In this episode, Shireen Ali-Khan hosts a discussion with Beci Piggott, Social Impact and Inclusion Manager from Kier Transportation and Joanna Hill, Northwest Regional Lead for Women in Transport, focusing on the motherhood penalty within the transport sector.
The conversation delves into the challenges working mothers face, the importance of representation, allyship, and leadership, and practical recommendations for supporting parents and caregivers. Topics include the impact of societal expectations, the need for flexible working arrangements, and the importance of a supportive workplace culture.
The episode reflects on the findings from the Motherhood Penalty Whitepaper and emphasises collaboration, storytelling, and policy implementation to foster an inclusive environment for all employees.
Download the whitepaper here.
Click below to listen online, or subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music or Audible.
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>> Sonya Byers: Hello, I'm Sonya Byers, Chief Executive of Women in Transport. Welcome to Season 3 of the Women in Transport podcast, where we're sharing the voices and stories of women from across the transport sector. Each episode we explore the experiences, challenges and triumphs of those shaping the industry, spotlighting the power of representation, allyship and leadership at every level. Thanks for tuning in. Let's dive into today's conversation.
>> Shireen Ali-Khan: Welcome everybody to this episode of the Women in Transport podcast. Today I am joined by Beci Piggott from Kier Transportation and also Joanna Hill, who is our Northwest Regional Lead for Women in Transport. Really good to have you on the podcast today.
The topic we're discussing is all around the Motherhood Penalty, which is such a contentious topic. There's so much that's happening right now and we want to deep dive into some of the work that we've produced as Women in Transport in collaboration with the sector, but certainly with really great support from Kier. So before we jump in, I'd like to have our guests introduce themselves. Beci, introduce yourself.
>> Beci Piggott: Hello, I'm Beci Piggott. I'm the Social Impact and Inclusion Manager at Kier Transportation. So Kier Transportation is part of the wider Kier Group and we work within the highways, rail, aviation and port sectors. And our common goal is connecting people. So working with Women in Transport is perfect for that kind of goal. We've worked with Women in Transport for a long time now. We've got a brilliant relationship, very collaborative, able to work on projects like the Motherhood Penalty that we'll get into, but also just having that open connection to be able to discuss lots of topics, discuss how we're implementing things that will help with our gender balance, but also hearing about what other companies are doing and sometimes just having a good chat, an event about what we're doing, if it's working, what other people are doing. So it's a brilliant relationship to have.
>> Shireen: Thank you. And likewise, we love being in the space where we can just unpick topics and really understand what are we doing, what's the problem, how do we move forward to fixing these things? So thank you so much. And Joanna to you, introduce yourself, please.
>> Joanna Hill: Thanks. I'm Joanna. I'm the Northwest Regional Lead for Women in Transport, a voluntary role. I help create spaces where women can share their experiences and lift each other up.
>> Shireen: Wonderful. And Joanna, you are so active within Women in Transport, so definitely link in with our guests today to hear more. There's loads that you do in the space and really looking forward to talking more for our listeners around how we genuinely collaborated in order to talk about this topic.
So let's jump straight in. Why motherhood penalty? Why did we choose this as a thing? Jo, I'm going to come to you first on this.
>> Joanna: I think there's several reasons. It was on our book club list, so we did do a deep dive, as part of our discovery session about this topic, into the book of the same name by Julie Brearley. As an organisation supporting women, I think it's really important that we fully represent women and in all of their experiences and the barriers that they face. And this is a really key one.
>> Shireen: Absolutely. Thank you. And Beci, we spoke about this topic way back when, right? It was at a session, we were talking about general EDI challenges and topics, that Women in Transport hosted with industry. And do you remember when everybody started talking about this particular thing and we thought, oh, there's something to be done here. What were your reflections?
>> Beci: Yeah, I think we were talking about, as you say, lots of different topics, but everybody had so much to say on this topic that actually it was almost a struggle to get back onto track of what we were all supposed to be talking about. So when we next caught up, we said, that's definitely something to explore more. And then we originally had the idea of doing one focus group, which turned into four, all happening on the same day, which turned into producing a whitepaper. So it just snowballed in the most positive way of us saying, actually there's so much that can be done here and we could link in with your campaign, having the book club and podcasts. And it became this brilliant, much wider piece of work that I think people really wanted to talk about.
>> Shireen: And what it's done is really supported what Women in Transport are doing around these whitepaper campaigns. And so for everybody listening, check out the website: we've just recently launched a paper on menopause. We've got a paper coming out soon around intergenerational workforces. But a lot of that came about through the conversations around this particular topic. And just that need and that want to collaborate to understand what organisations are doing currently, what some of their blockers are, but also understanding how can we collectively move forward knowing that the impact is. You do have mothers, caregivers of all types, who will just leave the workforce and thereby not retaining that information. There's a real business need as to why we should be retaining mothers and carers.
