The "motherhood penalty" and the legal profession

The latest Today’s Conveyancer Podcast turns its attention to one of the profession’s most persistent, and least openly discussed, challenges: the impact of maternity leave on women’s careers in law. 

While the legal sector is not alone in perpetuating the motherhood penalty, the measurable career disadvantage experienced by women after having children, the podcast explores the unique pressure the legal sector presents around billable hours, PQE structures and the absence of traditional line management which compound the issue. 

Returning mothers must “claw back” work, visibility and confidence say Sara Lyons and Hannah Bradshaw, former employment lawyers and co‑founders of Blue Sky; both of whom have personally experienced the issue and who now coach hundreds of female lawyers going through similar experiences. 

Lyons and Bradshaw are clear; this is not a theoretical concept, nor a “woke invention”, but an economic and structural reality that continues to shape women’s progression in the legal sector. 78% of women on their programme report experiencing the motherhood penalty, while 77.8% worry about the impact of maternity leave on their long‑term career prospects. These figures, they argue, should be a wake‑up call for firms that still consider themselves “equal opportunities employers” while operating within systems that are anything but gender‑neutral.

There is a cultural discomfort that surrounds maternity‑related discussions in law firms they say. Silence is damaging; women want clarity, support and honest dialogue about career progression, not well‑meaning but vague reassurances.

“You can have it all... just not all at the same time" is the mantra firms and employees need to adopt. 

The Today's Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views. 

Thank you to our podcast sponsors LEAP Legal Software and InfoTrack

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:23

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SPEAKER_01 0:44

Hello, welcome along to the latest Today's Conveyancer Podcast. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Sarah Lyons and Hannah Bradshaw, founders of Blue Sky, talking about the impact that maternity leave has on return to work, very specifically within the legal services sector, because I think that's your background, isn't it? But I guess a lot of what you talk about is as relevant to other businesses as it is the law. Great to have you both on. In the first instance, it's always useful to kind of get a bit of background to our guests. So, Sarah, I wonder if you might tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what do you do?

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Sure. So I used to be an employment lawyer and I've had a kind of squiggly career, which we are seeing as more common in people's lives now, no longer jobs for life for 30, 40 years. I then taught at the College of Law for a number of number of years, and then I relocated to Cambridge, where I worked at Judge Business School and ran executive education professional development programs for lawyers. And I launched a women in law leadership program. And that um exposed me to coaching for the first time, and that's where I became interested in coaching, and in a room full of female lawyers listening to the transformative effect of coaching on their careers. I then worked at a coaching consultancy and there I met Hannah, where we started to explore designing something tailored for their legal career.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Which leads rather neatly on to you, Hannah. Tell us about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 2:05

So I also was an employment lawyer, so we had very similar backgrounds. We were actually at the same firm for a bit, but not at the same time. And I had both my children at a US law firm in London and became a coach through my own experience of going on maternity leave, coming back, experiencing all the challenges that, you know, are still very much challenges, and we see women experience still going through their maternity leaves that came back and all my clients had been given to other people and had to slowly kind of claw my work back and then went on another maternity leave. And in the process of trying to get myself coaching, because I felt as though the career that I'd built up until that point had been derailed by maternity leave and I wanted some kind of expertise to help me get it back on track. I came across the provider that we both worked at and decided actually I would like to become a coach. So once I became a coach, started coaching full-time and met Sarah, and we started to realize that lawyers do have really specific challenges when they go on maternity leave. So absolutely what we do could apply to other industries, and lots of women have challenges. But we were getting really specific feedback from lawyers and we were seeing the same challenges come up over and over again that weren't being dealt with by kind of generic coaching because most people doing it weren't lawyers and they didn't really appreciate what those challenges were. But it led us to create Blue Sky, which is really trying to tackle some of those unique challenges head on in a way that general coaching doesn't really do.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

You've teed this up really neatly because obviously we're going to talk about some of those very specific challenges. But uh, before we get on to that, uh you know, I read resumes and I read job posts and that kind of thing, and and organizations talk about being equal opportunities employers. I I mean, from what you're saying, this this simply doesn't exist. This landscape that an employer might imagine to be equal opportunities is is is what a false narrative. I mean, what do you kind of make of of that as a challenge for a lot of industries?

