Trapped between the Past and the Future: Temporal Orientations and the ‘Becoming’ of Post-Maternity Extended Career-Breaks among Women Professionals in the UK

Abstract

This article uses agentic temporality as a focal construct and provides insights into women professionals’ transition to motherhood and extended career-breaks. It explores the connection between their temporal orientations and extended career-break decisions. The article posits that an extended career-break develops out of women professionals’ experiences in the past and an anticipation of the future in the context of motherhood and professional demands. The article builds on Emirbayer and Mische’s temporal view of agency to understand the phenomenon of extended career-breaks following maternity leave among a segment of women professionals in the UK. Qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with 42 professional women in the UK and analysed thematically using NVivo. We find that three temporal dimensions: distant past, recent past and distant future interact in a complex non-linear dynamic, revealing the gendered and structurally constrained exercise of temporal agency of women professionals in their extended career-break decisions.

Introduction

Despite women entering the workforce at higher rates than men globally, the state of gender parity in the labour market remains a challenge and women’s careers develop differently from those of men across developed and emerging economies (Madgavkar et al., 2019 ; World Economic Forum, 2023). Scholarly attention across the USA, the UK and Europe has focused on the high likelihood of women facing interrupted careers and what literature has identified as ‘opting out’, particularly among highly educated women workers (Biese and Choroszewicz, 2019; Guillaume et al., 2024; Hewlett and Luce, 2005; Weisshaar, 2018). Studies investigating the reasons behind women’s career choices have often theoretically framed these around an assumption of rational choice, like Hakim’s (2000) preference theory in the UK and Mainiero and Sullivan’s (2005) Kaleidoscope Career Model in the USA, claiming women’s preferences and agency in their career decisions. However, these studies have been criticised for overlooking the institutional and contextual structural constraints within which such preferences or agency are formed and exercised (Lupu et al., 2018; Tomlinson, 2006). Scholars suggest that organisational ‘inequality regimes’ are premised on gendered separation of production and reproduction spheres, driving practices that make workplaces suitable for the realistically male ‘abstract worker’ (Acker, 1990, 2006). This restricts women in fulfilling workplace expectations due to family responsibilities. Haynes (2008) argues that in the UK, long-hours culture, male homo-sociality and gender stereotypes systematically disadvantage females with family commitments. Women’s non-conformance with the masculine workplace models – both due to gender and motherhood – results in their marginalisation and exclusion from the workplace (Haynes, 2012). This supports Ashcraft’s (2013) view that work segregation and definition of ‘fit’ is linked with gender identity, and systematic disadvantage faced by women. Her metaphor of a ‘glass slipper’ encapsulates the alignment of occupational identity with embodied social identities through which women are excluded from certain occupations. Additionally, the idea of good parenting and ‘moral rationalities’ that define how mothers should combine employment and parenting influences women’s career decisions (Duncan, 2005). The idea of ‘intensive mothering’ is becoming a global standard and is notable in the UK (Faircloth and Murray, 2015). As a good mother is often associated with presence and visibility at home, negative perceptions are held towards mothers’ commitment to work and productivity (Chung and van der Horst, 2018). Organisational requirements often lead to conflict between what constitutes the notion of a ‘good mother’ versus a ‘good employee’ (Gatrell, 2013), impacting women’s career decisions.

This article investigates the reasons behind post-maternity extended career-breaks among women professionals and focuses its enquiry on understanding the nature of women’s agency in their career-break decisions. In this, we build on Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) temporal view of agency to address the following research question: how is women professionals’ agency constituted and exercised around post-maternity extended career-break decisions? It applies the temporally subjective manifestations of agency rooted in flow of time and reflected in individuals’ temporal orientations towards the past and the future to understand how decisions are taken in the present.

