Dr Emma Bolger

I was recently invited by Dr Anjali Raj Westwood to appear on the Career Chronicles podcast, discussing maternity leave, returning to work and life as a working mother. I cover policies, pragmatism and the need for a wide variety of options to support working parents.  The podcast is available on Spotify  and on other platforms via Anjali's website .

Over the past year, throughout the period of being pregnant with and then having my second child, I’ve discovered that very little career development support exists for new or expectant mothers. Perhaps because it is assumed that we don’t want or need it. I would argue that this period is, in fact, when career information advice and guidance interventions should be considered essential. For starters, the assumption is that we are happy in our work, and that we’ve chosen to have children when work is stable, or that we are riding the storm and plan to use maternity leave as an excuse to get out and never return. But women do want to work, indeed have to, around very small children. While financial considerations might be paramount, they should be equally weighted with mothers’ own emotional needs, which, if career is a lifelong process that incudes periods of education, work and caring, we forget are directly related to her career development. Straw poll time, I know, but I have two...

I am one month into being back at work, and the wee one has turned 4 months old. Given the amount of times friends and colleagues have asked me about my return to work, accompanied by a concerned look, it’s pretty clear that the general understanding of when you go back “early” is that it's not easy and it’s out of the ordinary. A quick definition of “early” is required here: there is a difference between early (in relation to the generally accepted duration of maternity leave) and too soon. I went back when I was ready. The challenge has been breastfeeding around my work. My workplace is ok: I have the option to work flexibly and there is a feeding / expressing room on campus should I need it. I’ve not needed it yet, because I have a private office space and I have a husband on shared parental leave bringing the wee one in to be fed during my breaks and at lunchtime when I am on campus. My daughter, one week after I returned to work, decided she didn’t want to take a bottle ...

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a proper blog post, so here I am, attempting to get back into the swing of it. There’s a simple reason why I have the headspace and time to do so: I had a baby at the start of June. That’s probably not what you’d expect to come at the end of that sentence. Maternity leave is meant to be all about sleepless nights, being covered in milk/wee/poop, fighting extreme tiredness, trying to entertain a baby, right? Yes, there has been a lot of washing, nappy changing, wondering when I last ate or showered or managed to leave the house in less than an hour. But it’s also been a welcome break from the demands of my work, which had pretty much overtaken my life for the last 3+ years, in every moment when I wasn’t also co-parenting a lively toddler who turned into an even livelier pre-schooler. There is nothing like an enforced period of total confinement, of being “tied down” to a new baby who needs you 100% of the time, to force you to reset. Not ...