One in five women in the UK steps back or drops out of her career after having children.
Zoe Duce, who spent a decade building a fast-paced career in media before becoming a mother, says the problem is not ambition. It is the near-total absence of systems, planning and process around one of the biggest transitions in a woman’s working life.
The scale of the problem should trouble any employer. More than a quarter (27 per cent) of mothers either don’t return to work after maternity leave or leave within a year of coming back, with most citing poor employer processes, a lack of flexibility and difficult reintegration. Previous research suggests the juggling act has driven a quarter of a million women out of their jobs altogether.
The financial toll is equally stark. ONS analysis shows mothers’ monthly earnings fall by an average of 42 per cent within five years of a first child, a motherhood penalty worth more than £65,000 per woman.
Duce planned her own return with enthusiasm, only to be blindsided.
“Maternity leave hit me harder than I expected mentally. I’d built my life around a fast-paced career in media for 10 years, and then overnight, it just stopped. It felt like going cold turkey; one minute I was surrounded by people and energy, the next it was quiet, isolating, and completely unfamiliar. I felt like I’d lost a huge part of who I was.”
What followed was a relentless cycle of collapsed childcare, sick days and shifting work schedules. “Every time I tried to rebuild my life, something would derail it. I felt like I was constantly on the back foot,” she says.
When she opened up to other mothers, the responses were bleakly uniform: “it’s just s**t for a few years” or “this is just how it is”. Duce refused to accept that losing yourself is simply part of the job description.
“For me, that’s the biggest misconception,” she says. “That women choose to step back because they want to. In reality, most are being forced into it because the system around them isn’t set up to make it work. We’re exhausted, overwhelmed and trying to make impossible situations work.”
Her answer was to treat the chaos like an operations problem. She built structured childcare contingencies, clear backup plans with her partner, weekly planning routines and non-negotiable time for work and wellbeing.
“The difference was immediate,” she says. “It wasn’t that the curveballs stopped, it’s that I finally had a way to handle them.”
That experience became MoveThru, a UK company helping professional mothers, and the organisations that employ them, navigate maternity leave and the return to work. With around 590,000 women going on maternity leave in the UK each year, Duce argues that “nobody is owning the process”, leaving mothers, managers and employers improvising through a transition that deserves the rigour of any other business-critical handover. It is a challenge that sits alongside growing pressure on employers to rethink workplace support for reproductive health more broadly.
“At the moment, mums, managers, and employers are all winging it,” Duce says. “But since having children is one of the biggest moments in a woman’s career, it deserves far more structure and attention than it’s currently being given. The solution is planning, not sacrifice.”
For SME owners, who rarely have an HR department to lean on, the message is pointed: retention is cheaper than replacement, and structure beats goodwill. To that end, Duce has created a free downloadable maternity leave and return plan giving women, managers and employers a clear framework, including what staff are entitled to during maternity leave.
“My goal is to remove the guesswork,” she explains. “When mothers and their employers understand what they’re entitled to and how to plan for what’s coming, everything changes.”
Her bigger message is simpler still. “I want women to know they aren’t failing,” she says. “I was told over and over again that this was just how motherhood is supposed to feel. But it doesn’t have to be.”
