Women’s Career Lifecycle Approach: a new look at accelerating action for women in the workplace

Blog posts

6 Mar 2025

Meenakshi Krishnan, Principal Research Fellow

Even though more women are entering the workforce today, they continue to earn less than men per hour, and fewer women make it to senior leadership and board positions. Have decades of advocacy for gender equality in the workplace resulted in a stalled revolution?

A key systemic barrier in women’s career trajectories has been their role as carers throughout their life. Data by the ILO from 64 countries on daily time-use by men and women shows that every day, women spend 16.4 billion hours on unpaid care work. That is equivalent to two billion people working eight hours a day without pay. Globally, women perform 76.2% of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men. Other research points to motherhood penalties in employment, wages, and leadership positions. IES research on the gender pay gap, imbalance in uptake of shared parental leave, widening of gender pensions gaps, and the gendered occupational segregation in sectors like construction all point to the deeply entrenched gender norm of women as caregivers. And this does not even mention women’s own needs for care, be it during maternity, mid-life, or menopause!

This stark reality notwithstanding, companies have failed to adequately acknowledge and address the role of unpaid care work in exacerbating gender inequalities in the workplace. While some efforts to expand parental leave and pay, offer flexible working and unpaid carers leave have been made in recent years, a systematic and concerted response to addressing care concerns of women employees continues to be absent.

Bridging this gap, we at IES have developed a Women’s Career Lifecycle Approach (WCLA)that brings together a care lens into workplace policies and a lifecycle understanding of women’s needs over the lifespan. As Figure 1 shows, from the time young women first enter the labour market to the time older women workers finally exit the labour force there is an ongoing cycle of care and career challenges that intermingle into what I term ‘care/er dilemmas’ –  the unique dilemmas women face in their career exacerbated by their care responsibilities to others, or their self-care needs.

HR professionals have adapted this idea into an employee lifecycle approach which addresses the transition of employees from attraction of candidates to onboarding, development, retention and finally exit. However, no effort has been made to match this employee lifecycle with the actual ‘life’ cycle of employees, i.e. their requirements as social beings in need of care and as providers of care during different ages and stages of their life as they go through their careers.

The WCLA offers employers a unique lens to evaluating the systemic barriers women face at every step of their career journey. Starting with young women’s challenges like access to work, stereotyping and discrimination at work, women continue to face barriers to pay and progression on account of absence of well-designed support during pregnancy and fertility treatments, absence of adequate and well-paid maternity, paternity or parental leave for both partners to manage maternity and infant care, and lack of affordable and quality childcare, especially for children with special needs. This is called the ‘motherhood penalty’ which widens employment, wage, and leadership gaps.

As women continue to progress through life and career, the needs of older children and the care for ageing parents and family members only deepen over time just as they also begin to experience health concerns due to hormonal deficiencies and perimenopause. Older workers report ageist attitudes against those over 50 to be widespread in the UK. This is particularly complicated for women who can experience multiple and combined discrimination due to their intersecting identities of age, ethnicity, disability and neurodiversity.

The final link in the WCLA model reconnects older workers with pregnancy care. While this hints at some outlier cases of older women getting pregnant through assisted reproduction techniques or acting as a surrogate mum for their daughters, it mainly draws attention to grandmothers who are increasingly being called upon to support childcare while also balancing longer working lives. Sweden has recently pioneered paid grandparents leave to acknowledge this connection.

The WCLA, thus, offers a systems perspective as opposed to a ‘specific functions’ approach. Instead of developing policies for maternity, childcare, or menopause in isolation or as kneejerk reactions to the latest trends in HR practice, employers are invited to proactively map the series of points where women need care and/or offer care over their career span. Taking women’s unique needs for care and as carers into account does not mean promoting policies that work only for women. Rather, the WCLA approach exhorts employers to advance policies for all in a gender equitable manner by recognising that women can be supported only through wider gender norm change around who provides care, when and where. The WCLA therefore calls for normalising care by men and building allyship across genders to advance women’s careers.

By adopting this new perspective on an employee’s lifecycle, the WCLA encourages organisations to offer workplace support with an eye to the long-term, to plan ahead for meeting the needs of women employees as they transition through life and roles, and to foster equality in the workplace by tackling the disproportionate burden of care placed on women.

To know more on how you can review your gender equality strategy using IES’ Policy-Process-Practice Diagnostic Framework, and redesign your career progression pathways using the Women’s Career Lifecycle Approach, get in touch with Dr. Meenakshi Krishnan at meenakshi.krishnan@employment-studies.co.uk.

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Any views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Institute as a whole.