Marilla Akkermans.
Marilla Akkermans, Founder and Managing Director, Equality Media + Marketing
I left a traditional agency after I had my first baby. My ambition had not gone anywhere. What had changed was the place I came back to. Before I left, there were conversations about my progression, a future being built around me. I came back a parent, and those conversations had stopped. The pathway that had felt open no longer was, and no one had to say it out loud.
I had been planned around, not planned for.
That distinction is what parental leave still misses. Businesses are getting better at talking about leave, and government is slowly getting better at supporting it, but most workplaces still do not know how to create a good experience for the person taking leave, the person coming back, or the person carrying the work while they are gone.
From 1 July, Australia's Paid Parental Leave scheme stretches to 26 weeks, with more reserved for the second parent, and super is now paid on top. That is progress worth marking, because care has economic value and both parents should get proper time with a new child. But leave is only the first chapter. It covers the months when a baby is small and stops there, and we have barely begun to ask how someone holds a career and raises a child across the years that follow.
In media and agencies, the pattern is familiar. Someone goes on leave and, instead of the role being properly replaced, the work is carved up and absorbed by people already at capacity. Often the person covering is another woman, trusted to carry the bigger job but not recognised enough to get the title, pay or progression that should come with it. Then the woman on leave returns to a role that has changed shape, and the one who covered is expected to step back down, after half a year proving she can operate a level up.
So two women carry the business through a hard stretch, and both come out worse for it. One comes back to a smaller job than she left. The other is sent back to the one she has outgrown. That is the maternity cover problem, and it is one of the most under-discussed ways we lose senior women.
We talk a lot about the pipeline, because it makes the problem sound external, as if the talent were still out there, on its way. But how can it be a pipeline problem when the women are already here, already doing the work, already proving they can lead? The talent is not missing. The structure is.
This isn't malicious on purpose, in fact, I think most businesses just haven't thought it through. They default to the status quo because it is easier at the start, and underestimate the mess at the end, by which point the small saving that caused it is long forgotten. And that saving is rarely a saving. The Media Federation of Australia's most recent census put the share of people leaving the industry at 18.3 per cent. Losing an experienced person costs far more than the few thousand dollars saved: the recruiter's fee, the lost knowledge, the client who leaves with her, and the message it sends to every other woman watching how you handle this. Losing senior women is not only a diversity issue, it is a commercial one. I am proof of that cost. That agency stopped valuing me at the moment I most needed to know my career still mattered, so I left, and built a company that now employs 32 people.
The quiet assumption underneath all of this is that motherhood dulls a woman's commercial edge, when so much of what parenthood builds is exactly what leadership needs. You learn to prioritise ruthlessly, to make the call fast, to hold three competing needs at once and still get somewhere. These are the skills every leadership team says it wants more of. Then a woman comes back from leave carrying all of them, and the room goes quiet. Men take leave too, and we should push hard for more of it, because the more evenly care is shared the more evenly the cost to a career is shared. But women still take longer leave, still carry more at home, and are still usually the ones covering for someone else. The policy is meant for everyone. It does not land on everyone the same way.
At Equality I have tried to build the workplace I wish I could have returned to. Not a perfect one, but one where flexibility is part of the model rather than a favour you earn back. We have not yet had to manage a senior maternity cover, and I say that honestly, because it speaks to the problem too. Too many women leave before they ever get to return and parent inside the same business. But if someone told me tomorrow they were pregnant, we would start with joy, and then we would plan properly. We would look at the role early, not in a rushed conversation a fortnight before she goes. If someone inside could step up, we would say so, and pay and title them properly for the bigger job while they hold it. We would hire behind them so nobody is left carrying two roles, protect the job she is returning to, and put the plan in writing before the leave began. There is no single model. Most businesses have not designed one at all, which is a choice, even if it never feels like one.
Human, flexible policy gets called soft. In fact it is one of the reasons a business performs. Our retention sits at 97 per cent, women hold 80 per cent of our leadership team, and our headcount has grown by roughly a third in the last year. The recognition for our culture came after the model was in place, not before it. The argument that this is too hard or too expensive falls over the moment you price in the people you lose.
So if someone on your team is going on leave, or covering it right now, the question that matters is not whether you support working parents. Almost everyone says they do. It is whether your structure supports them when it costs something. Pay the person doing the bigger job. Give them the title to match. Sort the cover before she leaves, not after. And make it completely normal for men to take leave too.
Government has lifted the floor, and that counts. But it cannot legislate whether a woman comes back to respect and opportunity, or whether we choose to see the leadership in the person covering her role. That part is on us.
Women are ready to lead after children. The real question is whether this industry is ready to stop designing them out.