SPEAKER_03 4:02

Saying things like we're an equal opportunities employer is is great, but we don't live in a gender-neutral world. So that doesn't reflect the experience of women in the workplace across the board, legal sector or outside, um, in other sectors. So we know about the motherhood penalty, we know about the effect on pension, we know about the effect on career and progression, um, we know about retention. All of those things are experienced by women in the workplace. So being an equal opportunities employer are just words that don't actually reflect the real experience of women.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

I think also it's the partners who are giving the opportunities, so it doesn't really matter what the firm is saying if those individual partners aren't really making sure that they are being equal when they're giving opportunities out. And generally they're not. Generally, they're giving opportunities to whichever associate or senior associate they think is going to make their life the easiest. And that's often not the woman who's just had a year out looking after a baby.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

Aaron Powell We veer into dangerous territory wokeism if we're not too careful with some of this stuff. But it let me let me put this to you then that you you described uh you know not living in a in a gender neutral world and you know the motherhood penalty. Talk to me a little bit about what you would describe the motherhood penalty as.

SPEAKER_02 5:18

The motherhood penalty is essentially the career penalty that women pay when they have children. So if you look at, you know, for example, the gender pay gap, there is almost no gender pay gap between men and women up until the point when women have their first child. And at that point, there is a fatherhood bonus. So men tend to see an increase in their earnings and their career progression at the same time that the opposite happens for women. And that is an economic phenomenon. I appreciate there may well be people who believe that's a woke invention, but it's in fact not. There's plenty of research showing, you know, that within the law, the the highest risk time for women to leave their careers is after their second child. It's pretty obvious to anyone who works in a law firm that women's careers stall in many situations after they have children. And we know, you know, in law, women's PQE continues running when they're on maternity leave. So it's pretty obvious to anyone that if you're a 10-year qualified lawyer who's had three children, you're actually you've you're kind of performing at 10 years with seven years of legal experience. So clearly that is a penalty based on the fact that you have had children.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

That sounds like one of the specific to law things that you talked about in the introduction in Hannah. So if we get into what in particular the law is bad at when it comes to dealing with uh returning mothers or indeed mothers who leave to go on maternity leave, what kind of things uh have you identified that are specific to law?

SPEAKER_02 6:47

So other than that PQE issue that we mentioned, which is a big is a big issue, there's lots of other things about the law that don't apply to other kinds of professional services or other similar careers. Lawyers are billing their time in six-minute increments. That means, you know, if you are a returning mum and you've got to leave to do the nursery pickup or you've just got a less elastic day, the law isn't rewarding you for being more efficient and getting your work done in a quicker amount of time. You're billing less hours if you do that. So you're actually worth less to your law firm. Also in other industries, you will have a line manager, whereas lots of lawyers don't have a line manager. They just work for different partners in their team. But it means that when they return from maternity leave, there's no one person whose role is kind of their pastoral care and looking after them when they get back and making sure they reintegrate. So for lots of women, that makes it, you know, additionally challenging because they don't have that line manager figure when they return. The combination of all of those things are kind of billable hours, PQE, no line manager, just means that the whole environment is clearly not set up with women who have children in mind. And we're frequently coaching partners who end up being the first partner who's gone on maternity leave and discover there's you know nothing in the partnership deed about maternity leave and it's never occurred before, and technically they're not entitled to any maternity pay whatsoever.

SPEAKER_01 8:06

And you talked about your desire to coach around this, but you've actually got empirical evidence as well that demonstrates uh some of the challenges that we're talking about here because you've recently released uh a new report around uh this this very topic. Can you give us a bit of an insight into some of the key kind of takeaways from that report? Perhaps one or two things that didn't surprise you and one or two things that did.

SPEAKER_03 8:29

I would say what didn't surprise us is that 78% of the women that we surveyed, so just under 300 women currently on our programme, 78% said that they've experienced the effect of the motherhood penalty in some way.

SPEAKER_02 8:44

So a really similar figure was 77.8% of women said that they were concerned about the impact of maternity leave on their careers. Again, that doesn't particularly surprise me, but uh it's kind of sad that in 2026 the overwhelming majority of lawyers going on maternity leave are going concerned that it's going to negatively impact their careers. So that wasn't particularly surprising, but still.

SPEAKER_01 9:07

I was gonna say I wouldn't have said that that's uh a statistic that I would consider to be unique to legal. I I would imagine there's a you know an awful lot of people might feel that way.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Yeah, I mean it would be interesting to know how that compares across different industries for sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:20

What about things that might have surprised you that came out of your research that, you know, unin unexpected or unintended consequences?

