By Jonathan Lord, University of Salford; Evelyn Oginni, University of Salford, and Guoxin Ma, Royal Agricultural University
Women in the UK face a “motherhood penalty” in the workplace when they have a child. New figures from the Office of National Statistics show that mothers in England lose, on average, more than £65,000 in earnings across the five years after a first child. This gap is driven by reduced hours, stalled progression and job moves to fit around caring for a child.
These dynamics are acute in higher education. Promotion in academia is tightly linked to the uninterrupted production of research papers and grant proposals, as well as the ability to move between institutions and even countries.
Our research has found that patchy implementation of family-friendly policies and unsympathetic managerial cultures push women to work as if nothing has changed. They are required to give birth to the “ideal academic baby”: a child who never disrupts grant deadlines, seminars or student emails.
Universities have various policies in place for new parents: parental leave, flexible working, and accreditation schemes that are intended to help institutions promote gender equality. But what actually happens when an academic gets pregnant, takes leave and returns to work?
We followed that journey across four stages: pregnancy at work, maternity leave, return to work, and career progression. We’ve found that culture regularly defeats policy. Motherhood can feel professionally risky even where formal policies exist.
Viewed as less committed
We conducted in-depth interviews with 26 academic mothers from five different UK universities. During pregnancy, many interviewees described subtle but telling signals that they were now seen as less “able” or less committed.
One was discouraged from attending a career-development programme. Another was told she looked unsuited to lab work “in your condition”. A third reported colleagues simply stopped discussing career plans with her.
These moments matter because they set the tone for what follows. This can include leave arrangements that depend on goodwill rather than process, and returns to work that start with heavier loads than before. As one participant put it: “Motherhood should be renamed guilthood.”
Maternity leave itself often failed the basic test of organisational care. Several women said there was no real cover, so their supervisory and email duties quietly continued while they were supposedly on leave, which is both exhausting and unsustainable. Others returned to find their office moved or their role reorganised without consultation. Such experiences erode trust.
The return to work was frequently the hardest stage. Some departments offered empathy, phased returns and informal mentoring. However, many mothers described an experience of “invisible motherhood”: the sense that parenting should be kept out of sight because colleagues might infer that it meant lower ambition.
That norm is amplified by the UK’s university model. High-stakes research metrics, student-as-consumer expectations and stretched staffing narrows tolerance for absence or unpredictability.
Two universities with identical policies can feel radically different. Culture and especially the line manager relationship governs whether support is meaningful and useful.
Parliament’s women and equalities committee has concluded the UK’s parental leave system “does not support working families effectively”, and the government has opened a full review. Shared parental leave, designed to normalise care across genders, continues to see low uptake.
This limits the cultural shift universities say they want. Without more equal leave and stronger childcare infrastructure, mothers will keep carrying the larger career risk.
International comparisons show what better alignment looks like. Nordic countries pair generous, gender-neutral leave with strong childcare provision.
Sweden, for example, offers 480 days of paid parental leave per child. This has recently been expanded to allow transfer of some days to other carers such as grandparents, a policy that explicitly recognises care as a shared social responsibility.
UK universities cannot transplant those national systems, but they can emulate the cultural lesson: treat care as normal, predictable and plan-worthy, not as an individual inconvenience.
There are some reasons for optimism. Where departments were women-led or explicitly feminist in ethos, our research participants reported feeling “seen”, trusted and able to talk about their caring responsibilities without penalty. That points to a cultural truth often missed in compliance-driven equality work: belonging isn’t created by forms, it’s created by norms.
If universities want to keep talented scholars through the caregiving years, they need to retire the fantasy of the ideal academic baby – and the ideal worker who never has one.
Jonathan Lord, Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Employment Law, University of Salford; Evelyn Oginni, Lecturer in People Management, University of Salford, and Guoxin Ma, Senior Lecturer in Business, Royal Agricultural University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