Consideration of the past and anticipation of the future, indicating the inter-temporal orientations of individuals, is fundamental to decision making (Taber, 2013). Studies based in psychology suggest that individual differences in cognitive engagement with time impact an array of outcomes like well-being, motivation and achievement where a high past focus corresponds to more negative outcomes, whereas a stronger future focus relates to professional achievements (Kooij et al., 2018; Shipp and Aeon, 2019). While temporal focus/temporal orientations have been explored in organisational behaviour, leadership and strategic management research in the western world (Choi et al., 2023; Shipp and Cole, 2015), an assessment of how inter-temporal orientations affect career decisions is limited in sociological careers research (Praskova and Johnston, 2021; Shipp et al., 2009). Studies either look at future orientation, like how anticipation of future work–family conflict due to the gendered nature of family and domestic responsibilities impacts women’s career decisions (Hummer, 2021), or consider the impact of the past, like upbringing, on the development of individual moral rationalities for working mothers (and fathers) that influence women’s career decisions (Lupu et al., 2018; Sang et al., 2013). Further, literature across the globe tends to focus on career development, career identity and career decisions of younger people (Hu et al., 2024; Praskova and Johnston, 2021). An assessment of agency from an inter-temporal perspective remains underexplored in adults’ careers research. Additionally, most of the research about women’s career interruptions in the UK is concentrated on short-term maternity leave, the exceptions being Panteli (2006, 2012), Tomlinson et al. (2008) and studies researching women returner programmes like Guillaume et al. (2024). This article focuses on the overlooked phenomenon of extended career-breaks among women professionals while theoretically integrating temporal orientations and agentic temporality in its enquiry. The article shows that women’s agency as constituted by their temporal orientations in the distant past, recent past and distant future as mediated by their social context of family and workplace contributes to the evolvement of maternity leave into an extended career-break. The article begins with a discussion of the construct of time and positions the temporal constituents of agency involved in individual action. Next, we situate women’s careers and career-breaks, particularly in the context of motherhood, in the UK context. This is followed by an outline of research methods, findings, contributions and conclusion.

Time and Temporal Constituents of Agency

While there is no single theory of time, the concepts of objective and subjective time constitute the two chief strands of how time is identified, understood and experienced by individuals. Objective time is defined as a view of time that is (a) unidirectional – progressing from past to present to future; (b) homogenous – each second is the same as any other second; and (c) absolute – time is the same across all situations and individuals. This is termed ‘clock-time’. In contrast, subjective time is defined as a view of time that is (a) cognitively cyclical – thoughts may move between past, present and future in any direction; (b) heterogeneous – some moments pass more quickly than others; and (c) interpretive – experiences can only be understood in context (Shipp and Cole, 2015: 239). While the clock-time view would see the past, present and future as three distinct parameters, subjective time recognises them as in undividable flow with a ‘continuous progress of the past [as it] gnaws into the future, and swells as it advances, leaving its bite or the mark of its teeth on all things’ (Chia, 2002: 864). The human ability to conceive mental transtemporal movement in the past and the future and the subjective interpretation of time provide an opportunity to analyse a phenomenon or an event as a ‘becoming’ where its temporal evolvement could be followed from the past and into the future alongside the engagement of the actors in continually reconstructing such a path (Hernes, 2017: 603). This lends a view that events are not just occurrences that are accomplished in any moment, instead, events are defined by their ‘becoming’ an event wherein both occurrences in the past and a perception of the future come into play.

Temporal Orientation, Temporal Focus and Temporal Depth

In their influential article on agency, Emirbayer and Mische (1998: 963) placed temporality at the heart of agency and recognised agency as situated ‘within the flow of time’ to investigate how agency shapes social action. The authors identified three dimensions of agency: ‘iteration’, ‘projectivity’ and ‘practical evaluation’, which correspond to the past, future and present dimensions of time. Focusing on the interaction of these three temporal dimensions they conceptualised agency as ‘informed by the past but also oriented toward the future and toward the present as a capacity to contextualise past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment’ (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 963). While individuals’ temporal orientation may be towards past, future or present, at a given moment, actors are embedded in multiple temporalities and hence may be oriented towards past, future or present at the same time. This is reflected in their decisions among options that are associated with different time frames at the same time (Shipp et al., 2009). Simply stated, individuals’ temporal orientations towards the past and the future and their understanding about their own relationship to the past and future makes a difference to their decisions made for and in the present (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 973).

We complement this idea of agency with Bluedorn’s (2000, 2002) theorisation of temporality while considering human action. Bluedorn argues that the past and future-orientation constructs are indifferent between long-term past and future and short-term past and future while this difference in emphasis may create different results. He calls the degree of emphasis on past, present or future temporal focus (Bluedorn, 2000: 124). Additionally, Bluedorn (2000: 124) introduced temporal depth and defined it as ‘the temporal distances into the past and future that individuals typically consider when contemplating events that have happened, may have happened, or may happen’. Bluedorn distinguishes direction (past or future) from distance (how far into the past or future). The difference in degree of emphasis and distance into past and future creates dimensions like future temporal depths and past temporal depths, which reflect individuals’ short-term or long-term orientations. These are useful theoretical temporal constructs while investigating individuals’ career decisions as they shape how individuals perceive their work and career experiences in the present (Shipp and Cole, 2015; Shipp et al., 2009). This research argues that agency as constituted by temporal orientation or temporal focus and nuanced by temporal depth has the potential to illuminate how women exercise agency while taking extended career-break decisions, which are influenced by the social contexts of the family and the workplace.

