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Maternity Coaching: An Initiative towards Gender Inclusion

Prof. Reena Poojara

Balancing career and family has been a struggle for women since there were careers to be balanced and it doesn’t end with pregnancy. Raising children is a self-sacrificing venture, and when faced with the decision between child or career, many women choose child. This presents a challenge both for employees who may desire a career, and the companies who likely covet the retention of said employees.

Over 48% of working women under the age of 30 take a break in career citing maternity as the top reason. And, companies see a surging spike in attrition of women who return from maternity leave. The Amended Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, Maternity Benefit stipulates a six months leave with the option of flexible working. However, the leave provision alone does not seem to play a major role in curbing attrition.

Maternity coaching or counseling emerged as a strong discipline in corporate counseling since the early 2000s. As part of psychotherapy, maternity coaching did not obtain the same level of awareness or utilization as did its more famous counterparts. With increase nuclear families being the norm, and with the young mother having to deal with the pressures and stresses of double-horse riding at home and work, greater attention to maternity counseling or coaching has been extremely beneficial and it has attained the status of a structured programme in recent times.

The demands on a woman professional who goes on a maternity break are high when you are neither 100% mom nor 100% professional and seek to be a combination of the two; you seem to fail miserably at both.”Plagued by guilt and unable to prioritize, the draining emotional upheavals that she goes through while stepping inside the doors of her workplace are not very helpful to her performance.

The different dynamics that influence a women’s thinking post-maternity have been discussed aptly by Katherine Ellison in her book The Mommy Brain. While Ellison argues that a woman actually ends up building far more robust business skills through changed neurological patterns post-maternity, the crucial clincher is that the woman requires self-awareness and support to actually emerge stronger.

Maternity coaching results in to:

• a) Improved engagement and productivity among returning women.
• b) Smoother re-integration of women post maternity leave.
• c) Better management of maternity breaks of employees by managers/teams.

For an organisation that is a serious investor in gender inclusion and believes in the power of women’s workforce participation, maternity coaching would be highly beneficial by providing Solutions to questions such as how a woman on maternity leave can stay connected, how to ensure that hard-won relationships at work do not suffer & Both can benefit.