Michelle Weston | CRO and Executive Coach
At some point, often in your early 30s, for most people at least, parenthood recalibrates your life and career in a way that doesn’t feel like a recalibration at first, but more like common sense and pragmatism.
One income is higher, and one career is on a slightly faster track. One of you can travel and say yes, absorb uncertainty with less evident sacrifice. So, you adjust and plan, and you tell yourselves it’s a blip in the career journey (usually for women) and that you’ll rebalance soon.
I used to believe that. When I was younger, I believed that if you were skilled and commercially valuable, your career wouldn’t really be affected by a few years of slowdown. It might not be perfect, but the system would even out eventually.
I don’t believe that anymore, not from cynicism but because I have seen how it works and perhaps uniquely as a mother and with a wife at home who was more in danger of suffering from the career ‘blip’. By contrast, I didn’t slow down and worked in financial services for 30 years, many of which I spent as a senior leader, including at board level.
I have sat on enough promotion and succession discussions to know that nobody ever overtly penalises mothers. That’s not how it sounds, what it sounds more like is fairly innocuous judgment calls. Who is available to lead the turnaround right now? Who can move country for 2 years? Who can handle eighteen months of turbulence?
Careers don’t often end because you’ve had children; it’s more of a narrowing. The riskier, more visible projects go to other people. You gain reputation, if anything, you hear confirmation that you are a great performer. However, the steep part of the progression curve, where power consolidates, shifts incrementally away from you, and this matters more than most people realise.
This research validates what many women experience but struggle to articulate. The first significant deviation typically occurs at the transition to management. It’s subtle, but leadership roles are populated from that first tier. Small gaps at 30 magnify by 40. Parenthood for women exaggerates that effect. Gender pay gaps in the UK do not close, and pension gaps are larger still, and by the time their first child enters adulthood, mothers collectively earn significantly less on average than fathers.
Differences in ambition or competence don’t explain that, and you might think that won’t be you. You might have a supportive boss, and you might work for a company that says it values parents, and it might do.
But large institutions are built around availability and deployability, rewarding people who can move easily and are always on. Children are variables that everyone manages well, but they do cause friction and create boundaries.
If your partner’s career is advancing faster, you might decide that one of you needs to be more flexible. It can make sense and can feel strategic. What rarely gets said is that someone else’s uninterrupted progress continues to compound. They build networks, accrue sponsors, gain confidence and benefit from informal authority. When you slow down for any reason, those things can be hard to replicate later. Later also often comes at a time when you have less energy, when you’ve had a few career setbacks that bruise your confidence and when many of the roles that confer genuine power have already gone to someone else.
Fatherhood carries penalties, but in many countries, it also comes with wage premiums. However, many men reach mid-life having earned well, and they vaguely or sometimes painfully regret not having spent more time with their children. I certainly did, and even now, cannot look at photos of my children when they were young without the heartbreak for what I missed. Our system rewards provision far more than presence. The best decision we made was for my wife to maintain her career. For years, it would have been financially simpler if she had been the one to step back completely. My pay was higher, so the short-term logic was very clear: one course of action. We decided early on not to treat one career as primary and the other as expendable. That meant two careers, two professional networks and independent identities. I am not telling you what to do, but I am suggesting you see clearly. The system will not record your sacrifice as you imagine or preserve a place for you at the speed you once moved. It is built to continue with the people who were easiest to advance.
What frustrates me now isn’t that institutions operate predictably, it’s that women make these choices with only partial visibility and then criticise themselves later. They miss out on a promotion and think they didn’t play the game well enough. Someone tells them they aren’t quite ready, and they believe they should work harder. Support diminishes, and they don’t want to seem troublesome, so they say nothing.
Time passes, and then they’re 45. Maybe they’ve got divorced. Maybe they haven’t. But they’re often far more financially vulnerable than they ever thought they’d be. They might walk away with 50% of the assets. That doesn’t replace earning capacity and it doesn’t rebound lost momentum or rewind the years where someone else was compounding leadership currency. And far too many women tell themselves it’s because they weren’t enough.
Institutions only adapt when it’s in their interest, not because you deserve it. They are incentive machines. That’s why legislation, in isolation, can’t work. Flexible working or part-time arrangements can be transformative in a healthy culture. In a toxic one, they make life bearable while leaving power dynamics intact. Studies show that when women work flexibly or part-time without changes to how progression is measured, they see their careers plateau. They stay loyal and make it work believing they will catch up later.
If you work somewhere that truly believes in the commercial benefits of retaining and promoting talented parents, you will see it in the incentives and in who is properly supported and promoted after maternity leave. If you don’t work there, then flexibility in working arrangements isn’t enough to protect your career. They may help you stay and make life easier in the short-term, but if stretch assignments, bonuses and promotions are awarded primarily to those who sustain velocity during life changes, you will slowly plateau, and it might take you decades to notice it.
You should expect more than just policy from your employers. You get to demand managers who understand how careers are built and sustained and insist on advocacy that preserves your trajectory, not just adherence to rules. No one will hold your spot for you. No flexible working policy is going to magically accelerate your progression once you’ve had a child and no company will fight for your career because they feel loyal to you.
Read your environment. Understand where your strengths are valued and where they are not. Sometimes that means fighting for change from within. Sometimes it means moving on.
But it shouldn’t mean waiting for the system to start bending in your favour.
