Dr. Anne Welsh had her dream job as a clinical psychologist at Harvard University Health Services, working with undergraduate and graduate students. But in 2011, while pregnant with her second child and raising a toddler at home, she decided that her 60-client caseload was no longer sustainable.
Welsh and another pregnant colleague developed a plan. They would share a caseload, splitting responsibilities so they could continue working part-time while caring for their growing families. They created a detailed job-share proposal covering logistics, scheduling, and continuity of care. Welsh brought it to their practice director.
Their director barely glanced at it.
Part-time work, he informed Welsh, was “too logistically complicated.” There were hundreds of other people who wanted her job. She could take it—or leave it.
Welsh left.
She wasn’t the only one to leave. In the following years, four or five more clinicians resigned after becoming parents, including the colleague who co-created the job proposal with Welsh. The institution finally adjusted its caseload expectations, but not before inflexibility cost these parents their jobs and led to the loss of talented employees with institutional knowledge.
What looks like a personal choice is often shaped by something larger—systems that leave little room for mothers to stay.
The forces pushing women out
During the first half of last year, more than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce—the sharpest decline in over 40 years for mothers of young children.
Some have described it as opting out. Welsh says “forced out” is more accurate.
Experts point to a combination of pressures: return-to-work mandates, limited flexibility, invisible labor pressures at home, and rising childcare costs. Daycare and preschool have risen around two times the cost of overall inflation for the past year and a half.
“It means that more and more workers are being affected,” Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG, told Fast Company. “And it’s roughly 90% women, mostly women 25 to 44.”
Many of these women are leaving their careers to become the default parent.
At the same time, the Women in the Workplace 2025 report found that women were 6% less likely than men to seek promotions, framing the trend as an “ambition gap.”
However, the report notes that this so-called gap is often a response to a lack of workplace support, including limited mentorship and persistent gender bias. The report also found that 25% of entry and senior-level women cite personal obligations at home as the reason they don’t want to take on more responsibilities.
Many high-achieving women, Welsh says, are caught in a psychological bind—deeply committed to their career and motherhood, yet feel as though they’re failing at both.
This “ambition paradox” is a concept explored in her forthcoming book, Ambitious Mother: From Surviving to Thriving in Your Career and at Home. Women aren’t losing ambition, she says, they’re forced to refine it. Some are doing this by starting their own companies, others by stepping back to part-time work or staying home to care for their children.
But scaling back often comes at the expense of career advancement and long-term earning potential, a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty.” One Urban Institute study estimated that caregivers lose an average of $237,000 in lifetime earnings. And according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, employed mothers nationwide earned around 62 to 74 cents per dollar paid to fathers in 2022.
The motherhood advantage that companies are losing out on
Working mothers are often viewed as less committed, driven, or focused, but the irony is that the transition into motherhood has cognitive benefits that can benefit their careers. One study found that midlife mothers with more children had “younger-looking brains,” “faster response times, and fewer errors on visual memory tasks,” and better verbal memory.
“When you have a child, it is the most massive neuro-rewiring that you experience as a person other than in adolescence,” says Welsh, adding that mothers often become stronger in time prioritization, emotional intelligence, delegation, and boundary setting
In other words, workplaces are losing women when they are at their zenith. Companies are paying a price for this.
Those that fail to support and train mothers lose out on institutional knowledge, productivity, and profitability, says Nestler. There are also tangible financial losses: replacing mid-level employees can cost as much as double their annual salary, due to recruiting, training, and ramp-up time.
Research also shows that companies who prioritized women’s representation outperform their peers by 18%.
When workplaces recognize motherhood as an advantage, not a liability, they may begin promoting mothers instead of punishing them, Welsh says.
The care and keeping of working mothers
Welsh says meaningful support starts with parental leave policies that don’t penalize either parent.
“I’ve worked with women who returned from leave to find they were passed over for a promotion that had been on track before they left,” says Welsh. “I’ve worked with others who were told to “take it easy” when they came back, even when they were ready and eager to re-engage, and in that process had key clients or projects reassigned.”
Allowing parents to take the leave promised to them without penalties needs to come with “clear promotion criteria, intentional re-onboarding, and ensuring people return to meaningful work rather than a narrowed scope,” adds Welsh.
Flexible work environments with real boundaries, not 24/7 expectations, are also imperative.
“There are plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, but we can have flexibility in those cases around schedules—coming in or leaving, having a longer workday, fewer days a week…or some flexibility around structure,” says Welsh.
She advocates for outcome-based evaluations rather than time-based ones.
“What are we actually wanting to pay people for?” she asks. “Is it the literal time they’re sitting at their chair, or is it the impact they are making?”
Additional supports include childcare support, normalizing caretaking responsibilities, and executive coaching for working parents.
Executive coaching helps parents to stop viewing work and family as competing forces, says Welsh, and to translate their experiences at home into intentional leadership skills that show up in the workplace, too.
When you offer this kind of support to new parents, Welsh says companies often see “higher retention, especially at mid-career points where many women leave. You see stronger leadership pipelines because people aren’t opting out or being sidelined during these transitions. And you see managers who are more thoughtful, more decisive, and better equipped to lead teams through complexity.”
But until workplace culture evolves, working mothers are stuck feeling as if they have to choose between their family and their careers.
The corporate ladder is not working for mothers
For decades, success has been defined by the corporate ladder—you climb up the rungs for money, power, and titles, or you fall off. However, working mothers are now redefining what career success looks like.
Instead of a ladder, Welsh uses the analogy of a playground web to illustrate how ambition is an expansive concept that allows movement in all directions—upward, sideways, downwards, depending on someone’s needs. Lynette-Matthews-Murphy, an award-winning restaurateur in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, can relate.
Matthews-Murphy started in fashion and events, later purchased a wedding publication, which she sold three years later when the demands of motherhood felt overwhelming. She then stayed home with her toddler. But, while pregnant with her second child, her marriage fell apart. She was forced to re-enter the workforce as a single mother of two boys, an infant and a three-year-old.
Over the years, she says her career looked like a zig-zag line, shifting careers to meet the demands of her growing boys. When the boys were in late elementary and middle school, Matthews-Murphy stepped back from her full-time job as visitor center manager in Winston-Salem to a part-time position to spend more time with them. She had remarried, making the pay cut possible.
Two years later, she rejoined the workforce this time as an executive director for Winston-Salem’s event program. While it was a full time job and far more responsibility, she was also given flexibility such as setting her own hours and working from home, which made the job sustainable.
After her children left for college, Matthews-Murphy felt ready to reinvent her career again, and ultimately opened two award-winning restaurants, which are fixtures in the Winston-Salem community.
Both Welsh and Matthews-Murphy have adapted and reinvented themselves multiple times. For mothers like them who step away or pull back for a season, ambition isn’t lost—it simply shifts. With support and a bit of reinvention, they can re-enter or remain in the workforce. But it takes flexibility from smart companies willing to recognize motherhood as an advantage, not a liability. In turn, they’re rewarded with a more productive, efficient, and resilient workforce.
The companies that force mothers out will pay for it through the steep financial costs of turnover, retraining, and missed innovation they can’t easily replace. And it will be a loss of their own making.