Zoe Duce, founder of MoveThru, has said the absence of planning around maternity leave and the return to work is pushing mothers out of their careers, with one in five women in the UK stepping back or dropping out after having children.

“I do not believe that is because one in five of us lost our ambition,” Duce wrote. “The problem is the near-total absence of systems, planning and process around one of the biggest transitions in a woman’s working life.”

Duce said the biggest misconception was that women choose to step back because they want to. “In reality, most are being forced into it because the system around them isn’t set up to make it work,” she said.

Duce cited figures showing that 27 per cent of mothers either do not return to work after maternity leave or leave within a year of coming back. Most of those cite poor employer processes, a lack of flexibility and difficult reintegration, according to the figures she cited.

She also pointed to an estimate by the Fawcett Society that about a quarter of a million mothers of young children have left their jobs because of the difficulty of balancing work and childcare. An earlier study by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, published in 2015, estimated that as many as 54,000 new mothers a year were being forced out of their jobs.

Analysis by the Office for National Statistics found that five years after the birth of a first child, mothers’ monthly earnings in England were on average 42 per cent lower, or £1,051 a month, than in the year before the birth. The ONS put the average total earnings loss over those five years at £65,618.

The ONS said part of that fall reflected lower employment, with the probability of being in paid work down by as much as 15 percentage points 18 months after a first birth. It noted that its data covered 2014 to 2022 and that the effects may not apply to more recent births.

Around 590,000 women go on maternity leave in the UK each year, according to Duce, who said nobody was owning the process. “At the moment, mums, managers, and employers are all winging it,” she said.

She compared maternity leave with other business-critical handovers, which she said owners would not leave to improvisation and good intentions. Instead, she said, a business would decide who is responsible, write the plan down and agree what happens when something goes wrong. “Maternity leave and the return to work deserve the same rigour,” she said.

Duce said this mattered most in smaller companies, where there is rarely an HR department and any process tends to sit with the owner. “Retention is cheaper than replacement, and structure beats goodwill,” she said.

Duce, who worked in media for 10 years before having children, said maternity leave hit her harder than she expected mentally. She described a return to work marked by collapsed childcare, sick days and shifting schedules. “Every time I tried to rebuild my life, something would derail it,” she said.

When she spoke to other mothers, she said, the answers were uniform. “This is just how it is,” she said she was told.

She said the situation changed when she began treating it as an operations problem, building childcare contingencies, backup plans with her partner, weekly planning routines and protected time for work and wellbeing. “It wasn’t that the curveballs stopped, it’s that I finally had a way to handle them,” she said.

That experience led to MoveThru, which works with professional mothers and the organisations that employ them on maternity leave and the return to work. The company has published a free downloadable maternity leave and return plan for women, managers and employers, which Duce said includes what staff are entitled to during maternity leave. The government sets out statutory maternity leave and pay rules, including the right to return to work.

“When mothers and their employers understand what they’re entitled to and how to plan for what’s coming, everything changes,” Duce said. “The solution is planning, not sacrifice.”

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