Whitepaper: The Mother of all Skills — Leadership skills that can be gained through caregiving
Sally McNamara, senior industry fellow at FORWARD, The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation, writing with director Peter Thomas on challenging the outdated assumption that the only worthwhile skills growth comes through paid work and how surfacing the undervalued and invisible skills of mothers is an important place to start.
In this whitepaper, we examine the following:
- How is it that Australia boasts the most highly educated women in the world yet has such a lack of women in leadership?
- Why we need to value the skills built outside work as much as inside work?
- How can motherhood grow skills that are directly transferable to leadership?
- What are tangible examples of these skills?
- Five ideas for workplace change.
Download the full report here.
RMIT Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Vocational Education and Vice President Mish Eastman says:
“I’m thrilled to see a new way and contemporary manner of thinking about the valuable skills learned through unpaid labour, including stay-at-home parenting duties. We know there remains a barrier for mothers returning to work, and the economic burden that results from this remains unacceptable. It’s time we start to adjust the way we perceive the skills people learn through major life experiences and understand that some of the most critical and difficult-to-teach skills are the human skills we learn through these experiences. Skills like empathy, problem-solving, navigating through complexity and creativity are increasingly important in our ongoing rapid acceleration to a digitally enabled world. They can be seen through a lens of recognition, celebration and value adding to maximise women in leadership, who utilise and implement the many complex leadership skills developed through a range of family leave commitments”.
Everywhere you turn, there is another ‘future skills list’. The one point of consensus is that human skills will become ever more critical in navigating change as a constant state, especially for leaders. These skills are also notoriously hard and costly to teach in artificial workplace training settings.
It’s time we codify the skills gained through transformational life experiences.
There is no better (and more urgent) example to highlight than the transferable skills mothers build in caring for children, as surfaced through dialogue sessions facilitated by RMIT FORWARD with 40+ mothers in 2023.
Whilst we have a long way to go, there has certainly been progress regarding the laws and policies regarding parental leave and returning to paid work. Yet there remains a huge gap between the promise and the lived experience of working mothers.
All the laws and policies in the world won’t change the unwritten rule that parental leave and flexible work are still considered “lost time” in a career. This signals a lack of ambition and commitment, often forcing mothers to choose between their career and their children.
For all the advances of technology, there remains an outdated approach to work design that leaves little choice for mothers who want to invest in their career and their children, job-sharing in leadership roles for instance, is exceedingly rare.
Culture change is complex, long, non-linear, and hard to pin down. Starting with visibility is an accessible and powerful way to begin. Our intention is to increase the visibility of the huge learning and development opportunity that the transition to motherhood and caring for children can represent.
We are not suggesting that only mothers can experience skills growth outside of paid work or that surfacing these skills is a silver bullet solution. We are suggesting that it is a fruitful place to start in shifting cultural bias and stereotypes against working mothers and the enormous toll they take on women—financially, emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Caring for children is not ‘lost time’ or a break from learning and development. We urgently need greater visibility and respect for the skilful work of caring for children to enable parents of all gender identities and couple types to pause, flex and pivot their careers as needed.
Learn more about us at https://rmit-forward.org