SPEAKER_03 9:28

One thing that struck me was when you think of ambitious, talented, very intelligent women who are practicing as lawyers, experts in some of the sectors they work in, when we ask them about whether they had a long-term strategy in relation to their career, only 31% at the beginning of the program had any kind of strategy around where their career is going. We also then asked that question by the end of our program. So, you know, our aim is to show that our program adds value and has real impact on people's lives. So that increased to 53.3% felt confident that they had a long-term strategy. So that increase by by increase was by 71%. But that does surprise me, and it might surprise listeners, that not everyone has a long-term career strategy. They're just kind of surviving and taking it not day by day, but you know, they're they're sometimes waiting for something to happen rather than making something happen.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

And is there a a geographic sort of split around that? I mean, I think my my gut would suggest that if you were perhaps based in the city, something like that, that you might be more inclined to have a clear career plan and path because you may well be in a firm that encourages that. Whereas if you're in the provinces, perhaps there's less of that career development opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

So we work with lots of different kinds of firms. So we work with plenty of, you know, US firms and London city firms, also Dublin firms and kind of more regional firms. And I would say no, there is no geographical split. There are plenty of overworked city lawyers who don't have time to think about their long-term career strategy, so they don't have one. And there are plenty of provincial lawyers who are extremely ambitious and they can see a path at their firm in a way that some of our city lawyers can't. And so they do have more of a strategy because their path is clearer for them.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

What about the growing number of people for whom partnership is not the kind of be-all and end all? I think, you know, you go back to traditional view of law and and you know, it's really working your way up to become the partner ultimately. Whereas we know, and this is true across a whole range of industries, but very specifically in law as well, we know that this route to partner is no longer the kind of guiding light and be all and end all. Is that something again that you've found through your research?

SPEAKER_02 11:44

In previous years, we looked at ambition for partnership. And actually, something that might surprise your listeners is that the overwhelming majority of women across their maternity transition were motivated by the prospect of becoming a partner. So 83% of our women by nine months after they returned from maternity leave wanted to be partner. And I would imagine, I don't have data, but I would imagine the majority of the partners who were in their teams wouldn't have necessarily assumed that the figure would be so high. And when we do sessions with partners, they guess that figure is much, much lower. So absolutely not everyone we coach wants to be partner, and there are lots of other roles within a law firm, and that's not the be-all and end all of anyone's legal career. But actually, I think you know it's good for partners to know that the majority of women do actually still want to be partner.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Through your coaching, you work with uh women who are looking to go off a maternity or who are returning from maternity, but then are you also working with firms and trying to enlighten them in such a way that they really should be thinking about this, that it it should be part of the firm's DNA to be thinking about, well, I've got a female team, there's a XYZ chance of that team going off a maternity at some point over the next few years. We need to have a plan in place to deal and cope with that.

SPEAKER_03 13:03

Yeah, 100%. So um it's just one part of the jigsaw puzzle is to provide coaching for women going and returning from maternity leave on its own, that's not enough, and that's not going to lead to any kind of cultural or systemic change. So the other things that we do, which we hope does lead to change and better practices to support women, is we offer webinars for managers who are supporting returners. So having key conversations at the right time and talking about career progression and what's expected of them and aligning expectations on both sides. Um we also share the data that we talked about today with partners so that they can understand where crunch points are in a woman's career when they come back from maternity leave, when they are less motivated, less engaged, and exhausted, and making sure that there's not just one conversation when there's a crunch point, but there's an ongoing conversation as you know they transition back from maternity leave. And some of our firms actually want us as coaches to speak to line managers on a one-to-one level to actually help them with those conversations because we know that some partners leave it to HR to have those awkward, slightly, they see them as a risky conversation. And we give them the confidence to set to realise that actually just be a nice manager, nice partner, obviously ask them how they are, but don't shy away from conversations about their career because that's what we know our women really, really want. They want to understand where they're going, how they're going to get there, who they need to support them.

SPEAKER_01 14:31

I think I've alluded to it in at the start of this conversation, but you talk about risky conversations there. I mean, again, is is there evidence that that does put people off, that this is a difficult conversation to have? You walk a bit of an HR tightrope as as well, if you're not too careful. And at a point in time where, you know, there's a huge amount of litigation that goes on around this sort of thing, and it gets you know portrayed in the press as well, that we don't have these conversations because actually they're too difficult.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I think lawyers are the ones who are the most afraid because they know what can go wrong, they know what the outcome is, yeah. Exactly. Most people plow ahead and they have no idea that they're about to be sued, but lawyers do know, and I think as a result, they tend to err on the side of saying nothing because they're kind of risk assessing the situation. And I I do think that because Sarah and I were both employment lawyers, it means that when we're helping firms, we're not just helping them from the perspective of our coaching and our data, but also from a lens of kind of employment risk. So when we're helping them to frame those conversations, we also have that in mind as well, in terms of making sure we're not exposing them to any kind of employment risk, because you know, we've seen all the data from the employment tribunals, there's massive backlogs, there's more and more claims, the law's about to change, and we obviously want to protect our clients from getting sued in terms of you know the advice that we're giving them as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:54

What about scenarios and thinking about HR where people are requesting to work more flexibly? And this, you know, this is very relevant, obviously, to returning mothers, isn't it, to have the option to work more flexibly?

