Opening
Leaving a career to have a child is usually described as a break, as if a pause button existed. Confidence, identity and industry knowledge shift underground while you are gone, and the return journey comes with no map. For thousands of women in public relations, that map is being drawn now.
The idea
Emma Padden is the founder of PR Mums, and a former colleague of mine from our PR days in London.
She built the community after seeing a female dominated industry lose women from around 35 onwards, through fertility journeys, IVF, baby loss, childcare, menopause, parental care and the pension gap waiting at the end of it all. The statistics she carries are stark.
The industry is around two thirds women, yet senior leadership flips that balance and the gender pay gap sits somewhere in the middle of its various readings. PR Mums works on four pillars.
Recruitment helps businesses bring women back and design roles that can flex around caring responsibilities, and Emma is explicit that this support should extend to men and parents more widely.
Training and psychology support the emotional transition, including teaching companies about matrescence, the physiological change of becoming a mother that workplaces rarely acknowledge. Policy work asks whether the rules exist, whether anyone actually uses them, and whether the wider workforce understands what they mean.
And the community itself is designed as a self mentoring space, with events built around what sustains a career rather than industry news. Their first speaker was Harriet Harman, a benchmark for the kind of voice Emma wanted in the room. The gap Emma described most sharply is re-onboarding.
A new hire receives a whole embedding process. Someone returning from leave usually receives nothing, and confidence pays the price.
“How do you support people back in to make sure that you don’t really damage someone’s confidence even more”.
Hundreds of women had already joined when we spoke, and campaigning for policy change is the destination.
What I took from it
I left that PR world myself, and I remember freelancing between agencies in my twenties with unshakeable confidence, then rebuilding it piece by piece in my thirties after children. The decades Emma maps, from fertility to retirement, are not abstractions to me.
Raising kids far from extended family, I learned how much returning to work depends on who catches you, and how much of that catching is simply someone remembering what you were good at.
Emma is building the catching mechanism into the industry itself, which is why so many women came forward the day she announced PR Mums. What I admire most is that she is not asking women to be more resilient. She is asking the industry to be more designed.
Confidence does not evaporate on its own. It usually erodes in the absence of any process to receive people back. That is a fixable absence, and Emma is fixing it.
I left our old industry chasing something she is now naming precisely, and hearing her put language to the unnameable discomfort of those years was its own small homecoming.
Three things to try this week
- If someone on your team is on leave, plan their return like an onboarding. Set one catch-up conversation before their first day back and agree what has changed while they were away.
- Learn the word matrescence and use it in one conversation with a returning parent this month. Naming the change is often the first kindness.
- Ask one colleague who has taken leave what the return actually felt like, and listen without defending your organisation.
Watch and go deeper
Emma’s laugh and our old agency stories are worth watching. The full conversation is waiting in the player below.
You can explore PR Mums at Emma Padden.
New conversations land on the Rediscovering Connection channel most weeks
Close
Workplaces that understand transitions keep their people, and our research with 1,218 leaders connects social health directly to retention and wellbeing. Explore the research, then ask what your organisation does for the person walking back in the door.