What is matrescence? Part 3

What matrescence means for work

This is the final part of a series on matrescence. Part one covered what matrescence is and why the silence around it is so damaging. Part two explored the structural conditions that make it harder than it needs to be.

Silence around matrescence affects so many more people than the woman going through it. Because it means nobody around her knows what’s happening either.

Take a line manager welcoming a colleague back from maternity leave. They might make some reasonable-sounding assumptions. She probably won’t want to hear about the promotion, because now isn’t the right time to take on more. She probably can’t make the 5pm briefing, because she’ll need to get home. Or, conversely, she’s back now, so she can pick up the same workload and projects as before.

All of these assumptions are well-meant. All of them could be wrong.

Assumptions go in every direction. They underestimate or overestimate ambition, availability and capacity. Managers have no framework for knowing what has actually changed and what hasn’t. And asking feels uncomfortable, even intrusive, because no one has told them a conversation is needed, or how to have it.

That’s what matrescence does to the workplace. It changes the person in ways that aren’t visible, aren’t predictable, and probably aren’t the same for any two people. The woman who comes back may be more ambitious than before. More focused, more efficient, clearer about what matters. She may be running on less sleep and less emotional bandwidth than ever. Or both, at the same time.

You cannot assume. You have to ask.

The gender pay gap doesn’t grow because women become less capable

On average, mothers in England lose more than £65,600 in earnings in the five years after their first child is born. Among full-time employees, the gender pay gap is 3.9% or less for under 40s. For those in their 40s, it more than doubles, to 9.1%.

Does that mean women are less capable as they get older? Less ambitious? There’s no reason to think so. Many women describe the opposite: more clarity, more conviction, more confidence in what they bring.

The gap grows because of structural mismatches that compound each other:

Workplaces designed around continuous, uninterrupted availability.
Childcare that doesn’t cover the hours, doesn’t pay the carers enough, but costs the family a fortune.
A culture that treats flexibility as a concession rather than a strategy.
A deep undervaluing of domestic work.
Well-intentioned assumptions from managers with no framework for the moment.

The honest complexity is that the solutions aren’t simple. My work is easily misread as pushing women back to work faster or more fully, or as fighting for equal pay for unequal hours. It’s neither.

Some mothers want to work full-time and resent being assumed into part-time. Some need to reduce their hours and resent being penalised for it. Some want the same role they had before. Some have changed so profoundly that they want something completely different.

The point isn’t to push women in any direction. It’s to create the conditions where each woman can work out what she actually wants, and pursue it without a structural penalty.

What doesn’t help

Policies that wordlessly assume women will absorb the friction. A flexible working policy that exists on paper but takes rounds of justification to use. A return-to-work programme focused on helping women “catch up” on what they missed, rather than recognising what has changed for them. A manager who means well, but doesn’t feel able to ask.

The gap between what’s written and what’s lived is where inequality happens.

An organisation can have all the right policies, and still lose women at the same rate, because nobody bridged the distance between the document and daily life.

It’s a culture problem, not a policy problem. And it needs someone to sit between the two.

What does help

Managers who feel able to ask rather than assume. A conversation, not a lengthy HR process: what’s changed for you? What do you need to do your best work right now? What are your ambitions, now that you’re back?

Flexible working designed around outcomes rather than hours, so the person who leaves at 3pm can catch up (if they need to) at a time that suits them without being penalised for the pattern.

Parental leave that lets both parents become competent caregivers. The default parent is created at the very beginning, when one person is far more embedded in care than the other.

Someone in the space between policy and people, making sure good intentions actually happen.

And for the women herself: somewhere to put it all down and think clearly. What she wants, what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what comes next.

Where Entela comes in

Matrescence isn’t a clinical condition. But it is a transition, often compared to adolescence, and transitions benefit from support.

For some women, therapy is the right support, particularly where perinatal mental health is involved, which is more common than most people realise. Coaching offers something different but complementary. It doesn’t assume anything about your experience; it helps you to explore it.

For organisations trying to close the gap between written policy and lived experience, I offer a free diagnostic call to talk through where the gap is widest and what might move things.

For individuals, I offer coaching to help them navigate the transition and take the right steps for them.

In November I’m also running The Squeeze Years, a free-to-low-cost 45-minute lunchtime session on why doing it all feels this hard, and why that isn’t a personal failure. Everyone who comes will leave with a load audit worksheet and a one-page planner for the conversation that could lighten the load. If you’re still on leave, you’ll also get first access to two new toolkits: one for planning maternity KIT days, one for planning a return-to-work. Date and booking details coming soon: sign up here to hear first.

Back to that return-to-work meeting

Every assumption that manager made was a kind one. That’s what makes them so hard to spot and address.

Matrescence doesn’t come with a script, for the woman going through it, or for the people around her. It doesn’t need one. It needs a question, asked early and asked properly: