As Manela grows, I (Sophie, co-founder) have been exploring the existing literature on work-life balance, parenting and the workforce, and how organizations handle -- or support-- their working parents.

What I found in the very well-respected and often very insightful Harvard Business Review, honestly depressed me. The advice, hailed as "specific and tactical" and "better than the grapevine of connected working parents you have access to":

• Be intentional about priorities

• Negotiate flexibility

• Communicate constantly

• Outsource where possible

• Redefine success over time

• Invest in sponsorship and visibility

  
  

I mean...yeah obviously.

Mothers don't burn out or leave the workforce because they aren't being intentional about their priorities or battling some chronic perfectionism. They are leaving because they simply CAN'T balance priorities. Their baby is sick 4/7 days of the week with a fever and somebody needs to be home and be responsible for caretaking. It often falls on the person who is making less money, and if mom just went on maternity leave for a year and missed a compensation cycle, well, she's fallen behind. And that's if both partners started out making the exact same amount of money.

Corporate systems reward:

• Responsiveness

• Long hours

• Travel flexibility

• Crisis availability

• Emotional labor

  
  

Telling individuals to “clarify priorities” doesn’t change:

• Promotion criteria

• Bonus structures

• Unwritten norms

• Leadership archetypes

  
  

Negotiating flexibility is great of course, assuming both parties have leverage. Which they might if the working parent is in a more senior position. If they are, they probably make a fairly good salary relative to the median income.

To be clear: Flexibility is not equally available to everyone.

The people who can successfully negotiate:

• Reduced hours

• Nonlinear promotion timelines

• Custom roles

• Performance defined by output not presence

  
  

…are usually senior leaders with leverage.

So the advice becomes self-reinforcing:

• If you’re already powerful, you can shape your work.

• If you’re mid-level and replaceable, negotiation carries risk.

  
  

So...how to become powerful if you want to also have kids and you're mid-level?

Communicating constantly sounds highly annoying, and is only possible if you're doing a job that involves access to your phone, email etc. Retail workers, healthcare workers, manufacturing workers, hospitality and food service... these jobs require people to be off their phones, present, working with their hands on the floor.

Redefine Success. Well, sure. We've all accepted that parenting, especially motherhood, has a significant effect on our careers. In Canada, that means we lose years of work, and years of wage increases, access to promotions, etc. So, the wage gap persists.

Invest in sponsorship and visibility. This one is, again, great in theory but assumes that you 1) have access to an office and face time with leadership and 2) have a strong network. For your average twenty or thirty- something new mother, those 2 conditions are certainly not fait accompli.

This generic advice is maddening. It signals that if you’re struggling:

• You didn’t negotiate clearly enough.

• You didn’t communicate boundaries well enough.

• You didn’t plan strategically enough.

• You didn’t outsource enough.

• You didn’t maintain visibility enough.

  
  

And it ignores:

• Gender bias in performance reviews.

• Access to money

• Motherhood penalty data.

• Lack of predictable workload design.

• Poor leave transitions.

• Manager discomfort with flexibility.

  
  

So how do we actually get women into senior leadership and let them be present parents?

This is where employers have the opportunity to innovate.

Employers can:

1. Redefine performance metrics

• Reward outcomes, not hours.

• Normalize non-linear career pacing without penalty.

  
  

2. Protect leave transitions structurally

• Formalized re-entry plans.

• Backfill budgets.

• No silent demotions.

• Defined “ramp up” periods.

3. Make flexibility default, not negotiated

When flexibility is a perk to be negotatied, it creates inequity. When it’s built into role design, it scales.

4. Train managers on distributed leadership

If leadership is defined as constant availability, caregiving will always be punished.

5. Separate ambition from presenteeism

High potential should not equal 24/7 access.

The real shift: from “balance” to "support"

“Balancing work and parenting” frames this as an individual equilibrium problem. This is a bad framing.

If companies truly want women in senior leadership:

• They must remove the structural penalties during caregiving years.

• They must treat parental leave as a predictable lifecycle event, not a disruption.

• They must design continuity, not rely on individual heroics.

Otherwise we’ll keep printing books about how women can “optimize” themselves… while quietly losing them at mid-career.

If we’re serious about keeping women in leadership, we have to stop treating parental leave as a personal resilience test and start treating it as a design moment inside the company. That’s exactly why Manela exists. We help employers build structured, repeatable leave and return systems so managers aren’t improvising and parents aren’t carrying the entire burden alone. If you want women to rise and stay, the conditions have to support both ambition and caregiving. Let’s build those conditions on purpose.