Why 26 Weeks Alone Won't Close Your Gender Pay Gap

“The motherhood penalty explains approximately four-fifths of Australia’s gender earnings inequality.”

— Australian Treasury Working Paper, 2023

On 1 July, Australia's Paid Parental Leave scheme officially expanded to 26 weeks. It is a genuine, welcome, and long-overdue expansion - 130 payable days at the National Minimum Wage, plus a 12% superannuation contribution, plus a use-it-or-lose-it 20 days for the second parent.

We often talk about paid parental leave as though it is the key to closing the gender pay gap. And with good reason: paid parental leave - especially when superannuation is paid throughout, as it now is under Australia’s scheme - addresses one of the largest single drivers of women’s long-term economic security.

But an expanded entitlement does not, on its own, address the pattern that has shaped Australian workplace outcomes for more than two decades. The leave is simply the policy setting. The inequality is created in the transition around it: the months before someone leaves, the decisions made in their absence, the failure to keep in touch or inform them of changes to their role or manager, the return, and the opportunities that quietly disappear along the way.

For more than two decades, organisations have focused on redesigning parental leave policy. They have spent almost no time redesigning the transition through which that policy is experienced. Yet that transition - not the entitlement itself - is where inequality is produced or prevented.

In other words, parental leave is no longer primarily a policy challenge. It is a systems design challenge.

The ‘Motherhood Penalty’: what discrimination actually looks like

In coaching conversations, we hear one of two things from almost every parent preparing to go on leave. The first: they want the person covering their role to perform well - but not quite as well as they do. The second: they arrive to tell us their role is being redistributed across their team, and they are quietly asking whether that makes them, in fact, redundant.

Another common pattern is the temporary reallocation of clients, stakeholders and responsibilities that quietly becomes permanent. Organisations often attribute this pattern to 'inconsistent manager experiences' - the manager lottery where some managers get it right and others don't. In truth, it is the predictable outcome of poor systemic controls throughout the parental leave transition. What looks like a manager problem is, in fact, a systems problem. And it plays out in patterns we see repeatedly through our work with organisations and in coaching.

Multiplied across a workforce, the pattern becomes the data. The University of South Australia's 2023 national review of more than 1,200 pregnant and parent workers found that 84.7% experienced discrimination during parental leave. 91.8% on return. More than half were not told of restructures affecting them while on leave, and one in five returned to find their role removed, downgraded or significantly changed - not because the work had changed, but because they had become parents.

“84.7% of pregnant and parent workers experienced discrimination during parental leave. 91.8% on return.”

— Dr Rachael Potter, University of South Australia, 2023

The pattern is not confined to women. Men who seek to take extended leave report their own version of the same sidelining or they ultimately decide not to take parental leave at all. But the scale of harm and the pay-gap consequence fall overwhelmingly on mothers. Treasury's four-fifths finding is a motherhood-penalty finding.

The benevolent bias few organisations address

There is a specific and under-named form of this that surfaces almost every time we coach through it: the benevolent bias of the manager making a decision for the employee without consulting them. One manager quietly leaves the parent "to parent," assuming they won't want to be bothered with a stretch opportunity. Another decides not to raise the promotion round on the parent's behalf because "she'll want to come back part-time - she wouldn't want the pressure." Others reallocate client accounts without discussion because "I wouldn't have wanted to worry about that on leave myself."

Some even explain, disarmingly, that "my wife wouldn't have wanted that either."

“Second-generation gender bias is often invisible to those affected by it — and to those who might otherwise counter it.”

— Herminia Ibarra, “Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers,” Harvard Business Review, 2013

While these decisions are usually well-intentioned, they are also, almost always, decisions made without the person it affects most. Which makes it a decision without their agency - and, with that, without their dignity, and without their right to be consulted about their own career. It is the second-generation bias Herminia Ibarra named more than a decade ago, showing up in the transition where its consequences compound most severely.

A known and foreseeable psychosocial hazard

Under the Positive Duty introduced by the 2022 Sex Discrimination Act amendments, employers now have a proactive obligation to prevent this - not to respond once it has happened. The obligation sits with the employer, not with the person most vulnerable to the harm.

There is a second regulatory frame that sits inside. Since the 2022 model WHS amendments, employers also have an explicit duty to identify and control psychosocial hazards. The conditions around a poorly managed parental leave transition - exclusion from decisions, leadership changes without communication, roles redesigned without consultation, and prolonged loss of professional visibility - meet the regulatory definition of a psychosocial hazard. They cause genuine psychological harm. They are well documented and entirely foreseeable. Which means an employer that fails to prevent them is not simply falling short on gender equity; it is also failing in its work health and safety obligations.

Which raises the question every leader should be asking: has your organisation designed a system that prevents these risks, or one that simply responds once the harm has occurred?

Why employee-led support falls short: "You don't know what you need until you wished you had it."

Many organisations offer parental-leave transition support in some form - through their EAP, through organisational psychologists, through coaching or through self-serve platforms. But almost universally, it is offered as an employee benefit. Which means the employee - the pregnant, expecting, on-leave or returning parent - is expected to opt in: to identify that they need support; to find the number; to make the call. Which asks, precisely, for the confidence and decision-making capacity the transition has already begun to erode.

Ironically, women are expected to navigate this transition at exactly the point they are psychologically least likely to recognise the risk in their own careers. Decades ago, American psychologist Faye Crosby described this phenomenon as the personal-group discrimination discrepancy: people readily recognise discrimination affecting their group, but are far less likely to believe it is happening to them personally.