SPEAKER_03 16:10

Absolutely. And this is something that we discuss both in our group workshops and one-to-one coaching when we know that women heading back who may have been full-time before having a child might want to consider going part-time, so requesting flexible work. And we know that they're currently there's consultation around the right to request flexible work and also businesses having requirements to real, real business requirements to turn it down. So I think employers are going to have to kind of really be much clearer on why they're saying no. We know that many female law firm law lawyers do work full-time and they carry on working full-time after their children, but we do know there's nervousness around will I be taken seriously? Will I still progress if I reduce down to say four days? We rarely see a practicing lawyer going down to three days.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

And connected to that, post-COVID, the ability to work from home, and actually the sort of almost the kickback against that as well. I think as part of these consultations you mentioned, there's going to be the opportunity for businesses to respond and say, no, actually, we we want people back in the office five days a week. You know, COVID created this bubble. Again, you know, thinking about things like childcare and and working flexibly, the working from home phenomenon has changed uh law firms massively. But do you see that that change is permanent, or do you see that it could kind of revert? And what impact is that going to have on you know the issues that we've talked about today?

SPEAKER_02 17:45

We've seen a bit of a split, I think. So there is some firms tend to be more kind of city-type firms where that trend is absolutely reversing, and you know, there is a real trend back to four or five days in the office, and that is a massive source of stress. There's a few firms where they've implemented that without much notice, and that's had real impact on people's childcare that has been based around what the previous policy had been. On the flip side of that, there are other firms that are really holding on to their kind of more flexible working with two or three days in the office and a bit more autonomy in terms of where you work. Those firms, I think, are seeing it as a competitive advantage and know that they will hire more women who leave the other firms forcing them back into the office more. So I think there is a split, and I do think it will become a factor that people look at when they're looking to choose which firms they work at. So yeah, there seems to be a bit of a divide. I don't think the whole industry is going in one direction. But we we collected some data on that last year. So we asked our participants if their firms were rolling back in terms of allowing them to work from home and then whether they felt positively, negatively, or neutral about those changes. And I think about 60% of our women at that point said their firms were requiring them to come into the office more and were having more return to the office mandates. And of those women, so about 300 women across a full cross cross-section of you know different kinds of firms. All of the women who said that there were return to work mandates, all of them, over 70% said that they felt negatively about it, and the remainder said neutral. So all of them were either either negative or neutral, and no one felt positively about it. I'm sure there are some women who do feel positively about it, even with very small children, but it it clearly disproportionately impacts women with young children when firms are reintroducing uh return to the office mandates.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

At a time when the legal sector is, you know, got a real race for talent, particularly across uh, you know, family law or wills and probate and conveyancing, surely something like flexible working, working from home is a is a recruitment tool. And you know, we want to be encouraging this flexibility rather than discouraging it.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

I was going to say there's also the additional um element of visibility, how important visibility is for women when they're back from maternity leave. So we discuss that a lot on our programme, which is yes, we know flexibility really helps with childcare responsibilities and logistics, which still unfortunately fall mainly on the women's shoulders. So visibility is important, but also flexibility is important. So it's balancing those two things. But you know, if recruiters are phoning up somebody, headhunters, and saying, I've got a firm that will allow you to work wherever you want during the day, no need to go to the city, go to the office, commute one hour each end of the day. You know, someone will take that phone call because it will be of interest. So I think firms will will become alive to that when they're kind of scrabbling around and fighting each other for talent. But I know there are, you know, leading firms in the city who are quite confident about saying this is how we're going to work. We're going to go back to pre-COVID days and you can work for us or not. It's your choice.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Is there anything in your research or anything in the uh work that you do with uh the people on your courses about around the pressure to return to work? Because again, I I I'm and I'm very conscious I'm speaking as a male, but I understand that there is a real pressure to return to work, uh, particularly for people who might be considered high flyers or or you know, particularly high earners from the free earning point of view.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

What we do see is that the vast majority of women in the UK take between 10 to 12 months off. But we do see the more senior a woman is, especially if they are a partner, they will take less. So we we're looking at around six to eight months. But we have, unless Hannah has any examples, I've never heard of anyone feeling pressure from their firm to come back. In fact, we hear the opposite. We hear partners saying things like, disconnect, turn your emails off, just don't worry about work for a year. They are actually very supportive on the pastoral side of allowing women to have the amount of time that they need, and there's no pressure on saying when you're coming back. So there's an assumption that most people will take around a year.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

