldn't provide all the answers'.
The site's early growth was slow and steady, spreading by word of mouth as mothers, often at home feeling stressed and lonely, discovered in Mumsnet a reliable source of good-humoured wisdom and advice.
It got a publicity boost in 2006, when Gina Ford, the strict-parenting guru, threatened to sue to have the site taken down for 'defamatory' postings. 'That was stressful,' Roberts recalls.
Another stressful moment was the infamous 'penis beaker' thread, a discussion about post-coital hygiene, technically titled 'Do you dunk?', which went viral around the world, drawing so much traffic that the site crashed.
If it caused a headache on the server front, it was also a reminder of one of Mumsnet's key strengths: it is extremely funny. A 'Mumsnet Classics' thread collates some of the most popular threads over the years. To browse the site is to marvel at the unusual scrapes people get themselves into. Husbands especially.
One ate a suet ball intended for the bird feeder thinking it was an 'artisan scotch egg', another got annoyed because his wife was so moved by the Sistine Chapel she started screaming, another started speaking like a pirate in the bedroom. One exceptional thread detailed being unable to leave the house because a 'tiny elderly Korean lady' was sitting in a deckchair in the garden.
'People don't think mums are funny,' says Roberts. 'It's a nice by-product over the 25 years that the humour on Mumsnet may have changed a few minds.'
David Cameron was the first party leader to realise Mumsnet's political potential when he did a live chat in 2006 after returning to work following paternity leave.
A few years later, the site was sufficiently influential that the 2010 General Election was dubbed 'The Mumsnet Election'.
In late 2009, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown weathered a squall of bad headlines when he was apparently unable to answer what his favourite biscuit was during a live chat (his staff claimed he hadn't seen the questions). In the run-up to the vote, political parties advertised on the site and all the leaders submitted to wide-ranging policy questions. Brown described Mumsnet as a 'national institution'.
In 2022, Roberts interviewed the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the Partygate scandal. Johnson, who had been Roberts' neighbour in Islington years ago, and who had been accused of ducking rigorous media interviews, appeared to be caught off-guard by the forensic and forthright nature of the questions, both on the rule-breaking gatherings held in Downing Street and how he balanced work and family life.
But the site has also made headlines for other reasons. In 2011, a user called Riven Vincent posted saying that she had asked social services to take her severely disabled daughter into care. 'I can't cope,' she wrote, adding that she only had six hours to herself per week. Her case attracted more than 1,000 sympathetic responses and made front-page news. The same year, Roberts launched Gransnet, a similar site aimed at the over-50s.
Mumsnet has a policy of not accepting advertising from any business it perceives to run contrary to its mission to make parenting easier: gambling companies, or products that play on gender stereotypes.
Moderators ensure that nothing illegal is posted, but Mumsnet's neutral approach – and its policy of allowing users to post anonymously – has not been without incident. Some of the opinions posted on the Feminism: Sex and Gender topic, where users discussed transgender issues, led to the New York Times calling Mumsnet 'transphobic'.
Undeterred by these kerfuffles, Mumsnet continues. The latest campaign, Rage against the Screen, wants to 'inform parents about the dangers of smartphones and social media', which are 'poisoning' children, and pressure the Government into enforcing strict age limits on social media.
Popular threads this week included one user asking for advice over her 'husband's food preferences', which are 'driving me crazy', and another asking: 'AIBU To be uncomfortable after my manager went on a rant about how much she hates Meghan Markle during a team meeting?'
In a third post, which prompted 80 replies within two hours of being posted on Tuesday, a 26-year-old woman asked whether she was 'expecting too much from my partner' given her concerns about how little he contributes to their household workload, while expecting her to do his washing, and make him breakfast and a packed lunch each day.
Although Roberts is threatening to age into the Gransnet demographic, she says she has no plans to retire.
'I've always thought the whole mission was that if you can tap in to the wisdom and friendship of others, and the people who have been there and done that, then it will make your parenting job easier,' Roberts says. 'That remains our thought today, tapping into the wisdom of eight million women.
'Very little of [Mumsnet] is about parenting any more. It's about women's everyday lives and the challenges they face. It's a window on everyday life and it's dominated by women, and that's quite unusual on the internet.'
Twenty-five years on, Mumsnet is still providing its millions of users with answers. But it is asking the big questions, too.
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