This week, UK women’s rights campaigner Joeli Brearley shone a light on something we cannot ignore: the motherhood penalty.
Her analysis shows mothers in the UK are paid 33% less than fathers per week – a difference of £302. And that’s before we even account for the thousands of women forced out of paid work entirely because childcare is unaffordable, flexible roles are rare, or maternity discrimination pushes them to the margins. Now let’s connect this to our world. The administrative profession is 98% women. Which means when we talk about pay inequality, we are talking directly about our profession. So many assistants tell me they still face executives or organisations who assume their ambition vanished the moment they became mothers. So here’s an uncomfortable question: Is part of the reason this profession is still dismissed as “unambitious” simply because it is overwhelmingly female? Obviously not all assistants have children, but when society undervalues mothers, when it assumes caring responsibilities make women less serious, less strategic, less career-minded, doesn’t that same bias bleed into how assistants are perceived? Because let’s be honest, assistants are ambitious. You don’t manage complex portfolios, control the time of senior executives, keep whole leadership teams aligned, and still get told you “lack ambition,” unless there’s a deeper bias at play. The motherhood penalty shows us exactly what happens when women’s contribution is systemically undervalued. And I can’t help but wonder if that’s ne of the lenses through which our profession is still being judged. So let’s start asking different questions. Not “why don’t assistants want to progress?” but “why do we still equate ambition with being male, child-free, and working all hours of the day and night?” If you still think assistants aren’t ambitious, perhaps it’s time to ask whether the problem lies in the profession, or in the way we’ve been conditioned to undervalue women’s work.