The UK Context of Women’s Career-Breaks

In 2024, 24.6% of all the economically inactive women out of paid employment to look after their family and home comprised of women earlier working in occupations identified as managers, directors and senior officials; professional occupations and associate professional and technical occupations (Office for National Statistics, 2024). The study collectively refers to them as professional women and focuses on their experiences. Various employment trends and patterns highlight the gendered nature of work and careers. Following global trends, the employment rate of women in the UK increased from 52.8% to 72.3% between 1971 and 2023 (Office for National Statistics, 2023). Since 2020, it has become more common for both mothers and fathers to work full-time, rather than one parent (usually the mother) working part-time (Office for National Statistics, 2021). However, the number and age of children affect mothers’ employment participation. In families with one child, 55.1% had both parents working full-time, dropping to 36.3% in families with three or more children, with mostly mothers working part-time (Office for National Statistics, 2019). Mothers aged 25–49 years are less likely to be employed than women without dependent children but are more likely to work aged 50 years and over, when children grow older. Nearly 9.3% of mothers work term-time jobs compared with 1.9% of fathers as these roles align with school hours (Office for National Statistics, 2021). Post COVID-19, more mothers with a youngest dependent child aged between three and four years (16.4%) worked from home while fathers’ homeworking rates were largely unaffected (Office for National Statistics, 2021). In summary, this picture reveals that despite historically high levels of women’s employment (including mothers), the UK labour market remains gendered including for highly qualified women. In 2016, the career-break penalty for professional women in the UK was estimated at £1 bn, with potential additional economic output of £1.7 bn, if the issue could be addressed (PWC, 2016).

Methodology

The article draws on a broader research project looking at the career behaviour of women professionals in the UK and focuses on the reasons behind the incidence of extended career-breaks. We define an extended career-break as more than two years away from professional employment to clearly distinguish it from the UK’s statutory 52-weeks maternity leave. The qualitative data were collected between August 2021 and February 2022 through remote and in-person semi-structured interviews lasting 50–80 minutes with 42 women professionals living in the UK. There were three conditions for participation: that they were working in the UK at the time of the decision to take the career-break, that they had taken a career-break of two or more years for childcare reasons and that they had attempted a return to work within the UK, regardless of whether such attempt resulted in gaining employment. The participants were recruited using purposive sampling to ensure that they met these criteria to fulfil the objectives of the research. The recruitment requirements were advertised using a flyer, which was shared at multiple personal, professional and social media platforms. Snowball sampling technique was used to leverage participant referrals; however, we secured only four such participants. Participants from three professional occupation categories in the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020 (Office for National Statistics, 2020) were chosen for their close association in terms of expectation of high educational attainment, knowledge, training and experience: Managers, Directors and Senior Officials (9); Professional Occupations (31); and Associate Professional and Technical Occupations (2). All the participants were heterosexual and married; however, one was divorced and two were undergoing divorce at the time of the interview. They were aged between 35 and 57 with one–three children. The average age of participants at the time of the career-break was 34 years and the average length of the career-break was five-and-a-half years. Out of the 42 participants, 23 were white, 16 were Asian, two were of mixed ethnicity and one was from a Black ethnic background. Most participants lacked family (grandparent) support for childcare since nearly half had migrated to the UK as adults and the UK born had moved away from their family to build their professional careers.

The interviews were transcribed manually verbatim, and the data were thematically analysed using NVivo 14 software following principles suggested by Braun and Clarke (2006). The coding and analysis were inductive and open while exploring meaning both at explicit and implicit levels and paying attention to patterns and paradoxes. After immersion in data during interviews and transcription, we generated initial codes in each interview transcript. These were grouped into initial themes followed by revisiting original data to assess their fit and viability for the overall analysis. The themes were refined and named by fine-tuning of analysis and then chosen to be presented based on the research question. Guided by the theoretical underpinning, extant literature and thematic analysis, we identified three temporal orientations: distant past, recent past and distant future, to answer the research question.