The number of women - especially in People & Culture, especially in HR - who tell us they thought they were fine, that they had it under control, and only realised what they hadn't known once they had specialist coaching, is one of the most striking patterns we see. This is not a story about individual women lacking preparation. It is a story about the transition itself, and the ways it hides the risk from the person carrying it.

We have seen firsthand how parental-leave transition support, positioned as an employee benefit, is actually used. People access it when things are already going awry. When their manager has changed and they haven't heard from the new one. When a restructure has been announced in their absence. When they’re not afforded the opportunity to apply for a role they’re well qualified to perform. When they suspect they're being managed toward a quiet redundancy. When they're told, on return, that "we've made some changes to your role”, meaning their role has been split into two, and they now report to someone they used to manage.

By the time they reach for support, the workplace harm has materialised and the discrimination has begun. The opportunity for prevention has already passed. Support can still help people navigate what has happened, but that is fundamentally different from preventing the harm in the first place.

Beyond the Policy: The Transition is a Systems Design Challenge

If parental leave is a systems design challenge, then the solution cannot rest with the employee alone. It requires organisations to deliberately design the transition around the known points of risk. That means more than an EAP, a wellbeing conversation or life coaching. It means embedding evidence-based interventions that prevent discrimination before it occurs, equip managers to lead the transition well, and give employees the information, support and confidence to make informed decisions throughout it.

One of the most effective ways to do this is through specialist, expert-informed coaching for both managers and employees. The Australian Human Rights Commission's 2014 Supporting Working Parents national review identified many of the risks organisations must now anticipate and prevent: discrimination, redundancy, exclusion through poor keeping-in-touch practices, anxiety and depression arising from workplace experiences rather than the transition to parenthood itself, and the loss of dignity that accompanies decisions made without consultation. It is an approach the Australian Human Rights Commission has itself recognised, honouring Grace Papers with its Business Award for work preventing discrimination against pregnant, expecting, on-leave and returning parents.

In practice, this means:

1. Managers are required - not invited - to participate in coaching and learning, whether in groups or one-to-one, to understand the three roles they play when leading someone through parental leave: line manager, sponsor, and system influencer.
2. Employees are engaged on an opt-out basis, not opt-in. The assumption is that every pregnant, expecting, on-leave and returning parent will receive support unless they actively decline it. This is not a minor design feature. It is the mechanism that protects parents from having to identify their own risk at precisely the moment Crosby's research suggests they are least likely to recognise it.

Because this is not, in the end, only a story about parenthood, identity or balance. It is a story about people retaining the ability to make informed decisions about their own careers. About being given the tools, education, unbiased support and strategies required to navigate the moments that matter most.

This is what empowerment looks like in practice. It is the difference between feeling as though you are asking a favour when you request flexibility on return, and having that flexibility expected because your organisation understands your value and has designed for it. It is having a manager who understands why keeping in touch matters. A sponsor who is clear on the professional vision the parent is returning with, and who actively keeps them visible while they are doing the most wonderful, tiring, painful and rewarding work of caring for a newborn.

That single design shift changes everything: the known workplace risk is addressed before harm occurs. And the moments where the gender pay gap and promotion gap are created become opportunities for prevention rather than recovery.

When motherhood becomes a career accelerator

Something else happens where coaching becomes a part of the transition: Motherhood stops being a penalty and starts being an accelerator. Women return with greater clarity about where to invest their energy. They stop carrying non-promotable work and focus on the work that grows their careers and gives them confidence. And they get promoted.

The pattern shows up in the men we coach too. They are equally surprised by the impact of reflecting on their careers, their values, and what they actually want to be doing. Increasingly, we see men choosing reduced-hours arrangements to support their partner's career and spend more time with their family, replacing default household economics with intentional decisions made together.

Systematising success: The real path to gender equality

Managing the transition around parental leave is genuinely complicated. Which is why the organisations serious about closing their gender pay gaps have stopped leaving it to the individual to make 'choices' about their career and care with no system underneath them. Instead, they have systematised the experience. They require managers to actively lead the transition, supported by specialist guidance, practical tools and workforce insights. At the same time, they equip employees with the confidence and information needed to make genuinely informed decisions about their careers and care, so they return motivated, confident and clear that they can thrive and progress.

Which means, paradoxically, that expanding paid parental leave without redesigning the transition around it can widen the very gap it was meant to close. The longer the leave, the more decisions are made in someone’s absence. The more moments where a career can quietly be redirected. The risk grows with the entitlement. So does the opportunity.

Twenty-six weeks of paid parental leave is a welcome and important shift. But the shift that closes the gender pay gap, narrows the widening representation gap, and meets Australia's Positive Duty for the prevention of sex discrimination is a different one. It is the shift from treating parental leave as a policy to treating it as an organisational system. One that either prevents discrimination or quietly produces it.

Because policy creates entitlement. Systems determine outcomes.

Prue Gilbert

Prue Gilbert is a lawyer, human rights advocate and Founder of Grace Papers, recipient of the Australian Human Rights Business Award for leadership in preventing sex discrimination at work. Recognised as a LinkedIn Top Voice and one of the AFR’s 100 Women of Influence,

Prue helps organisations use workforce data and lived experience to identify structural risks, and deploy targeted coaching and behavioural interventions to prevent discrimination and build healthier, more equitable workplaces.