Does motherhood belong on a resume?

Mums multi-task. They plan. They research, organise, negotiate, manage time and lead.

Although mothers’ juggling hasn’t ever been a secret, their role has, perhaps, never been more obvious than during the pandemic. As schools transitioned to remote classrooms, and women took on more of both the physical and mental load of home life than before, the skills required to keep the trains on the tracks have been on full display.

As a result, the question increasingly floating to the surface is whether or not these skills have a place on mothers’ CVs.

There’s long been a push to recognise motherhood as a legitimate job that trains workers in legitimate skills, valuable to employers. And some voices are getting louder. One of the newest leaders is HeyMama, a US-based community for working mums, who’ve launched a campaign called Motherhood on the Resume. 

It’s quite literal, says Katya Libin, HeyMama’s co-founder and CEO – the organisation is advocating for mothers to update their titles on LinkedIn, or even add the position on a resume, like any other ‘recognised’ job in, say, sales or engineering

Whether motherhood ‘belongs’ on a resume is, of course, subjective. The question, instead, lies in whether mothers can reap tangible benefits for the addition of the title – or whether some systemically entrenched biases around mums could produce the opposite effect.

A rightful place on the CV? 

At its core, Libin says the HeyMama campaign is an effort to “tear down some of the cultural biases that exist against mothers in the workplace, and give women the tools to acknowledge what a training ground for leadership and growth motherhood is”. The pandemic has only exacerbated how important it is to recognise how much mothers actually do, she adds, which is why HeyMama has launched their campaign now.

Read More:   BBC.com