Findings

Temporal Orientation in the ‘Distant Past’: Upbringing and Cultural Influences

An orientation towards the distant past was reflected in the participants’ subjective experience of their upbringing and the cultural influences internalised through socialisation, which had impacted their perspectives on ‘good’ parenting. An overwhelming majority of the participants strongly felt that children should be cared for through parental presence at home until they reach a ‘milestone’ age. They believed that parental presence was crucial in developing a sense of connection with the child, which had a lasting impact on children’s mental and physical well-being. This had gravitated them towards taking a career-break beyond maternity leave:

Well, I have a strong belief there . . . I feel if you decide to have kids . . . they should at least be brought up to a certain age with us being there for them . . . I think the key years of kids is in the beginning, and the impression they get about everything that goes on in life is then. (Payal, 50, Pharmacist)

With such beliefs, despite initially planning a limited break, such as until the child started nursery, the break often extended with the decision to have more children as parents aimed to offer the same experience to each child. Additionally, most participants expressed a strong sentiment and a gendered moral rationality of being the primary caregiver themselves. Most participants did not have family support to rely on for childcare purposes and nevertheless, were often reluctant to consider taking any external childcare help. While the issue of high childcare costs in the UK was ubiquitous across the discussions with the interviewees, even in instances where they had the financial means to hire childcare, many still decided to stay home. Filipa, an investment banker, stayed home for eight years to care for her two children despite having a childcare support system:

Even when I took the career-break, I did have plenty of help at home. So, I did have a nanny, I did have a nursery . . . I did have a cleaner and all that kind of stuff. I could have gone back to work . . . but I actually wanted to be around the kids. (Filipa, 48, Investment Banker)

The belief in the importance of one parent staying at home to care for children often had roots in the participants’ and in many cases, in their partners’ upbringing, which often motivated them to replicate the kind of upbringing they themselves had had.

However, even if the belief ostensibly was that one ‘parent’ should stay home to raise children, and the discussion was often led using the gender-neutral term ‘parent’, in effect, the decision about which parent stayed home was gendered as that parent ‘happened’ to be the mother. This was a product of participants’ orientation in the distant past, whereby their cultural understanding of the mother’s role and their experience of their own upbringing persuaded them that they should do as their own mothers had done. Many participants had grown up in households where mothers stayed home, and this experience was strongly engrained and manifested in their own unquestioning assumption of their present primary caregiver role:

In my household, my dad used to work, and my mum used to be home, looking after the children . . . she would cook, and she would do the cleaning . . . so pretty much what I am doing now (Ragini, 55, IT professional).

The responses from the participants also revealed an essentialist assumption emanating from gendered ideologies imbibed during their upbringing that produced a view of women as instinctively and naturally better carers:

I don’t think it comes naturally for a man to look after the kids all day. I think, women have more patience and I think we are just made to just be the primary carer (Renee, 39, IT professional).

Sometimes, there was a tendency to essentialise a whole culture wherein the participants attributed their understanding of the role of the mother as the primary carer to their national culture or religion:

It’s somehow in Indian culture; it’s always the woman (who) ends up taking care of the house . . . mother’s importance is always more . . . our culture imbibes that. (Neha, 40, Asian/Indian, Biochemist Researcher)

I think it’s due to Islamic culture that motherhood and being a mother is a really important job and part of values. (Leia, 44, White/Moroccan, Graphic Designer)

The idea that the mother should be the one to stay home was further reinforced if their partner had similar beliefs emanating from their own childhood experiences. The participants often struggled to pinpoint the origins of such beliefs but felt the pressure of delivering a hands-on version of motherhood imbibed through the social discourse whereby they felt conflicted about pursuing a career that required outsourcing domestic tasks and time away from the family:

I have painted a picture of what it is to be a mum . . . and that’s been probably influenced by my mum, people that I have seen and respected . . . I felt that to be the best mum I needed to be with my son. It needed to be me doing the things that he was doing say with my mum and mother-in-law or both carers . . . and that was the main conflict. (Vicky, 35, Marketing and Sales professional)

