InDepth | Why Motherhood Still Comes With A Career Penalty For Women

At 33, Preethi Kavilikatta is caught in a limbo. She has spent years acquiring qualifications and trying to find a career that gives her the stability she wants. But motherhood remains something she keeps pushing further away. It is not that she does not want a child. It is that she does not feel she is at a point in her career where she can have one yet. Kavilikatta, a Mumbai-based lawyer, has moved across India and abroad to complete her education.

“Despite having four degrees, I cannot have a child right now,” she says. Law, she adds, is still largely a boy’s club. The profession demands constant reading, long hours keeping up with judgements and an unbroken presence. She fears that if she misses even a year, she will be pushed out for good. “Motherhood would be like losing that freedom to spend more time doing my readings,” she says. “If I miss out on anything even by a year, then I am out of the profession.”

Her concerns capture a tension increasingly visible among ambitious working women: motherhood may be a choice, but the conditions under which that choice is made are not always within their control.

The Outlook-Toluna Survey on motherhood found that among women in urban India who have delayed having children or chosen not to have them, 44 per cent cited concerns about work-life balance as a key factor in their decision. Despite an increasing effort by the government and industry to help women juggle work and children, more than a third of women still feel that having kids negatively impacts their career progression. The survey had 1,334 respondents.

The numbers point to a dilemma that sits beyond the familiar question of whether women want children. For many working women, the question is whether they can have a child without losing the professional life they have spent years building.

The Cost of Having Both

The fears and anxiety among these women are not unfounded. Although research on the economic cost of motherhood in India remains limited, the available evidence points to a significant motherhood penalty.

Economist Leila Gautham, using India’s 2019 Time Use Survey, found that motherhood was associated with a 35 per cent decline in employment among urban women, compared with about nine per cent among rural women; the effect was particularly pronounced in formal-sector work, where jobs offer less flexibility to combine paid work with child care.

A 2025 study by Anirban Mukherjee and Sukanya Sarkhel, using longitudinal data from the India Human Development Survey, found that having one more child than a woman had originally planned was associated with a 2.9 per cent fall in wages and an eight per cent lower probability of being employed. The researchers also found that the number of children alone had a weaker relationship with wages, suggesting that an unexpected increase in family size may carry a greater labour-market penalty.

For women like Shailza Sharma, a 35-year-old assistant professor in the National Capital Region, however, the calculation is not simply about the possibility of earning less. It is about the fear of losing momentum in their career altogether. A child in the middle of pursuing a doctorate, she feared, would have left her with neither a finished degree nor the institutional protection a new mother needs.

“I needed a job, and I needed to work six months in a job and then I could think about it,” she says. She had watched friends try to finish their PhDs with infants and then struggle to enter the job market, unable to simply leave a young child behind and throw themselves into work the way the system demanded.

The problem extends beyond individual choices. It is also built into workplaces and the expectations surrounding care. Her fear is reflected in the challenges faced by 35-year-old Neha Adhikari, who is pursuing an MBA in Mumbai after leaving a stable job at the State Bank of India. She had planned to have a child after she completed her MBA. Instead, she discovered she was pregnant just a week before starting the course. She deferred her admission after completing the first term, returned to her hometown to give birth, and spent nine months with her daughter before leaving her with her parents and in-laws to return to complete her degree.

She does not describe it as postponing motherhood. But she is living through the challenges of navigating motherhood and career at the same time. “I’m studying here and working hard. It’s all for her, but I’m exhausted most of the time,” she says. The distance makes it even harder. She has spent months away from her young daughter, and the separation often gives her a sense of guilt.

Her experience also exposes another gap: support that exists on paper may not fit the realities of working women. A university facility that allowed her to keep her child with her, she says, would have made the decision considerably easier.

The Default Parent

Monica, holding her two-year-old second child in her lap, points to the small study table where her older child sits with an open notebook, writing. “He has two tests tomorrow. I have to prepare him for that,” she says, as the pressure cooker whistle blows in the kitchen.

Married at 26, Monica had her first child at 27. She left her full-time marketing job after delivery. “At that point, I thought maybe I will get back after a year or so, but it became increasingly difficult,” she says. It was not just because of her son, but because the entire responsibility fell on her.

She tried returning after a year’s break, only to be offered a lower salary than before because of the gap. The responsibility for the child, she felt, rested completely on her. Her husband runs a business and, she says, could not afford to spend more time at home. When they had their second child, she had to step back once again.

“No matter what anyone says,” she says, “the responsibility always falls on the mother: whether they’ve eaten properly or not, whether they’re well, whether their homework is done, or whether they need anything at all.”

In 2017, India extended paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks for women in companies with 10 or more employees. The goal was to make it easier for mothers to stay in formal jobs. Yet a study by Saheli Bose and Somdeep Chatterjee, and published in 2024 by Taylor & Francis, found an unexpected result. After the change, women in these bigger companies became 4.3 percentage points less likely to hold regular salaried jobs. More of them shifted to unpaid family work or casual labour, with no rise in self-employment. The effect was strongest among married women and those of childbearing age, which means that the policy, which was meant to support working mothers, may, in some cases, have made secure formal jobs harder for them to keep.

The maternity framework is often also discussed in terms of whether women have enough leaves. The more difficult question is what happens when the leave ends.

Apart from 26 weeks of paid leave, the law also provides for crèche facilities in establishments with 50 or more employees. A crèche, however, cannot solve every problem faced by women whose work involves commuting, long hours, night shifts or frequent travel. Meanwhile, work-from-home after maternity leave is not a universal entitlement; it depends on an arrangement between the employer and the employee.

