This is the first post in a two-part series on parental leave and return to work.
Nearly 3,000 women who took paid parental leave in the last three years answered 42 questions about what that experience actually looked like, in the first study of its kind from Parentaly.
The findings are blunt: 73% of new parents consider leaving their company at least occasionally after returning, and a third leave within 18 months of coming back. Of those who leave, only 4% leave to exit the workforce entirely, meaning the overwhelming majority aren’t opting out of ambition. They’re opting out of this employer.
We’ve talked to enough senior women leaders on this show to know that the leave itself is rarely the hardest part. It’s everything on either side of it - how the conversation with your employer starts, what happens to your role while you’re out, and whether anyone has a real plan for how you come back.
Here’s what the research says about each stage, alongside what our guests learned living through it.
Before You Go: The Conversation Sets the Tone for Everything After
According to Parentaly’s research, 94% of mothers say they’d factor a company’s parental leave policy into whether they’d take a job offer - leave isn’t a footnote to the offer anymore, it’s part of the offer.
Sarah Hofstetter, co-founder of 37Arc and former CEO of 360i, learned this the hard way. Pregnant with her first child in her early 20s, she told her boss the news and got a distinctly unenthusiastic reaction. The policy at the time gave her an ultimatum: return after six weeks and get paid for that leave, or take twelve weeks unpaid. She went back after six weeks, twice.
“It wasn’t a psychologically safe environment.”
Compare that to Mary-Ann Anyikam’s experience. Pregnant with twins and still in her first trimester, she walked into her PwC partner’s office already planning what to say, only to be met before she said anything.
Her PwC partner had already noticed, and rather than treating the pregnancy as a problem to manage, she made it a non-issue on the spot: restructured Mary-Ann’s travel to shorter Tuesday-through-Friday trips through a healthy pregnancy, and committed in advance to staff her on the right project when she returned.
“She said, I know you’re going to worry about what happens when you get back from maternity leave. I just want to let you know that’s one less thing for you to worry about. You tell me what you want that to look like.”
The difference between those two conversations is the difference between an employee who stays fifteen-plus years and one who’s counting down until she can leave.
The Real Risk Isn’t the Leave — It’s the Silence Around It
Parentaly’s data shows that for women with access to fully paid leave, continued career progression — not childcare, not health — is their number one concern. And the less anyone talks about it, the worse the outcome: only 20% of new parents get real support from their manager on career progression, and 69% don’t find it easy to even raise what they need with their manager in the first place.
Sarah’s advice to any employer cuts straight at that silence. Once she had the power to build the culture she’d wished for, she made a point of creating explicit permission to name the hard parts before there was a policy in place to fix them.
“You have to make it be okay to talk about the yuck, whatever the yuck is.”
This included genuinely celebrating every pregnancy on her team regardless of the timing, rather than treating it as a scheduling problem. The operational logic behind it lines up with what the data shows: an employee who tells you at four months gives you real runway to plan; one who waits until two weeks before leave leaves everyone scrambling.
While CEO of 360i, she built out the actual playbook for how parents were supported going into and coming back from leave - and the payoff showed up in retention numbers that outpaced the industry.
The Re-Entry Plan Matters as Much as the Leave Itself
The data is specific here: employees with a strong coverage plan while they’re out are over twice as likely to feel confident about their future career trajectory than those without one, and employees with a strong re-onboarding plan are three times more likely to find their return easier than expected.
Shanta Kohli, CMO at WEKA, points to a single manager who changed the entire trajectory of her career by treating her return as something to actively design rather than default. When she had her first son and was worried about sustaining a demanding, global role, her leader Janet Matsuda made her one of the company’s first remote employees, years before that was a common accommodation.
“I was one of the first employees to work from home... she went to bat.”
Shanta is direct about what that one decision meant:
“She’s the reason I’m working... here I am, 20 years later, still working.”
Having a supportive boss who helps in your return - and keeps your confidence and support systems high during peak parenting years - can make all the difference.
Career Opportunities Don’t Wait for Perfect Timing
We often picture career moves and parental leave as separate chapters, one neatly following the other. But opportunities don’t check your due date first.
Alison Lange Engel was eight and a half months pregnant with her second child when LinkedIn offered her a role. At the time, she was comfortably settled at Microsoft, which offered 20 weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Taking the new job meant walking away from that.
“People thought I was nuts because I was leaving my 20-week Microsoft maternity leave behind, but I did it, jumped in. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made.”
Her OB wasn’t thrilled either. LinkedIn’s office in Mountain View was about 60 miles from her hospital in San Francisco, and her doctor told her plainly, “I don’t love this plan.” So her husband, Martin, took the day off and drove her down, and Alison signed her employment papers in the LinkedIn parking lot before heading back home.
I love picturing this moment: Alison signing her offer weeks before her due date, in a Mountain View parking lot. It wasn’t the timing anyone would have planned. But she trusted her gut about the company, the culture, and the role.
“I was so authentic, and I was very clear on who I was, the marketer I was, what I was striving to be.”
That leap paid off. Alison went on to become VP of Global Marketing at LinkedIn, a role that set up her path to becoming CMO of Stripe.
The lesson isn’t that everyone should change jobs weeks before giving birth. For many people, protecting that leave is the right call. The point is that your career doesn’t pause while you’re growing your family, and the “right time” for a big move may never line up perfectly with the “right time” for leave. When an opportunity comes along, Alison’s experience shows that, increasingly, women get to weigh the tradeoffs for ourselves instead of ruling it out because we’re also growing a family.
Coming up next: In part two, we’ll feature two of the foremost experts on parental leave on the podcast - Allison Whalen, Founder and CEO of Parentaly, and Erin Grau, Co-Founder of Charter.
These are all rather positive stories. Unfortunately my experience with both pregnancies was pretty bad. First time, it was clear my boss assumed I didn't want to work hard and made my job more difficult every step of the way. The second time, my boss made it clear before going on leave that she expected me to hand in notice. When I didn't and I came back she made it more insufferable by not assigning me any meaningful work and eventually laying me off. Can you talk about more stories like mine?