Some participants described their decision to stay home as ‘pragmatic’ citing the higher earnings of their partners. Also, the financial affordability to prioritise care work and take an extended career-break without significantly disrupting the family’s lifestyle provided an important backdrop to the participants’ decisions. However, this prioritising reflected and reinforced the gendered non-egalitarian arrangements in the family whereby the question of career-break and its implications for the participants’ future career was marginalised. The gendered understanding of the caring role, the interpretation of mother being the primary carer and an assumption about these tasks as women’s responsibility remained strong behind these decisions. This reflected in their readiness towards taking an extended career-break and a reluctance or absence of consideration to discuss alternative arrangements with their partners to enable their return to work earlier. This was also visible in instances where the participants decided to stay home despite earning higher than their partner:

I don’t think that thought even occurred to my mind . . . that there was a possibility that that sort of discussion could have been had. In my head it was already a given . . . I think somehow, it’s always been that the home and child would be mine. (Padma, 44, Market Researcher)

This understanding made the idea of returning to work complicated and uncomfortable due to the need for workplace adjustment for emergency childcare, often deferring their return to work:

Even if I was working, I would still be the one that would pick up the pieces. If one of them was ill, I would be the one at home, not my husband (Kaila, 49, Graphic Designer).

Many interviewees observed that such assumptions were a result of a socially reinforcing effect of traditional ideas around childcare and domestic duties showing the impact of influence that their distant past had on their perceptions and understanding about their role in the family. An orientation towards the distant past underpinned the gendered moral rationality held by most participants. Only a handful of participants expressed dissatisfaction with the rhetoric of women being endowed with natural abilities to care and resisted the idea of being identified as the primary or more suitable carer for children. This alternative orientation was also the product of their childhood experience where they had grown up around a working mother. However, for most of them, the internalisation of such discourse generated doubt if they would be able to fulfil their responsibilities as a mother while pursuing a career. In this, a lack of role models – women who balanced motherhood and a successful career – also influenced participants’ perceptions around accepting themselves as primary carers and disregarding pursuing career alongside motherhood. Not having a template to guide them to manage both work and family and working within the internalised gendered discourse, for them their career became something to be adjusted around the family:

That’s a big challenge, I don’t (have role models). So, there was nobody to guide me as to how having a family is going to impact my career . . . for me it has always been, whatever my husband does I have to fit into that, and then what happens in the family, I have to fit into that . . . I have always followed the traditional model and tried to get my profession into it. (Babita, 42, Investment Banker)

However, even in cases where the participants had observed women managing both family and career, a majority were not inclined to manage both themselves citing reasons like time away from children, dependence on external childcare and the intense balancing act it required. Their upbringing often bore on these considerations. Vicky had left work after 11 years in the marketing profession and was working part-time as a contractor at the time of the interview after staying home for three years:

I had women I worked with . . . who were working mums, and so they had a totally different blueprint. But I knew what I felt inside, and I suppose the upbringing I had and on my husband’s side made me think of it differently. . . so I think it was more justified in my mind that actually it’s better off if I am home. (Vicky, 35, Marketing professional)

It is surprising that we did not find a greater diversity of thinking towards parenting among the participants despite the variety in their ethnic and socio-cultural backgrounds. This suggests similarity across cultures and ethnicities regarding beliefs and assumptions around gendered moral rationalities of mothering among professional women who take extended career-breaks. The participants’ temporal orientations in the distant past reflected their upbringing, cultural influences and absence of working mother role models, which manifested in their parenting beliefs and understanding and acceptance of the mother’s traditional gendered role.

Temporal Orientation in the ‘Recent Past’

The interviewees’ experiences in the recent past were chiefly constituted by their observations about the work–home challenge and its impact on new mothers even before they became mothers themselves. These insights were gained through witnessing others whereby they developed an understanding of how the experience of balancing work and raising young children unfolds for mothers. This understanding affected their own motivations and judgements about their own roles and was crucial in determining the duration of their own career-break. In this, the organisational culture of long hours, presenteeism, need for travel and visibility at the workplace left many with the feeling that pursuing a career is unsustainable for new mothers. The organisational culture valuing time as a proxy for commitment left many participants feeling that they could advance in their career while childfree but feared their progress would pause with childcare responsibilities. As the pressures of time and presence at the workplace corresponded closely to the image of the ‘ideal worker’ (Acker, 1990), finding a way to do the job in that environment and be a mother to young children was often understood as an unsustainable proposition. They believed that to be taken seriously, one had to behave like a man or be a proper employee, which they felt they may not be able to do as a mother. Felicia explained:

