I remember sitting at my kitchen table trying to answer what should have been a simple question.

When was I going back to work?

On paper, it ought to have been one of the easiest decisions I’d ever made. I wasn’t waiting for HR to approve my request or negotiating with a line manager. I owned the business. There was no policy to navigate, no one to tell me what was or wasn’t possible. If anyone had the freedom to decide what returning to work looked like, it was me.

And yet I couldn’t make the decision.

I went round in circles for weeks. 

One day, I’d convince myself I was ready. The next, I’d wonder if I was rushing. I’d tell myself I was overthinking it, only to find myself back at the same question a few days later.

Looking back, it wasn’t the indecision itself that unsettled me. It was that I didn’t recognise the woman making it.

I’d always been decisive. 

Career-focused to my core. I trusted my instincts and backed myself to make difficult decisions. My professional identity had become so intertwined with who I was that I’m not sure I could have separated the two. Being decisive wasn’t simply something I did; it was part of how I understood myself.

So when I found myself unable to land on an answer that felt right, I assumed something had changed in me.

For a while, I wondered if motherhood had quietly switched off the ambition that had driven me for so long.

It took me years to realise I’d been asking the wrong question.

Motherhood hadn’t diminished my ambition.

It had changed me.

And that meant the way I made decisions, understood success and thought about my future was changing too.

The compass hadn’t broken. It was recalibrating.

The Part We Don’t Talk About

Then I came across the term matrescence – the psychological, emotional and neurological transition into becoming a mother.

It gave language to something I’d struggled to explain.

We understand that adolescence reshapes identity. We expect teenagers to question who they are, what matters and where they fit in the world. Yet when women become mothers, we often expect them to navigate an equally profound identity shift while making career decisions with exactly the same certainty they had before.

Looking back, I’m not surprised I struggled to make that decision about returning to work.

I’m surprised that I expected not to.

I think we’ve inherited an incredibly narrow story about ambition and motherhood.

It goes something like this: ambition is a fire, and motherhood either keeps it burning or quietly puts it out. Women either continue climbing or they lose interest in the careers they once loved.

But that isn’t what I’ve experienced.

And it isn’t what I’ve witnessed in the hundreds of women I’ve coached over the past two decades.

The fire rarely goes out.

The person standing next to it simply changes.

The Penalty Is Real

Before we talk about what women do next, we need to acknowledge something important.

The system isn’t neutral.

The evidence for what’s come to be known as the motherhood penalty is now overwhelming.

In 2025, the Office for National Statistics published one of the most comprehensive analyses to date, tracking earnings and employment following the birth of a first child in England. Five years after giving birth, mothers’ monthly earnings were, on average, 42% lower than before becoming parents. Over those five years, that equated to an average loss of more than £65,000 in earnings. Their likelihood of being in paid employment also remained significantly lower for years after childbirth.

Fathers experienced no equivalent penalty.

In fact, decades of research suggest almost the opposite.

One of the most widely cited studies, led by sociologist Shelley Correll, found that mothers were consistently judged to be less competent and less committed than equally qualified women without children. They were offered lower starting salaries and viewed as less suitable for promotion. Fathers, meanwhile, experienced no such penalty and were often perceived as even more committed than childless men.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment. Nothing fundamental had changed about these women. Only the assumptions being made about them.

This isn’t a confidence gap.

It’s a credibility gap.

And that’s a very different problem.

Women Aren’t Becoming Less Ambitious

One of the most persistent myths is that motherhood causes women to step back from ambition.

The data tells a different story.

Female entrepreneurship in the UK has grown significantly over the past two decades, with the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reporting record levels of entrepreneurial activity among women. Long before this recent growth, the Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship found that flexibility around family responsibilities was the single most common reason mothers gave for starting businesses.

That finding has always fascinated me. Not because women were leaving organisations. But because of why.

They weren’t saying, “I want less.”

They were saying, “I need a different way.”

That’s an important distinction.

Starting a business is rarely the easy option. It often involves greater financial uncertainty, longer hours and enormous personal risk.

Women aren’t choosing entrepreneurship because they’re less ambitious.

They’re choosing it because traditional workplaces too often ask them to express that ambition in ways that no longer fit the reality of their lives.

When the system doesn’t flex, people build new systems.

To me, that isn’t evidence of ambition disappearing.

It’s evidence of ambition refusing to wait for permission.

The Ambition Gap We’re Naming Wrong

This is where I think we’ve misunderstood the conversation.

The assumption is that mothers want less. I don’t believe that’s true.

What changes, at least for a season, isn’t capability. It’s capacity.

Those two things are not the same.

Capability is what you’re able to do.

Capacity is what you currently have available to give.

When you’re leading a team while raising young children, managing the invisible mental load of family life and functioning on interrupted sleep, your capacity may well shrink.

Your capability hasn’t gone anywhere.

Confusing the two is one of the greatest mistakes organisations make.

A woman with less capacity this year is not a woman with less potential.

She is a woman carrying more.

If leaders understood that distinction, I suspect we’d stop measuring commitment purely by visibility, hours worked or constant availability.

We’d start asking a better question.

How do we create environments where talented people can contribute brilliantly across different seasons of life?

Because seasons change.

Capability endures.

What Twenty Years of Coaching Has Taught Me

I’ve spent much of my career coaching senior leaders, founders and ambitious women navigating moments of transition.

Some were returning from maternity leave.

Some were leading global organisations.

Some were doing both.

Some were questioning whether the career they’d worked so hard to build still reflected the person they’d become.

The circumstances were different.

The underlying question was remarkably similar.

“Why don’t I feel like myself anymore?”

I’ve never once met a woman whose ambition had genuinely disappeared.

I’ve met women who were exhausted.

Women carrying impossible expectations.

Women frustrated by systems that quietly penalised them for becoming parents.

Women who no longer recognised the shape their ambition had taken and mistook that unfamiliarity for failure.

But the desire to contribute.

To build.

To lead.

To matter.

I’ve never seen motherhood extinguish that.

What I’ve seen is ambition becoming more intentional.

Less about proving.

More about purpose.

Less about climbing every ladder.

More about choosing the right one.

If I Could Go Back

I still think about the woman sitting at that kitchen table.

The one who couldn’t understand why a decision that should have been simple suddenly felt impossible.

If I could sit beside her now, I wouldn’t tell her to be more confident.

I wouldn’t tell her to trust herself harder.

I’d simply tell her this.

You’re not broken.

You’re becoming.

Of course your decisions feel different.

You’re making them from a different identity than the one that existed before.

Give yourself time to get to know her.

She isn’t less ambitious.

She just wants different things from that ambition now.

And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson motherhood has taught me.

Before children, much of my ambition was about proving I could.

Now it’s about building something that reflects who I am.

Work that matters.

Leadership that feels authentic.

Success that doesn’t require sacrificing the people I love to protect the career I’ve built.

The workplace still has a long way to go.

The motherhood penalty is real.

Too many women continue to pay a professional price for becoming parents that fathers simply don’t.

But every week I sit with women who refuse to let that define the rest of their story.

They aren’t waiting for permission.

They aren’t becoming less ambitious.

They’re becoming more discerning.

They’re asking better questions.

Building careers, businesses and lives that make room for the whole of who they’ve become.

Looking back, I realise I wasn’t losing myself at that kitchen table.

I was meeting a new version of myself.

She just needed a little time before she could trust her own compass again.