Anuradha Kapoor, founder of Swayam, a feminist organisation working on women’s rights and gender equality, says the problem has to be understood beyond maternity leave. “If you have a child when you’re in the middle of something, you are pushed back while men move ahead of you,” she says.

The break itself can become a marker in a woman’s career, she says, but the problem continues after she returns to work. Shared household and child-care responsibilities remain limited, leaving women with what Kapoor describes as a “double burden”—the work of their homes and the work of their jobs. A woman may have to leave the office at six to look after her children while male colleagues can stay later because someone else is taking care of their children. Over time, that difference can affect how managers perceive availability and commitment. “Then we are undermined and our progression is stopped,” says Kapoor.

The answer, she argues, cannot rest only with individual women or companies. Child care has to be treated as a shared responsibility between parents, employers and the state. She points to the need for good-quality crèches, adequate leave and a system in which men also take time away from work to care for children. Otherwise, she says, employers may continue to view women as a greater cost.

The deeper shift, she argues, has to be in how society understands child-rearing. It is not simply a private responsibility that belongs to mothers but work that contributes in raising the next generation.

Future Tense

Seema, a senior management professional who chose not to have children, puts the problem more starkly. In her early 30s, while working in the senior management of one of Asia’s largest business groups, she had been competing in a heavily male-dominated environment. She believed that taking a career break or having children would have made it significantly harder to reach the position she wanted.

“I knew that if I took a career break or planned to have children, I would significantly fall in the hierarchy and not be able to reach where I needed to reach,” she says. “I started postponing until it was too late for me to plan.”

For her, the problem is not merely maternity leave.

“First, it’s what it does to your physical and emotional sense of being. Second, is there an ecosystem to support you so that you can get back to work? And the third thing: is the organisation really waiting for you and then giving you back even your past glory as a starting point? Chances are, no.”

Her assessment of workplace culture is blunt: “The real culture is still very pro-men.” That bias can also begin before a woman actually takes maternity leave. An HR professional at a company with more than 2,000 employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says the possibility of maternity leave is already a consideration when women are hired. “We cannot assign important assignments and projects to them for months around their pregnancy.”

New mothers may also require additional leave when a child falls ill, explains the HR professional, adding that employers cannot simply refuse such requests. “It is a very usual practice that new mothers will have an additional responsibility and they will skip work with leaves beyond maternity. We cannot refuse them leave when their child is unwell.”

That is where the motherhood penalty becomes more than a question of salaries. It is about promotions missed, assignments passed over, professional networks weakened and the assumption that the person who will make the adjustment at home is the woman.

While many women are postponing motherhood to be able to deal with such pulls and pressures when they are better placed in their careers, it is a decision that comes with its own set of complexities. For one, women who delay motherhood may later encounter fertility concerns or face health risks during or after childbirth. Meanwhile, options such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) or egg freezing can be expensive and run into lakhs of rupees.

Many hope such costs could be covered, at least partly, by their employers or through government policies. Sharma, who is “in the middle of the process” and is already discussing IVF options, says she wishes she had more information and awareness, greater financial support through government schemes and more room to make reproductive decisions without feeling that time was running out. “Making this choice for women would certainly become easier,” she says.

The costs can be significant. According to various databases, egg freezing in India can cost between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 3 lakh per cycle, while IVF can range between Rs 1.5 lakh and Rs 3.5 lakh per cycle. For many women, particularly those already weighing the financial implications of motherhood, these expenses can become another barrier to making reproductive choices on their own terms.

Some large employers have begun responding to this changing reality. Globally, companies including Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Spotify and Morgan Stanley offer fertility and family-building benefits that can include IVF, egg freezing, adoption and surrogacy. Figures, reported publicly, include fertility support of up to $75,000 at Google, $50,000 at Microsoft and $20,000 at Apple and Meta. But such benefits remain far from the norm: an analysis cited by Plum, an employee health-benefit platform, found that fewer than 10 per cent of companies offer benefits for egg freezing or infertility treatment. In India, companies are warming up to such benefits, but slowly.

Priti Shetty, chief people and culture officer at workplace-provider WeWork India, says workplace policies in India still have a long way to go to adequately support women who want to have children while continuing to build their careers. She said organisations had so far “only touched the tip of the iceberg” when it came to workplace policies and support frameworks. As yet, firms like Accenture, Myntra, Diageo India, SAP India and WeWork India have introduced benefits covering some combination of IVF, infertility treatment and egg freezing. WeWork India, for instance, has offered up to Rs 1 lakh for infertility treatment, including egg harvesting and egg freezing, while Salesforce India, an enterprise software company, has reported a one-time fertility and surrogacy benefit of up to Rs 29 lakh. But the interesting thing to note is that most of these early movers are the Indian arms of global companies.

“There have been an increasing number of women in their mid- to late 30s, who have come to fertility clinics either to plan their families later in life or to preserve their future fertility,” says Aswati Nair, clinical director and fertility specialist at the Nova IVF Fertility, Delhi. “In addition, women in their late 20s and early 30s have recently become more interested in fertility-preservation technologies, including egg freezing.” For women, however, fertility support is only one part of the equation. What they are asking for is not necessarily a choice between career and motherhood, but the possibility of having both without one becoming a penalty for the other.

Swayam’s Kapoor suggests that this requires support at every level—the home, the workplace and the state. “If child care remains primarily a woman’s responsibility, the cost of having children will continue to be disproportionately borne by women—in lost opportunities, interrupted careers and slower progression.”

(Names have been changed to protect privacy)

Mrinalini Dhyani is senior correspondent, Outlook