I think, an organisation thinks of a proper employee as one that is the classic presenteeism, is there eight in the morning stays until six in the evening, has no other commitments on their time. If the client comes in and says hey, we want this done by tomorrow, it can be done by tomorrow. Can stay till 2 a.m., 1 a.m., 5 a.m., 6 a.m., whatever is necessary to do the work. Can go to Toronto tomorrow, go to Beijing the next day, doesn’t have any need to prior arrange childcare and is dedicated. 100% ‘I can do whatever you want at the drop of a hat’ type, way that people with children can’t because they have got childcare to do. (Felicia, 43, Solicitor)

The specific demands of the profession or industry that required a professional’s unlimited and unpredictable presence at work left many participants feeling that they would not be able to continue working once they had children. Some participants argued that these expectations increased with seniority, posing a greater challenge for those who became mothers later in life after reaching senior positions:

I worked in the corporate world, and I would say it is very much geared to working full-time and the more senior you are, the longer hours you do (Vicky, 35, Marketing professional).

The participants understood the corporate world to be structured for employees who could work long hours and be present for travel and after-hours socialising, which in their judgement, they would be unable or unwilling to do upon becoming a mother.

However, while part-time or flexible work options are often considered to achieve a work–life balance after motherhood (Chung and van der Horst, 2018), the participants often felt that the workplace culture limited the availability of such roles:

The opportunities are so few and far between and part-time jobs are like gold dust, especially at the higher work [level], across the board really (Camy, 38, Speech and Language Therapist).

Even so, the double shift of managing work and family through part-time or flexible work was not an idea that all the participants were enthusiastic about. Some of them had seen their colleagues’ careers slow down or deteriorate after returning to work on such arrangements. Aditi did not want to work full-time but was also sceptical about returning part-time in the advertising industry, which thrived on long hours, after-hours socialisation and overwork. It was difficult for her to imagine that returning to work on a part-time basis would provide career prospects worth taking the pressures both from work and home:

I have seen pre-kids, mums or people that were doing part-time roles and it’s almost like they’re a bit dismissed and miss out on a lot, or they are just doing so much behind the scenes when they get home in the evenings . . . that it’s ridiculous, the juggle is absolutely ridiculous. (Aditi, 43, Advertising professional)

Therefore, a perception existed among some of the participants that part-time work does not provide the same level of professional experience and opportunities for progression as full-time work. This concern led them towards an extended career-break instead until such time as they felt ready to work full-time. Participants also reported witnessing day-to-day micro-level resistance and ridicule from colleagues towards women who worked flexibly, something research identifies as employers’ concern about women returners’ prioritising their family over career and stigmatisation of part-time workers by their superiors and colleagues (Guillaume et al., 2024). Amy observed one of her teammates being derided while working shorter hours after maternity leave:

On the days that she was working, she was working harder than anybody else . . . getting everything done between normal office hours and then leaving . . . So, when she was leaving at 5.30 on the dot, it was like ‘oh it’s a part of a parts’ . . . There was this element of oh well, that person is a ‘part-time’ (gestures to quote). (Amy, 56, Lawyer)

The participants hence believed that working part-time or flexible hours after becoming a mother would put them at an overall relative and competitive disadvantage against colleagues who could always work longer hours, stay for after-hours activities, undertake training and developmental projects without time limitations and be around to participate in office politics. They felt that these opportunities were essential for progression, but they would miss out on them vis-a-vis their colleagues, predominantly men, who were often not encumbered with caring responsibilities:

There are a lot of males who basically don’t take time out. They can spend the extra time learning and basically doing the development you need to stay ahead (Ragini, 55, IT professional).

As such perceptions about unsupportive workplace cultures were strong in the participants based on their observations in the workplace, they were unmotivated to consider an early return to work after motherhood. At the same time, most of them felt a lack of support at home too. While many participants were reluctant to use external childcare options as discussed earlier, even in cases where participants were potentially open to the idea, their observations around costs and planning challenges of childcare often led to feeling that they would create limitations towards returning to work early. The issue of high childcare costs that renders women’s return to work financially unviable for many families in the UK is widely acknowledged in literature (Cahusac and Kanji, 2014). The calculation of net income after taxes and childcare costs does not appear attractive enough to many. The high costs of childcare created a belief among many participants that while reluctant to work full-time, if they worked part-time, they would not be able to earn enough to afford childcare, assuming they managed to get part-time work to do. They had also seen families trying to economise through a combination of various forms of childcare like using a childminder or nursery, asking a friend or relative. Some participants felt overwhelmed by the idea that such childcare arrangements would be unstable and feared it would negatively impact how they would be perceived at work:

