Does motherhood belong on your resume?

While filling out a LinkedIn profile to apply for jobs, Amy Grilli felt sheepish about entering “full-time parent” to explain the five-year gap on her resume. Her time caring for kids at home would surely be dismissed by potential employers, she thought. So instead, she removed her profile from LinkedIn altogether, “feeling insignificant, worthless and lacking in confidence, as a person who is not welcome in the professional world anymore,” she later wrote in a LinkedIn post that went viral.

Grilli, a former teacher with dreams of being a psychologist, tried looking for part-time and flexible jobs to no avail. The job she ended up getting made it clear that staying on an academic track wouldn’t work with kids. “I’m a parent and I don’t belong on LinkedIn,” Grilli, a mother of two who lives in Folkestone, England, concluded.

Grilli’s story struck a chord with people, garnering over 210,000 reactions and close to 10,000 comments over the course of two weeks. “Wow, I felt like I was reading about myself in your story,” one commenter said. “I feel seen,” said another. A father chimed in, sharing he’s had a “horrible experience trying to get back to work after staying home with his son for five years. “You are right, the 9-5 just doesn’t work for parents,” another mother wrote.

The juggle of caretaking responsibilities and careers — and doing it all with grace and polish — has made modern-day motherhood a bit like a superhero movie. Even as women’s income increases, research shows women still shoulder most of the housework. The adoption of flexible hours and remote work in the post-pandemic era has made navigating home and work responsibilities more feasible for some women. Yet, for many mothers like Grilli, who took time away from careers to focus on childrearing and are looking to reintegrate back into the workforce, the decision comes with a slew of dilemmas: How do you explain the gap on your resume and does it need to be explained at all? And how do you find the kind of work that’s compatible with kid pick-ups, drop-offs and other demands of parenting?

A ‘shock to your system’

When I put out a call on Instagram for women to share their experiences of returning to work after taking time away to focus on children, one friend wrote to me she was “petrified” of the transition. Another woman told me she went from an executive assistant to an associate dean to a front-desk administrator after a two-year pause. “It did feel like a setback,” she wrote. One woman wanted to know how you actually “reintegrate.”

“There are so many women who feel paralyzed by getting back in, because the narrative has been so strong for so long that once you’re out, you’re out (of the workforce),” said Brittany Larsen, a career coach in Salt Lake City and former executive at a public-relations agency. But the volatile labor market during the pandemic and the “quiet quitting” trend has upended these patterns. “I think employers realized that moms are so valuable, that they’re often hiring more for culture fit than experience,” Larsen told me. “Today, the emphasis is not just on education, years of experience, and certifications — but ‘can you do the job?’ and ‘do you fit in well with the vibe of our company and what we’re trying to accomplish here as a team?’”

Research confirms that mothers are gifted in navigating work environments. Close to 90% of American workers believe that mothers bring unique skills to leadership roles and bring out the best in their coworkers, according to the Bright Horizons Modern Family Index. The same survey points to mothers being good listeners and multitaskers, and being calm in face of a crisis.

The debate about women’s roles recently resurfaced after Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker praised his wife for staying home to care for their children in a commencement speech at Benedictine College, a Catholic school in Kansas, saying “... it cannot be overstated that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife, and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.”

Yet even when mothers decide they want to work outside of the home, a bias against mothers still permeates workplaces, research shows. “There are outdated ideas that when you become a mom, you’re not as dedicated to your career and you don’t have the same ambitions, you’re not going to be giving it your all,” said Amri Kibbler, co-founder of HeyMama, a New York City-based community with the goal of empowering mothers in the workforce. “Moms will be passed over for opportunities they were in line for before they went on leave.” According to a survey of more than a thousand stay-at-home mothers by Indeed, 73% of women reported experiencing biases when reentering the workforce and a little more than 90% of mothers said they anticipate bias when returning to work. Mothers are up against what’s been called a “motherhood penalty,” which means that their pay tends to decrease when they begin to have children, a factor that often discourages mothers from returning to the workforce.

Nevertheless, after the pandemic, mothers returned to work quicker than women without children (with the exception of mothers without bachelor’s degrees, who are are not back to the pre-pandemic levels, likely due to jobs that aren’t remote). In 2023, the labor department recorded the highest number of mothers in the workforce since 1948, when the department began tracking the numbers, per the Financial Times.

But returning to work after a yearslong break can be an intimidating and humbling transition for parents. Larsen described the change as a “shock to your system.”

“The home dramatically changes when a woman or a man reenters the workforce,” said Shay Baker, who runs Return Utah program, which helps people reenter the workforce after a break. Home responsibilities that had previously run well, like laundry or cooking, can fall through the cracks as the family adjusts, which can bring on “a kind of chaos in someone’s home life.”

