'Boss's insults after I lost my baby'

A senior banker who suffered a miscarriage lost her £100,000-a-year job with Abbey National after her boss said he did not want her "aborting all over the place", an industrial tribunal has heard.

Diana Woodward is claiming more than £1million compensation and lost earnings for the way she says senior managers set out to "destroy" her City career.

Mrs Woodward was made redundant as head of financial institutions in 1994, five months after suffering a miscarriage following years of fertility treatment. She accuses the high street building society - now a bank known as Abbey - of sexual discrimination in preventing her getting a job for five years by either giving her a bad reference, or no reference at all, after she left.

The case is being brought 10 years after she left because it was only in 2002, when she started working for Bupa, that she discovered she had not been given a reference.

Mrs Woodward, 48, of Weybridge, told the London tribunal that the bank's then treasurer, Jonathan Nicholls, was a "chauvinist bully" who humiliated and embarrassed her about her pregnancy in meetings with staff. Following her redundancy, managing director Gareth Jones swore she would "never work in the City again", leaving her clinically depressed and unable to work for five years because Abbey had "destroyed" her career, she said.

She added: "I was later told by colleagues that Mr Nicholls removed me from my post because of the miscarriage and had said, 'We can't have Woodward aborting all over the place'." She said her suspicions that Abbey was poisoning her career were first aroused in 1997 when she was told she had landed a job with the Financial Marketing Association. "Then suddenly it wasn't mine."

She suspected the bank of sabotaging two other job applications with Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. But, she claims, the first concrete evidence came in her Bupa personnel file, which revealed she had not received a reference from Abbey.

The case continues.