RESEARCH
Maternity Mentoring Toolkits: Accelerating Impact of Philosophical and Psychological Research to Improve Perinatal Employee Support and Communication.
The MaMeT project is a collaboration between researchers at the Universities of Southampton and Keele and bump & glide.The project provides evidence of the benefits of maternity mentoring.
We hope that it will encourage more businesses to offer this kind of support to their employees. Our research also led to further recommendations for simple steps employers can take to improve the experiences of those returning to work after giving birth.
Click here to access our project report, and policy briefs on Maternity Mentoring and Making Maternity Work.
Pregnancy and early motherhood/parenthood is always a time of transition and commonly associated with a loss of confidence, self-esteem and sense-of-self. Parenthood often has a significant impact on women's careers, with a reduction of earnings of about 45% over their careers compared to the earnings of childless women. bump & glide offers a '360 degree' approach with covering the pivotal time from pregnancy, through maternity leave to the return to work. Fiona Woollard, Philosophy, Southampton and Alexandra Kent, Psychology, Keele, worked with bump & glide to further enhance the existing bump & glide maternity mentoring toolkits.
The resulting research-based toolkit was field tested at a large Russell Group University in South East England . The field test was supported by co-Investigators Ruth Pullen and Jo McManus from the School of Healthcare, Enterprise and Innovation. We followed a group of new mothers as they received maternity mentoring and compared their experiences with mothers who had recently returned to work without mentoring. Mentored mothers were interviewed three times, before, during and after their mentoring.
Key findings:
-
All mothers who experienced mentoring during the project all considered it to be a positive and valuable experience that met and exceeded their hopeful expectations.
-
Feeling valued and supported at work makes it more likely that an employee will continue to see their work as important. Support is needed before, during, and after maternity leave.
-
Parents often face hard constraints in their family life. When work is flexible enough to fit within these constraints, employees feel more positive about work, and they are more able to focus on the content of their work
-
Clarity and certainty about the role to which they would return markedly reduced stress for staff on maternity leave.
-
Employees need to be able to access a network of support at work before, during, and after leave. Line managers who control contact with the organisation while on leave can lead to staff feeling powerless and vulnerable.
-
Maternity mentoring can help mothers to navigate these challenges and to productively re-engage with work at the end of maternity leave.
-
Mothers really valued the role maternity mentoring played in creating time to focus on themselves and reflect more on their own identity.
-
Mothers found the practice of reflection useful because it helped them to take positive, purposeful actions on their return to work.
-
Mothers valued an ongoing mentoring relationship and wanted support before, during, and after maternity leave.
-
Mentoring provided the time, focus and safety to verbalise nebulous thoughts and fears. With the mentor’s encouragement, the mothers felt validated, their confidence improved, and it supported them to plan and find solutions to complex challenges. The mothers could then generate their own strategies to bring about positive actions that mitigated their concerns
and worries.
Study Title:
Maternity Mentoring Toolkits: Accelerating Impact of Philosophical and Psychological Research to Improve Perinatal Employee Support and Communication (MaMeT)
Researchers:
Fiona Woollard, Alexandra Kent, Serena Williams, Jo McManus and Ruth Pullen
Ethics/ERGO no:
86817
Data collection end date:
June 2024
Project Publications Reports:
Maternity Mentoring Toolkit: Accelerating Impact of Philosophical and Psychological Research to Improve Perinatal Employee Support and Communication (MaMeT) Project Report
Kent, A., Tumilty, A., Williams, S. & Woollard, F., March 2025, University of Southampton.
Policy briefs:
Woollard, F., Williams, S. & Kent, A., March 2025, University of Southampton.
Woollard, F., Williams, S. & Kent, A., 17 Mar 2025, 4 p. University of Southampton.