I had two friends, and I would constantly see them (struggling), this nanny has not come, arrange for this nanny, that nanny, some days they will have to leave work at three to pick up, rush and pick up. So, I was seeing this environment where you know I could foresee a lot of stress. (Asha, 48, Accountant/Finance professional)

The participants’ orientation in the ‘recent past’ constituted their perceptions about the role of organisational culture in making balancing work and home tricky with young children; the career implications of working on flexible arrangements and challenges of managing childcare as accumulated through the observation of their colleagues prior to becoming mothers themselves. This often left participants perceiving a lack of practical solutions to consider an early return after becoming mothers and predisposed them to consider taking an extended career-break until the time they felt they could return full-time to work.

Temporal Orientation towards ‘Distant Future’

The temporal orientation towards distant future guided a long-term view and associated career planning for about a fifth of the participants. It was manifested in decisions taken in anticipation of future motherhood, which interviewees often acknowledged had compromised their potential lifetime career trajectory as the planning for eventual motherhood led them to forgo further studies or choose less demanding specialisms and roles. This then facilitated their readiness to stay home for childcare because their careers had hitherto failed to meet their expectations in terms of interest, earnings and prospects.

When she got married, with future motherhood in mind, Paula moved from a consultancy role within HR to a more ‘operations-oriented’ role in order to have predictable work hours and less travelling. Similarly, Camila decided not to pursue investment banking after her economics degree and instead moved into HR, which she interpreted as not ‘real’ work. The sense of ‘real’ was linked with elevated social and financial status. However, she ‘self-limited’ at the age of 20/21 because she felt that being an investment banker would be too much of a time commitment for future motherhood:

I decided (after my economics degree) that I didn’t want to be an investment banker because I wouldn’t be the mum I wanted to be, because you have to be there at half-six in the morning (Camila, 40, HR professional).

Palak, an accountant, scaled back from investment accounting before having children to balance her work around her husband’s busy career. She joined a smaller company several years before getting pregnant and argued the move delayed her return, as larger firms with good maternity policies might have motivated her to return sooner. Participants also highlighted that the financial viability of the household running with a reduced income was also critical. Payal, who stayed home for eight years before returning to being a full-time pharmacist, acknowledged that owing to her husband’s financial stability, she made the decision to stay home with children long before having them:

I think just from the way I was brought up and the fact that we are lucky to survive on one parent’s income, I could be at home with the kids to bring them up. So, we knew this before I actually had kids. (Payal, 50, Pharmacist)

The participants’ orientation towards distant future was shaped by the perceived realities of motherhood, but it also was a product of their disposition towards the distant past of upbringing and recent past of perception and experience of organisational work culture. The resultant lived and imagined experiences from the multiple temporal orientations worked in tandem towards creating the event of an extended career-break.

Discussion and Contribution

This article focused on a specific segment of professional women in the UK who take extended career-breaks after maternity leave, and aimed to explore how such women’s agency is constituted and exercised around this career decision. Building on the temporal view of agency contemplated by Emirbayer and Mische (1998), the article assessed the temporally variable manifestations of their agency and makes several contributions. It has addressed a theoretical gap in literature by utilising the temporal construct of agency from a sociological perspective to understand women professionals’ career behaviour. It has also bridged an empirical gap by focusing its inquiry on the under-researched phenomenon of extended career-breaks among women professionals in the UK. The article showed women’s agency as composed of their ‘iterative’ temporal orientations in the past and ‘projective’ temporal orientations in the future alongside a consideration of temporal distance/depth of such orientations (Bluedorn, 2000). Their long-term orientation in the distant past, the imagined realities of distant future and lived experience of recent past as embedded in the context of the family and the workplace shaped their extended career-break decisions. The participants interacted with multiple time frames at the same time (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998; Shipp et al., 2009) and showed a complex interaction of past and future perspectives exhibiting a non-linear temporal dynamic, where an orientation towards the past also impacted how a future-oriented long-term view was taken with respect to career. The extended career-break hence emerged as an event-in-the-making, a ‘becoming’ (Hernes, 2017: 603).

