Leading Out of Maternity Leave

Lead Engineer and Bickley Blog reader, Helen Pedersen, gave a thought provoking presentation to Engineers Australia members recently entitled "Leading Out of Maternity Leave". In 2007, Helen attended a presentation of the Career Review of Engineering Women report - the report investigates the issues surrounding women's retention, satisfaction and progression in the engineering workforce. She discovered that the report did not contain much in the way of good news and she observed a negative, almost defeatist response to the results from the mainly female audience. Questions asked from the audience indicated the difficulty of struggling against the tide and that young women were hesitant to have families because of the conflict with career.

Helen was driven to look on the positive side and reflected on her own experience as a parent and as an engineer. Her experience is that parenting is not negative, but can add to and complement a career. Her view is that there are leadership skills that are learnt in many other areas of life that are directly applicable to the workplace, with parenting being a prime example of this. The idea for the "Leading Out of Maternity Leave" (LOOMOL) project was born.

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Helen's presentation discussed the findings of a survey that she performed as part of the LOOML project, in conjunction with the Western Australia Women in Engineering group. The survey explored the additional skills that parenting can provide and looked at how these skills fit in an engineering environment. Her belief is that recognition of these skills will have multiple benefits - increased confidence for women, better employee contribution for employers, and improved retention for industry.

A group of engineering parents were asked to identify their sources of parenting learning and to rate their leadership skills in terms of how much impact parenting had on these skills in the workplace. The top five skills, seen as enhanced by parenting were:

1. Time management


2. Planning


3. Delegation


4. Self-management


5. Acknowledging effort

The results strongly suggested that the participants felt that parenting skills were relevant and tranferable to leadership in the workplace. Participating in the study was also observed to have a positive impact on those involved - many of the participants were empowered by thinking about their parenting skills in this way and there were tangible changes in confidence and reported self-image.

The findings of the study are being used to develop a set of resources for engineering parents and organisations, to assist with the return from a family break - "The Parenting Pack". It is hoped that this project can demonstrate the useful leadership skills that are gained and enhanced by parents in their time away from the workplace rather than being on a break with no identifiable professional development.

We look forward to further updates from Helen on the progress of this great idea!