The mother of all skills
Sally McNamara development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and with development partners Soolin Barclay, Helen Babb Delia, Courtney Guilliatt, Daniel Bluzer-Fry, Inder Singh, Pete Cohen, and Kate Spencer — on how we can recognise the valuable transferable skills attained through motherhood to build women’s confidence and contribution, for the benefit of all in the workplace.
Most of the conversation around pregnancy and the transition to motherhood in the workplace has been centred around legal rights like job protection and maternity leave entitlements. Whilst indisputably important factors, they are only scratching the surface of how we could be acknowledging women through such a profound transition — for the benefit of women, families and workplaces.
Anthropologists refer to the process of becoming a mother as “matrescence” — a process of such significant neurobiological change that it has been likened to the amount of change and growth that we experience in adolescence. We are only just beginning to understand how this change impacts women and grows their physical, mental and emotional capacity in valuable ways that can extend far beyond caregiving.
Women give up a lot to go through this transition — bodily autonomy; energy; time; income; superannuation; promotion opportunities— to name a few. And the losses stack up over time — according to a Women in Super report, in Australia, the average career break taken to care for children is six years. When women do return to work, it is often part-time with more limited opportunities for advancement. A recent Treasury report found Australian women experience a decade-long “motherhood penalty” on their incomes, earning on average less than half of their pre-birth wage in the first five years after childbirth. Contributing to women retiring with around 23% less super than men, and a stubborn gender pay gap where women still earn $253.50 less per week — adding up to a startling $13,182 lost in a year.
Additionally, a lack of education and understanding of the transition to motherhood results in mothers (and others) believing they have ‘lost their edge’, been afflicted with the dreaded ‘baby brain’ — and are no longer capable of stretch projects or promotions. As a culture, we just haven’t valued the skills of motherhood and how transferable they are to the workplace. Meanwhile, the non-birthing partner’s career (regardless of gender), can often carry on as though nothing has changed.
If we really do believe that durable skills (such as self-awareness, resilience, adaptability, empathy and more) are the critical skills of the future (as is so widely declared) — perhaps we could make the not-so-great imaginative leap to reframe life experiences like matrescence as the powerful upskilling experiences they are. Instead of “time out” of the workforce, what if we talked about it as a period of supercharged upskilling?
One example is what we tend to denigrate as “baby brain”, which is actually an incredibly smart restructuring of the social brain where brain areas responsible for empathy and theory of mind — the ability to understand another person’s thoughts, feelings or needs — are fine-tuned. What’s more valuable — remembering if you sent an email (yes, it’s annoying, but not critical) or being able to put yourself in a colleague’s shoes and support them through a tough time?
Whilst the process of matrescence remains an under-researched area, there is growing research on this period of significant development — The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health reflects: “It’s well-understood that the extreme hormonal fluctuations of pregnancy prepare a mother’s body for the physical aspects of motherhood — growing a child, giving birth, and producing breast milk. But what we’re beginning to understand now is how the hormonal changes prepare her brain for the behavioural, mental and emotional tasks of caregiving”. If you replace “caregiving” with “collaborating with colleagues” — we can begin to consider how the skills may actually be quite similar.
At FORWARD we have aggregated the most critical capacities of future leaders through our made program — and we know that a lot of these involve bringing a greater degree of care to the workplace. For instance, managing employee wellbeing is now a top priority for leaders— to do so effectively requires a good dose of self-awareness, vulnerability and empathy — all capacities that are pressure tested in the transition to motherhood.
Natural upskilling opportunities:
- Self-awareness Increased brain plasticity through pregnancy and the postpartum period combined with the identity shift of becoming a mother and practising emotional regulation in caring for a newborn require high levels of self-awareness and practicing a growth mindset — especially persisting in the face of daily setbacks!
- Resilience Continuing work and other life tasks in the midst of physical discomfort and stress — morning sickness, exhaustion, insomnia, loosening joints, swelling hands and feet, backache, hair and skin changes, dry eyes, heartburn and more. Often accompanied by uncomfortable mental shifts — such as a heightened threat response which can lead to an increased sense of fear and anxiety in service of protecting the baby. Then there is the additional stress and uncertainty some women have to endure to even become pregnant, through IVF for instance.
- Adaptability Questioning sense of self in the midst of continuous change outside of your control, including wrestling with a changing identity and how to balance work aspirations and motherhood.
- Empathy Growing activity in the region of the brain where empathy lives, including the ability to understand another person’s thoughts, feelings or needs (verbal and non-verbal).
Whilst there is much still to discover about the adaptive evolution that occurs during matrescence, researchers believe a woman’s brain may change more quickly and more drastically during pregnancy and the postpartum period than at any other point in her life — including puberty. Importantly — there is a very intelligent reason behind these changes, which, if better understood, could play an important role in helping mothers-to-be normalise and grow confidence through the experience rather than berating themselves for “baby brain” or lack of perceived capacity.
A sense of confidence and empowerment at a time when everything is changing so rapidly is a critical element to how women will experience work through their pregnancy and, therefore, how they will return to work or not. As this NYT article summarises: “Women are often left with a false binary: They either have postpartum depression, or they should breeze through the transition to motherhood” — there is little acknowledgement of the significant transformation that occurs for all mothers and the value that brings society and workplaces. As one D&I leader in Australia recently reflected to me: “One obvious skill of motherhood is the ability to spot potential and nurture it — this is just one example of a highly transferable skill we need all of our leaders to have”.
Helping mothers to surface and articulate the skills they have gained through matrescence would allow them to build confidence in their capacity to perform in paid work as well as at home — we believe having a multiplier effect on the mother’s well-being, the family’s well-being and the workplace's well-being. If a woman felt empowered and encouraged to speak about the skills she has gained rather than apologise for the challenging side-effects of this transformation — we might see more women backing themselves for leadership roles and integrating their work and life skills for the benefit of all.
Perhaps we could start in workplaces by providing basic education on the mental, physical, emotional and behavioural changes of transition to motherhood — honouring them collectively and helping mothers to surface the skills they are learning in real-time for even greater confidence and contribution.
As reproductive psychiatrist — Alexandra Sacks — puts it: “we need to normalise the discomfort of this transition”— there are far too many women who feel isolated in the natural push and pull of becoming a mother — shattering their confidence and mental health not only at home, but in general.
“When a baby is born, so is a mother, each unsteady in their own way. Matrescence is profound but it’s also hard — and that’s what makes it human” (Alexandra Sacks, reproductive psychiatrist).
Let’s help women to understand and codify this profound experience as one that makes them more skilled for well-paid work, not less. If we can finally see and value the transferrable skills of motherhood, we can create the opportunity to value caring skills at work more generally, regardless of gender or specific experience — which can only result in healthier people and healthier workplaces
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
Contact us at forward@rmit.edu.au
