It’s 2025, and yet the motherhood penalty is still alive and well for women trying to return to the workforce after having children. Two job-seeking platforms – Jobs For Mums and ZEIL – are teaming up this month to help bring awareness to this problem, and opportunities for those who need them most.
“I can’t tell you the number of doctorate-level women who have come to me that are wanting an admin job,” says Mela Lush, the founder of Job For Mums. “And I’m like, ‘Well, you’re a scientist?!’ and they’ll say, ‘yes, but I have children and I can’t do the hours, or the travel that’s required, so I just want something in admin so I can still provide.’”
‘I spoke to my mums’ groups and it didn’t really matter what we did; how successful we were, how ambitious we were. The elephant in the room for all of us was flexibility.’
If you’d like to start YOUR International Women’s Day off with some rage-inducing statistics about what the state of the workforce is like for women who are also mothers, please enjoy the following:
- According to Statistics NZ, mothers are NZ’s largest untapped talent pool currently either not in employment or underemployed.
- NZ Ministry for Women 2023 reports that 43% of mothers leave the workforce after having kids.
- Of those mothers who do leave the workforce, 60% then struggle to get back in, according to a study by Deloitte NZ, in 2024.
- 85% of working mothers say flexible work is essential to their return to the workforce (Business NZ, 2023) but 92% of women feel that asking for that flexibility could harm their career (Deloitte NZ).
Happy International Women’s Day, I guess! Unless you’re someone who is a mother or wants to be a mother in the future, in which case – even in the year 2025 – you’re still facing the same battles that the generations of women that came before you also did.
When you look at the numbers in those statistics, it’s easy to see that this is a big problem for women, businesses and the economy. And you would be right. In fact, it’s not a million-dollar problem, or even a billion-dollar problem.
An estimated 80% of the gender gap is caused by the motherhood penalty and according to McKinsey Global Institute, closing the global gender gap could add $12 trillion to the global economy.
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Before Mela started Jobs for Mums in 2022, she knew the stats about the motherhood penalty – the economic disadvantage that women face after becoming mothers – but she hadn’t yet lived them. Then, she had children.
“I was commuting 129km a day, I had very young children and I had a daughter with health problems,” she says. She reached out to others and found it was a common problem across the board. “I spoke to my mums’ groups and it didn’t really matter what we did; how successful we were, how ambitious we were. The elephant in the room for all of us was flexibility.”
Mela borrowed $30k from her parents and, with a six-month-old baby and a 20-month-old toddler, set up Jobs For Mums from her couch. The concept is simple, and brilliant – a search engine for mums who want to work but need flexibility.
She posted the website on community pages and had 5,000 candidates signed up, very quickly – and a front-page story on the NZ Herald. She had correctly guessed that there was a huge gap in the market, and Jobs For Mums filled it on both sides – the candidates that needed jobs, and then a huge line-up of businesses that knew the reality that mothers are one of the greatest untapped resources in the professional world. Dedicated, hugely focused and incredibly good at working under pressure – they just need a flexible employer that understands that they have two jobs, rather than punishes them.
“Now, we’ve supported over 10,000 women working with some of the biggest partners and companies in the country,” Mela says. “It’s about smashing the motherhood penalty and it’s very much around the idea that when women rise, we all rise.”
Mothers being trapped out of the work force is such a global problem, it’s literally part of the UN Sustainable Development goals, alongside eliminating poverty, because the organisation knows how critical it is for the economic health of families, communities and countries. “We know that if we can improve female work participation by 50% by 2030, it’s $12 billion invested back into the NZ economy,” Mela says.
This is why, to coincide with International Women’s Day, job-seeking platform ZEIL has added a ‘Jobs for Mums’ filter to its search engine, to help mothers find parenting-friendly employers.
ZEIL is already the largest home for remote jobs in NZ, which makes it a natural fit. “The amount of time you spend working, it has such a big impact on your overall life,” says Caitlin Langlands from ZEIL.
Far from being a part of the ‘end remote working’ movement that has sprung up amongst the public sector, ZEIL is all about matching candidates with flexible employers. “Ultimately, it’s ensuring that the opportunities are there for people, that fit into their lifestyle and helps them get excited and motivated to show up as their best selves, for all parts of their life.”
This month-long partnership between ZEIL and Jobs for Mums is key, Mela says, for getting the word out there that mothers have options. “Why we love working with ZEIL comes back to that concept of when women rise, everyone rises. And even though we’re called Jobs For Mums, we want to make sure every woman gets the same opportunities to thrive,” she says.
While both of these job platforms are helpful for mothers who are looking to get back into the workforce, by giving them the confidence to know their potential employers are pro flexible working, it’s also gives a big boost to the younger generation of women watching how their current employers treats mothers.
“Seeing how other women are forging that path, and what companies are supporting them, what conversations you could be having now or to set yourself up in the future, it makes you think ‘Okay, this could be a great company for me to look at for my career,’” says Caitlin.
She points out that that ZEIL founder, Anna Mowbray, who is herself a working mother, has a saying that ‘when you change one woman’s life, you change a generation. “I’m so grateful to get to work alongside a lot of working mums and I think it’s that concept: that generations change because of it.”
