Working mums: Is marketing only for the ‘chosen few’?

“This is our industry and we came into it thinking it was ours for life.”

As mothers continue to be marginalised, pressured back into the office and see their value questioned, Mums in Marketing (MiMs) founder Claire Ferreira fears marketing is at risk of becoming a career “only for the chosen few”.

She has seen marketers at every stage of motherhood experience discrimination, from being marginalised on maternity leave to pushed out of the workforce entirely. Recalling her mum losing her administrative role in the Royal Navy after becoming pregnant, the Mums in Marketing founder questions how far society has come in the intervening 50 years.

“Businesses need to stop viewing working mothers as a risk or logistical challenge and start recognising them as a significant asset. Until that cultural shift occurs, there’s a considerable journey ahead,” she says.

“Again, we often get culture cited as the reason for the enforced return to the office, and yet there is something unnerving about that to me.”

Great culture, Ferreira argues, can’t only be for those who can start work at 9am.

“We can see the facts and figures. Is it that only the lucky few get to stay in the industry? What message are we sending? Where will it end?” she asks.

We return to work as capable as we were before we left, if not more because nothing will teach you to prioritise and organise quite like having a baby.

Jess Heagren, Careers After Babies

The experiences within the MiMs community correlate with data published in February by Pregnant Then Screwed, which found up to 74,000 women each year lose their job for becoming pregnant or taking maternity leave – an increase of 37% on 2016.

According to the research, half (49.5%) of pregnant women, those on maternity leave and those returning say they had a negative experience at work. Of those who had a negative experience, a fifth (20.6%) left their employer.

Over a third of the sample (35.9%) report being sidelined or demoted while pregnant, on maternity leave, or when they returned to work. Yet, just 2% of women who experience discrimination raise a tribunal claim.

“We’ve long felt things are getting worse, but the research isn’t finger in the air,” says Celia Venables, PR lead at Pregnant Then Screwed.

“Every seven minutes, a mum or woman who is pregnant is now fired. That’s a lot. The numbers have gone up 37%. We know it’s worse, we’re not guessing. That’s a fact. The reason is that whenever businesses face any uncertainty, it’s mums and it’s women who are pregnant who are seen as a potential burden.”

The stories are harrowing. As part of Pregnant Then Screwed’s ‘The Career Shredder’ campaign women came forward who had never shared their experiences before, including one woman who was sacked on the day of her stillborn daughter’s funeral.

“She received a text on the morning and was naturally flabbergasted. When she spoke to them [her employer], they denied they knew that was why she was off,” says Venables.

“Another lady I spoke to was called onto a Zoom while she was in hospital and let go.”

The campaign saw the charity livestream a giant physical shredder destroying mothers’ CVs on a billboard at London’s Westfield shopping centre. People could also upload their CV to LinkedIn to be shredded. The idea was to show women are being “chewed up and thrown out of their careers” at a time when they’re at their most vulnerable.

“Women work, they get to a certain level, they hold years of talent and they’re not having children to leave the workforce. They want to grow their family, but they also want to keep their careers,” Venables adds.

“Discrimination doesn’t discriminate. It really is cross-vertical. I can’t emphasise enough the shock I’ve had when I hear… the way people have been treated.”

‘Clinging to presenteeism’

A rejection of flexible working within some businesses is exacerbating the strain on working mothers.

Ferreira sees some businesses “clinging to presenteeism”, which has a tangible impact on working mums. Finding childcare to cover additional days in the office, for example, can take a mother from earning a wage to paying to ensure she can keep her job, she explains.

Describing any enforced return to the office as a “significant regression”, Ferreira cites research published in the journal Nature in June 2024, which found no evidence for a dip in performance among hybrid workers. Furthermore, the research saw attrition rates fall among employees with hybrid working patterns, particularly female staff, while work satisfaction improved.

Acknowledging it has been a challenging year for businesses, Ferreira argues the most creative, “solution-oriented” people she knows are mothers. For those businesses serious about valuing working mums, the first step is to listen.

We’ve long felt things are getting worse, but the research isn’t finger in the air. Every seven minutes a mum or woman who is pregnant is now fired.

Celia Venables, Pregnant Then Screwed

“The journey of motherhood, there’s so many layers within it. It’s the intersectionality of motherhood. There’s no one-size-fits-all,” she explains.

“It just feels like we spend so much time researching who we’re marketing to, but do we have that same understanding of who is in our workforce and our workplace?”

Drawing on the experience of the Mums in Marketing community, Ferreira encourages businesses to create safe spaces where employees can share experiences, build awareness and foster a culture of mutual support.

“I can categorically share that, when you create a community – and I believe this can happen at work – when you understand people, you value them and you support them, it generates revenue,” Ferreira adds.

The pandemic was a particularly strained time for working mums who, forced to pick up the majority of childcare, were pushed out of the workplace, Pregnant Then Screwed reports. Despite hybrid work keeping the country going under lockdown, women are now facing a rollback of flexible policies based on “prehistoric opinions”, Venables argues.

“It’s based on a fundamental belief in presenteeism, which ultimately will always bring bigger challenges to people who cannot fit within that structure,” she says.

The Career Shredder campaign is pushing for flexible working to be advertised in job descriptions and for flexibility to become the default, unless there is a business reason this isn’t possible.

This Much I Learned: Mums in Marketing’s Claire Ferreira on never ‘levelling down’

The campaign is also calling for an increase in UK paternity leave from two to six weeks, with Pregnant Then Screwed advocating to equalise parental leave from the get-go. The aim is also to encourage businesses to collect data about what’s happening to mothers in their organisations.

