Introduction
You remember that wistful look in your mom’s eyes when she reminisces about her days as a professional? The solemn sigh that leaves your elder sister’s lips when all the siblings get together and talk about their first jobs? The slumped shoulders of the homemaker across your flat, the one who had to give up her job because her partner got transferred?
I know what you’re thinking. ‘Here we go, another diatribe about parental leave and the motherhood tax.’ You’re only partially right.
Hear me out as I break down the mentally excruciating side quests women go on when they take career breaks. This article shall explore opportunity gaps, identity issues, hiring bias, and long-term impacts on women who take career breaks.
Careers Don’t Just Pause But Opportunities Do
Sadly, the economic impacts, such as wage penalties, slowed growth, and retirement gaps, are just the starting point here. The career breaks women take inevitably set them back in a world that’s already determined to hold them back. In the age of instant solutions and instant results, these hiatus periods interrupt women's promotional cycles, meaning women work harder but earn less than their colleagues.
Another troubling (but increasingly common) trend is to put women with career breaks outside the momentum roles and high-visibility projects. Women with career breaks in their record are headed straight for delays in promotions, higher titles, and aren't entrusted with nearly enough high-visibility projects.
‘How can a career break negatively impact a woman in such a manner? Surely, she's exaggerating?’ I wish I were. Let's consider a hyper-realistic scenario here:
You've worked with a client over a long period of time. As a sign of goodwill, they've helped you connect with potential clients and mentors. You went on an unexpected career break, and now your professional networks have dried up. Your client now offers informal opportunities and referrals to your replacement. The outdated skills and career break bias is becoming severely inflated; so much so that women with a career break have a 49% lower callback rate than those with no career breaks.
Image Credits: Pexels
The Identity Shift: Erosion of Occupational Identity and Self Recognition
You see, the thing about women taking career breaks is that it’s not just about money. The core problem is that modern capitalist societies have made access to self-earned money a matter of pride and self-identity. Who are you really if you’re not a girl boss with a larger-than-needed sipper and a 10/10 baddie with chronic burnout syndrome? (Read the self-mockery here).
When a woman briefly steps away from her career, she's not just giving up her source of income. She also loses her sense of validation and confidence in her independent abilities.
The emotional act of stepping away from your career is filled with immense trepidation. On one hand, you're trying to be optimistic while battling your internalized self-doubts. On the other hand, just knowing about workforce re-entry barriers like age-related barriers and skill gaps is breaking you out in hives.
As if that's not enough, the cascade of prolonged job searches and rejections in personal interviews upon re-entry would send anyone spiraling straight into an ice cream tub.
The Motherhood Penalty & Biases
Confusingly, being the bearer of a literal new life is considered a huge red flag for employers. As weird as it sounds, mothers returning to the workforce have to prove their worth while also paying the wage penalty for having children.
Sounds dystopian, but it's true: the wage penalty comes from a variety of factors that are unfortunately too pervasive.
Hiring Bias Against Returnees
It comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that companies tend to view resume gaps as a serious disadvantage for a candidate. I wouldn't be surprised to know that they unofficially rank applicants based on their reasons for taking career breaks. For instance, I would be perceived in a positive light if I took a career break for upskilling or higher education.
The opposite becomes inevitable for caregivers who take career breaks due to childcare. Caregivers might have better social skills in comparison, but employers’ concerns about their flexibility, skills obsolescence, and mental decay take precedence.
Side note: Curiously, I found that employers tend to be harsher on male applicants with career breaks that aren't related to training. This warrants further inquiry and also deserves attention.
Image Credits: Pexels
The “Less Committed” Stereotype
An ideal employee in corporate circles is one who delivers non-stop availability and devotion to work. According to most employers, being “proactive” and “going the extra mile” are professional attributes that caregivers returning to work lack. Caregivers providing eldercare are less discriminated against than those with parental responsibilities. This is likely because of the perception that eldercare is shared across a kin network, whereas mothers shoulder a majority of mental and practical parental responsibilities.
These misconceptions about caregivers being less committed to work make harmful assumptions about ambition and availability that set a dangerous precedent for the future.
Intersectional Compounding Effects
While this topic deserves a dedicated article on its own, I believe that not mentioning it at all would be a greater disservice to minorities across race, class, geography, and sexuality spectrums.
There are many proportions to career breaks that are massively understudied. Homosocial relationships and parenthood, mothers from racial minorities who find even lesser opportunities to return, and economic disparities, which make childbearing and upskilling together an unattainable goal. Women across the world undergo negative scrutiny for even entertaining the idea of going back to work, mainly because of regional and socio-cultural ethics.
The Re-entry Cliff: Structural Barriers
Apart from extreme psychological upheaval, women rejoining the workforce are handled with kid gloves. They're hired at lower levels than the position they last left. The reason behind this enforced downward mobility is graciously given on this platter: “so you can assimilate at your pace”.
Returnship programs are few and far between when it comes to the required amount for women. Even still, the conversion rate from part-time or internship to permanent roles varies from industry to industry.
Furthermore, flexible roles such as part-time and remote work are significantly classified under the hollow sanctions of lower pay, unpaid overtime “just for peak seasons”, growth at a glacial pace, and discouraging titles. In comparison, men’s career advancements, even on a remote work cycle, elucidate higher promotional rates than women who work remotely.
Long-Term Ripple Effects: The Cycle That's Incredibly Hard to Break
We GenZers keep talking about breaking toxic generational cycles, but we forget the most important asset that makes our victory over generational trauma certain. The assets of a steady career, accumulated wealth, and retirement planning. Rapid industrial and technological advancements have made it near impossible to be an up-to-date diva while taking career breaks.
This has a compounding impact on the trajectory of your whole life: your wealth, your savings, your safety blanket, and your financial independence. Studies have found that even high-performing women who took career breaks remain 20-30% behind lifetime earnings compared to no-break peers.
Image Credits: Pexels
We extensively discussed fewer and slower promotion cycles for post-break women earlier; we skipped out on the ripples this has on leadership pipelines. More women on career breaks translates to more women on the leadership board, which ultimately means less representation and equal standards.
Peripheral Note: Circling back to generational trauma cycles, post-break employment setbacks leave a crumbling echo on children's perceptions about gender roles.
Rethinking “Time Away”
Career breaks don't just empty your wallet. They close doors and lock women out of professional spaces where they can excel. Consequently, career breaks need a socio-economic and cognitive narrative reframing. It has to stop being a penalty and start being a capital investment with transferable skills. That can only happen when women have a veritable abundance of flexible leadership roles, returnship programs with actionable projections, and bias training. In short, the rigid career timelines need to exit the stage entirely.