That doesn't seem to correlate then. If the firms are kind of saying, you know, we're easy, come back when you're ready, but the more senior somebody is, the less time they they seem to ha have off. That almost sounds as though it's like an internal pressure, a a kind of a a real desire to return, or an internal pressure to return. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

That's exactly what I was going to say. I think the pressure is internal. So the more responsibility you have, the more senior you are, the more pressure someone putting on themselves. And what we sometimes see is women overpromising, maybe underestimating the impact of you know having a young baby and how they're going to feel, you know, six months into their maternity leave. And at that point, you know, they've told their firms they're going to take six months and they then feel pressure to then take longer because their firms think they're coming back. But actually, I would say I agree with Sarah, I've never seen any firm kind of proactively pressuring someone to cut their maternity leave short.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

We're fast running out of time for the discussion. And I mean, look, we could probably talk about this for most of the day. I I guess to kind of move towards a conclusion of the discussion at the least, what's the solution here? I mean, can women have it all? Are there practical issues regarding motherhood? And we've kind of talked about one or two of them today, which are surmountable or insurmountable through your coaching. How do you reconcile these challenges?

SPEAKER_03 23:26

So, I mean it's a well-known quote, but I'll just use it because I think it's a really good one. You can have it all, but you can't have it all at the same time. I think that might be Michelle Obama's quote, but don't hold me to that. And I talk a lot about firms needing to recognize women's potential rather than recognizing what they can give you on day one back from maternity leave. And so it's nurturing talent and recognizing that someone might not be or might not have the bandwidth to be going full steam ahead and be an equity partner within the next six weeks coming back from maternity leave, but their lives will change and everything is a phase. And raising a family, you know, your kids don't always say stay young, they grow up. And these women have got a lot to give, but not necessarily at that really tough period when they're they've got young children to look look after. I would say for for us, it's about speaking to firms about recognising the talent, recognising the potential, and stopping women from leaving law. So I think that's all part of the same the same conversation.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

There are some business imperatives though, aren't there? Things like, you know, we have to hit a certain number of billable hours, we have to achieve this, we have to achieve that. And that makes some of what you've talked about there quite difficult because you've got uh a real conundrum in terms of supporting somebody back to work, but then making sure that that they're doing what they need to be doing.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Well, there is one law firm, Bristol's, where they don't have billable hours and they also have 50% female EC. So I do think, yes, those things absolutely are part of what makes it so challenging for women in the legal profession who have young children. But actually, you know, in the future, particularly with AI taking over lots of the kind of junior, really hour-intensive work, there may well be scope to move away from that model. And I think that will for sure be helpful for women in the legal profession.

SPEAKER_01 25:11

And presumably through your work you've seen good, bad, and the ugly. Uh, I guess as we kind of come to the conclusion of the podcast, perhaps you might share some examples of best practice where you've really seen firms succeed in both supporting mothers going off on maternity and then returning as well.

SPEAKER_03 25:33

So, one of our firms, it's a very simple concept, but um it seems to be really valued and appreciated by women returning from maternity leave. The senior partner has a one-to-one with every returning woman to check in with her and ask her about kind of career plans, career aspirations, which makes people feel really kind of visible and appreciated by someone senior. So it's really dealing with that, you know, you're coming back, you're lacking confidence, you've got a bit of imposter syndrome, you're wondering if is it for me, can I do this? And to have that kind of senior person who's really kind of giving up some time for you and might also kind of look out for opportunities for you is is a really good thing. So that's something we we encourage with our firms. Anna, can you think of any other best practice we can share? We've seen firms allowing ramping up and ramping down in terms of targets on chargeable hours, which again does work, takes the pressure off people who might be feeling overwhelmed, and also allowing greater flexibility on where women work in the first year after maternity leave. Some of our firms allow greater flexibility on that.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

I'm not sure that we will do uh the motherhood penalty justice over the course of 25 minutes, but I hope that through the course of the discussion we've given a little bit of insight into some of the challenges here, some insight into some of the skills and opportunities that are out there for firms, and some thoughts around how firms can best accommodate uh their staff uh during these times as well. So I'm very, very grateful to you both for joining the podcast and for sharing your insight.

SPEAKER_03 27:11

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

The Today's Conveyancer podcast is available on your preferred podcast provider. It's also available on today's conveyancer.co.uk. My thanks to Ed. Thank you as ever for listening. And we'll see you again soon.