A general lack of data analysis is happening even at the highest level. As Venables points out, in 2016, the government commissioned a report to better understand the scale of pregnancy and maternity discrimination. A commitment was made to the Women and Equalities Select Committee to repeat the research every five years, but as yet, the data has not been re-run.

The retention of parents is a business critical issue, not a ‘mum issue’, Venables adds, arguing it’s good for the bottom line to retain talented employees. From an employee perspective, she urges leaders to “parent out loud”, in the words of campaigner and author Elliott Rae.

“[Parenthood] should be something organisations are proudly talking about. If you’re a parent in the workplace, if you’re a boss, you should be parenting out loud. You should be leaving loudly to go to your children’s nativity play,” says Venables.

Systemic issues

Pregnant Then Screwed’s research correlates with a 2022 report by parenting organisation Careers After Babies, which found 85% of mothers leave the full-time workforce within three years of having their first child.

A fifth (19%) leave the workforce altogether, often because their employer does not offer flexibility or they can’t afford childcare.

A quarter of the Careers After Babies sample went back full-time after giving birth. Within two years, 57% had left their full-time role – 19% due to redundancy, 11% due to ill mental health and 36% because it wasn’t sustainable.

Where women returned to the same company but in a different role, 79% had left within two years, rising to 80% for middle management. The Careers After Babies research found 32% fewer women in middle management roles after having children.

The long-term career impact is considerable. According to the report, it takes more than a decade for mothers to regain the same level of seniority or higher after having children, while 74% of women are earning less or the same as prior to having kids.

Careers After Babies founder and CEO Jess Heagren’s work is fuelled by personal experience.

Businesses need to stop viewing working mothers as a risk or logistical challenge and start recognising them as a significant asset.

Claire Ferreira, Mums in Marketing

Director of strategy, change and distribution at Direct Line, Heagren was on a succession plan to become the next CEO. One day, when presenting the commercial strategy to the public-facing board, a non-exec director asked what it was like to be a young, talented female in insurance.

“I opted to say to this guy: ‘The reality is I spend all my time surrounded by middle-aged white men with stay-at-home wives. I don’t really have any friends at work, because there’s no one else like me. I want a baby at some point in the next couple of years and when I look around, I think that would just spell the end of my career’,” she recalls.

Following that conversation, Heagren set up a diversity and inclusion committee in the company, leading the gender and working families group. When her first child was born a few years later, Heagren returned to the workplace after five months.

“I lost all my confidence. I stopped speaking. I really struggled when I went back and I didn’t tell anyone because it was such a male-dominated environment,” she explains. “I didn’t want to be branded the hormonal crying woman in the corner. I lasted about eight months.”

After the birth of her second child, Heagren left the company completely. Despite enjoying this time away from the corporate world, she came to the realisation wider change was needed to support working mums.

“I woke up one day and thought, ‘Hang on a minute. How have I gone from being on the succession plan to being CEO of a FTSE 100 company to being a stay-at-home mum?’ What’s happened in the world to make that happen?” she asks.

After meeting fellow mothers with similar experiences, Heagren set up an organisation helping skilled mums find flexible and part-time work. However, she quickly realised companies often aren’t as family friendly as they appear, especially if line managers don’t believe in flexibility.

Determined to delve deeper into the data, her research, which sparked the creation of Careers After Babies, revealed systemic issues forcing women out of the workforce, a crisis businesses cannot ignore.

“82% of us will become parents before the age of 45. So, you can’t afford not to look at it,” she explains.

Tangible action

When the Careers After Babies research went viral on LinkedIn, Heagren started working with 10 companies on a framework for parent positive organisations, looking through the lenses of policy, process and practice.

On the latter cultural element, her work identified seven themes for success, starting with having equitable and family-friendly policies, including flexible working.

Another theme is consistent nurture and support, which means giving any two parents a consistent experience where they feel nurtured. Other elements for success include empathetic and inclusive line management, and role models parenting loudly, meaning senior leaders talking openly to the wider organisation about their families.

There is also a theme around parenting being valued, in terms of how an organisation thinks and talks about parents. The last characteristic of a pro-parent business is around career progression.

2025 is the year we embrace the superpower of working mums

“Most working parents, even if they go back to work, tend to find they go through this sort of five- or six-year period of career stagnation where they stay in the same role. There are two dynamics in play there,” says Heagren.

“One is the organisation makes assumptions about changes to our ambitions and our abilities, combined with us feeling a bit more vulnerable, trying to get used to new priorities and trying to get our head around everything, often with a real confidence knock that comes with going back into work.”

Careers After Babies uses this framework to assess and accredit large organisations, offering certifications to smaller firms. The initial cohort of 10 partner companies has risen to 40 over the space of 18 months, including the likes of Salesforce, WPP and car brand Kia.

Smart businesses, Heagren argues, have a long-term vision for the attraction and retention of talent, which sees parenthood as a life experience that contributes to an employee’s worth.

“I find it so short-sighted when people say: ‘Oh well, that’s it for the next couple of years, I’ve lost that person.’ Actually, you haven’t,” she argues.

“We return to work as capable as we were before we left, if not more, because nothing will teach you to prioritise and organise quite like having a baby.”

The second Careers After Babies survey is currently out in the field, click here to take part. 

Marketing Week will be exploring what more can be done to help working mothers in a series of upcoming features.