The gendered phenomenon of mostly mothers (rather than fathers) staying home to raise children is often claimed as women’s preference or orientation for family life or a response to how their career aspirations change vis-a-vis their station in life around family, interpreting it as women’s agency (Hakim, 2000; Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005). However, the temporal view of agency adopted in the article established that an exercise of such agency is shaped by structural factors both in the workplace and within families. An understanding of gender roles that developed out of upbringing and cultural socialisation often led women to consider raising children as their primary responsibility. Their experience of a work environment structured on the premise of the ‘abstract worker’ made returning to work with young children particularly challenging. Together, the two curtailed women’s true agency while taking their career decisions. In a few instances, women vehemently contested the idea that taking a career-break to raise children was a ‘choice’; however, more often, they owned it as their ‘choice’, citing their desire to fulfil their conception of the motherhood role by being present while the children were young. This indicated the ingrained strength of the gendered discourse and moral rationality around motherhood that often hinders the cognisance of structural barriers by those who live it. The structurally limited and gendered construction of such agency suggested that the constitution and exercise of agency in relation to extended career-breaks is itself an act of performing gender.

The article further revealed that the impact of gendered discourse around the moral rationalities of parenting transcends space and ethnicity as the agentic outcome regarding the extended career-break decision was common across a culturally diverse group of participants raised both within and outside of the UK. Such moral rationalities often influenced the extended career-break decisions more than the presence of working-women role models. While scholarship has found links between partners’ gender ideologies and the division of domestic and care work in the family (Seierstad and Kirton, 2015), this research showed its direct bearing on participants’ extended career-break decisions. The article also provided a possible explanation for the persistence of gendered role performance in families and workplaces (Seierstad and Kirton, 2015; Sian et al., 2020). As women performed gender as mothers under the interaction of their temporal orientations, it reinforced the structural environment from which such expectations had emanated and women’s extended career-breaks after childbirth perpetuated those structural conditions in the process. The article hence aligns with literature suggesting that the dispositions embodied during upbringing continue to shape work–family decisions, reinforcing structures that hinder gender equality (Lupu et al., 2018). The article also supports the literature that confirms a trend among women to proactively shape their career choices in anticipation of potential work–family conflicts stemming from motherhood (Hummer, 2021; Pasamar et al., 2020) by linking such moves to the possibility of maternity leave turning into an extended career-break.

Despite an increasing number of professional working women, workplaces continue to be structured around male workers (Acker, 1990) and jobs and career opportunities de facto if not de jure, reserved for employees prepared to work full-time hours, which men are more likely to offer (Calinaud et al., 2021). Women continue to suffer downward career mobility with their increased likelihood of working in low-quality part-time jobs post maternity (Costa Dias et al., 2021; Lovejoy and Stone, 2012) that does not make an early return to work seem viable and worthwhile for many professional women. The article roots for efforts at the organisational level to counter the hegemony of linear careers and a culture that is biased and resistant towards flexible workers and stigmatises such work (Guillaume et al., 2024; Kornberger et al., 2010). This may be achieved by acknowledging the childcare obligations of parents by offering flexible work to both mothers and fathers, offering good quality part-time work and investing in on-site nursery facilities. Planned career-break policies to enable mothers to return to their pre-break careers, and clarity and planning around reintegration of women returning from maternity leave would help organisations in extracting their professional value and support women in avoiding extended career-breaks after motherhood. Considering the impact of early socialisation and gendered social discourse on women professionals’ career decisions, targeted education of females to raise awareness at early stages such as at school and university may also help disrupt such influence. While the data obtained for this study are from a select segment of professional women on extended career-breaks that constitute around one-quarter of women on career-breaks in the UK, the article calls for further research and policy intervention to address the immense personal and economic losses associated with women professionals’ extended career-breaks.

Conclusion

An understanding of agentic temporality at work in the career decisions of women professionals who took extended career-breaks unpacks the complex ways in which structure continues to outweigh agency in work and domestic spaces. However, merely calling upon voluntary organisational action is not enough, and the article agrees with scholars’ call that much needs to be done in terms of employment policies and practices that enable women’s career progression through family-friendly practices and proactive and transparent gender equality measures (Calinaud et al., 2021), thus enabling real choice to all professional women. Future research might consider how and what interventions may be brought into the organisational and domestic domains to provide returning women professionals with a supportive environment and opportunities to balance motherhood with career.