And reentering a technical field after a pause will likely involve a learning curve of new technologies or office systems. “We found that the fundamentals of most jobs stay the same, but it’s the technology that changes rapidly,” Baker said. A mother of three, she took eight years off before returning to work with the help of the program. The program helps “returners” find jobs and supports them with coaching and training during a 16-week transition period. Most jobs are midlevel to allow “returners” to rebuild their skills. Baker said 70% of the participants are women and half of them left the workforce to care for children. Some, however, left for health reasons or to care for a sick loved one, or to pursue education, Baker said.

Own your resume gap

Day care costs, parental leave policies and even the availability of lactation facilities all factor into a mother’s decision whether to return to work.

But one of the bigger hurdles for mothers is grappling with self-confidence, experts told me. “It’s a paradigm shift within your own mind,” Larsen said. “The biggest game you have to play is with yourself.” One woman, who returned to her teaching job after staying home for several years with kids, wrote to me: “I think the most frustrating part for me is that I’m a fourth-year teacher who’s older than men with more experience than I have.”

When it comes to addressing a resume gap — the question Amy Grilli, the LinkedIn mom, quibbled over — career coaches suggest fully leaning into motherhood and the way that parenting fosters skills that are transferable and improve time management, problem-solving, negotiation and efficiency. “We’ve heard from hiring managers that when moms can confidently talk about the gaps on their resume, that they feel more confident in hiring them,” said Kibbler of HeyMama.

The organization launched a campaign called “Motherhood on the Resume,” encouraging mothers to update their titles on LinkedIn with “stay-at home mom” or “parent”. Membership at HeyMama comes with a free toolkit that includes guides to help mothers answer interview questions that veer into perceived conflict between being a mom and an employee.

Larsen once advised a client who took an 18-month sabbatical to care for her sick mother to put the reason on her resume. “No one’s going to think twice about that — that’s way less of a red flag than just having a 18-month gap,” she said.

Another client, who obtained a CPA license, had a 30-year gap of working full-time. “We just owned it on her resume – we put it right on paper that she’s been focusing on being a mother and is ready to get back to work,” Larsen said. And if an employer sees that as a red flag, she suggests that you may not want to work there anyway. Larsen recommends being transparent in these conversations: “Just be honest, talk about what you prioritized.”

This openness about caretaking obligations should continue in the workplace, too. Economist Emily Oster wrote for The Atlantic that women in particular tend to minimize their roles as mothers, fearing to appear uncommitted to their jobs, engaging in “secret parenting.” “Put simply, mothers and fathers ought to come clean about the nature of their lives. We can’t fix problems that we pretend don’t exist; we can’t improve the lot of parents at work if we pretend we aren’t parents,” she wrote.

But to present the experience of motherhood with confidence, women must believe it themselves, Kibbler said. “There is a little bit of internal work there,” she told me. “Own it, and know that you have accomplished a lot.”

‘A new way of working’

When, after a bout of discouragement and career exploration, Grilli decided to return to LinkedIn to pen her viral post, she had a more optimistic mindset and wrote that she decided to return “as a mother, who feels proud of the new skills I have gained during this time raising my children.”

She also wants to offer solutions for mothers who want to work and still be available for their children. She launched the “Five Hour Club,” a community helping women to reintegrate into the workforce after having kids. She’s advocating for a five-hour workday within children’s school hours for mothers, and hopes to work with employers to create these kinds of opportunities. Flexible work isn’t enough, she told one commenter: “It’s no good being ‘flexible’ when that requires you to be on call whilst you are cooking dinner or finish emails in the evening.” She urges employers to be “trail blazers” and to offer “a new way of working.”

Another mother and recruiter in Salt Lake City, Tawny Lott Rodriguez, has promoted a six-hour workday. “You just cut out the (stuff) that doesn’t need to happen and do the efficient things and don’t do things that aren’t really necessary,” Lott Rodriguez told me. “If we could do that for working mothers, that would be great — relieve them of additional and optional items.”

Longer parental leave, she noted, could also help women enjoy their babies without leaving the workforce. She would also like to see a smoother transition for mothers returning from maternity leave. “The way it is now, it’s 12 weeks (off) and bam, you’re full-time,” she said. Others mentioned creating more part-time jobs that are meaningful and have the same aspects of full-time jobs, like set hours and benefits.

The companies that don’t create motherhood-friendly work environments with good maternity benefits and flexibility, Larsen says, are simply missing out, and also endangering their own success. “If they don’t figure that out now, they’re not going to be around in 10-15 years,” she said.