The skills you don't expect to bring back from maternity leave

Returning from maternity leave is, for most professionals, framed primarily as a process of catching up: re-engaging with clients, re-establishing presence, closing the gap that absence creates. That framing is understandable, and the practical reality of re-entry is real. But it captures only part of the picture.

This piece reflects on a different dimension of the return: the capabilities that the experience of parenthood can sharpen, and what those capabilities mean in a demanding professional context. It draws on my own experience returning from a second maternity leave, as well as conversations with other senior women who have been through similar transitions. It does not make a universal claim - every experience of parenthood is different, and every return to work is different. But it makes an observation that I think deserves more attention than it typically receives, both for the women going through it and for the organisations they return to.

 

On empathy

There is a growing body of neuroscience research showing that motherhood changes the brain in measurable ways. Studies using brain imaging have found that the transition to motherhood is associated with changes in regions involved in social cognition and empathy - areas that support the ability to read emotional states, attune to others, and infer what someone needs. Researchers have described this as a reorganisation of the brain's social processing architecture, one that appears to persist well beyond the early months of parenthood.

The lived experience points in the same direction. Parenthood also develops a particular kind of attentiveness - the constant reading of a small person who cannot always tell you what they need. You learn, over time, to pick up on signals that are subtle and sometimes indirect.

It is not a large leap to suggest that this carries over. Reading a room, sensing where the tension is, understanding what a client actually needs beneath what they have asked for - parenthood, it turns out, offers unexpected practice in all of these.

 

On resilience

There is a kind of resilience that comes from having actually been tested, built through sustained pressure, unpredictability, and the requirement to keep functioning when conditions are genuinely hard. Early parenthood can build that.

The suggestion is not that parenthood is uniquely difficult, or that professional life is not demanding in its own right. It is that the particular pressures of that period - the sleep deprivation, the competing demands, the decisions made on limited reserves of time and energy - can recalibrate a sense of proportion in ways that show up later in the work. A steadiness, a higher threshold for what registers as genuinely difficult. In a team context, that kind of groundedness tends to matter.

On focus and perspective

Parenthood has a way of sharpening how you think about time - not necessarily how much of it you spend, but how deliberately you use it. Decisions about what actually needs your attention become more instinctive, not as a conscious exercise, but out of necessity.

Stepping away from the daily rhythm of demanding work, and then returning to it, also adds something else: a clarity that is difficult to develop from within. Distance changes what you see. The observation many returning women make - and one that resonates with my own experience - is not that they have become different professionals, but that they have a clearer sense of where they add the most value and where their energy is best directed.

What good support makes possible

None of this happens automatically. Whether these qualities show up quickly in the work depends significantly on the environment the returning woman comes back into - what she is given to do, and how soon.

Being brought back into substantive work from the start, trusted to operate at the level she left, and included in the conversations that matter - these things create the conditions for a return that builds momentum, rather than lose it. I have been fortunate in that respect, and I am grateful to DT Economics for creating those conditions. It has made a material difference.

The broader point

The case for supporting senior women through maternity leave and back into full engagement with their work is often made in terms of retention, pipeline, and diversity. All of that is true and worth making.

But there is a simpler observation underneath it. The women who return from maternity leave at senior level, in demanding technical fields, and who are given the conditions to re-engage fully - they often bring something back with them that is worth paying attention to. Not despite what they have been through, but in some ways because of it.

I believe that observation deserves to be made more plainly than it usually is.

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Chiara Garbellini is a Principal Consultant at DT Economics. She is a regulatory economist with expertise spanning telecoms, digital platforms and payments, advising network companies and regulators across the UK and internationally.