Before we get into recommendations and things like that, let's set the scene a little bit around some of the problems. So what have we seen so far through lived experience?
>> Beci: I think one of the things that I've seen from my colleagues, but also that came out a lot in the focus groups was how much additional, maybe unseen work, working parents and particularly mothers are doing. Especially when we were talking around agile working and part-time working. Actually when people got into it and almost counted the hours they were doing, they were doing far more than they would do when it was full time. And a lot of that also brought out topics around guilt and having to prove yourself or feel like you need to prove yourself more than other people to justify being a working mother. I thought that was really interesting and seemed to come up no matter what the topic got to, those themes kept coming up time and time again.
>> Joanna: Yeah, I think for me, and I think what I connected with most because of the experiences my mum had was the fact that you never stop being a parent. So it can come back. Just because your kids are no longer in nappies doesn't mean that you know that you're still having to take on that caring role. So we had people, they were actually fathers as well. It's important to note this isn't just mothers with disabled children or children who needed more hands on care for longer, yet they were finding that they were back to the guilt point. They were having to make up hours or felt they had to make up hours for every one hour they took to take their child to an appointment or something like that, or mental health later in life. So parents who hadn't been really parenting for a very long time suddenly having to take on this caring role again. And how do you get that across to your employer that suddenly you're going to have to be the parent again? That was quite interesting, I found.
>> Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. And I think what we're describing there is that nobody's journey is the same. And also sometimes these are lifetime journeys and sometimes they're not. And actually what does the nuance of the change look like in there? From the recommendations, what would you recommend if somebody was newly finding themselves in that space of caring or parenthood and trying to navigate something personally, but also then being able to have conversations. What do the recommendations uncover?
>> Beci: I think from the conversations that we had, a massive thing that came out was also just the people in the room saying how wonderful it was to be able to all share and actually see that there were so many common experiences. So I think anything around networks, kind of working family groups, things like that, where you can come together and share those experiences. While they might not be exactly the same, you're going to find people who've either been through that journey already or are going through it at the same time as you and have that support network to be able to talk things through and maybe see what's worked for other people. And that could be as simple as just talking about what it feels like. But also if people are looking at agile working and they don't know how to approach their manager, somebody might have done that before. So that came out as something really important.
>> Joanna: Definitely. I think that the sharing perspective and I think if you're in a leadership role, being able to role-model the fact that you have children and you do want to go and see them at the end of the day saying, look, I'm finishing, I've done my hours, I'm going and living and breathing. The flexible and agile working I think is really important. And yeah, making it clear that you want to collaborate with your employer I think as well, the top and bottom of it is being human. We talk about this a lot Shireen, don't we? Decide we're humans and this is part of the human experience. And having children is something that as a society it's one of the main purposes of other societies to continue. So yeah, it is a part and parcel of the human experience. So having humanity as an organisation I think is really important as well.
>> Shireen: Oh, I love that Joanna. That real stripping-back from process and guidelines and actually just human beings speaking to human beings. And again, when you look at some of the statistics, we know that the birth rates are low in lots of countries. We know that is going to have a long term issue. We know that people's life expectancy is going up. So again you've got a greater number of older people and a fewer number, lesser number of people being born. We know that's going to have an impact in a generation, at least a generation. What are we doing to support parents and carers of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds in order to fulfil that role, which at the moment comes across to be burdensome because people are still a bit scared to have the conversation. Certainly Covid has helped with some of the transparency around it, but we know that people are still feeling it. Hence the need to write the paper, hence the need to have the campaign around the motherhood penalty.
One of the things I'd like to deep-dive into which really kind of threw me: When we looked at the statistics that came out of the book, the motherhood penalty was around salary and the gap, and actually a lot of the gender pay gap is made up of mothers. And that really threw me off. I wasn't expecting it. It isn't something that's spoken about a lot. But what are your reflections on that? Around salary, but also there's a real prejudice against mothers.
>> Beci: I think there are a lot of different reasons and that's maybe why sometimes we don't think of it straight away as the main reason is because it was almost a kind of death by a thousand cuts of all these things compiling onto each other. I think one of the things that was spoken a lot about that I hadn't thought about was just around the cost of childcare and raising a child and having them become an adult. That, as somebody without children, I knew it was expensive vaguely, but hearing people talk about it and also comparing it to the kind of childcare offerings in other countries where people said, I think they had friends in Denmark who were all full-time and couldn't understand why a mother wouldn't be full-time here until they discovered how expensive that was.
And then people talked about being out for a year and coming back and feeling like they had to catch up. Those kind of things compounding each other actually makes it really difficult for people to want to come back to work because the kind of cost-benefit is really hard to manage.
>> Joanna: I think it's awful that it's not really a choice. I think it would be, you know, if we had an ideal world, it'd be nice to think that if you wanted to be the stay-at-home parent of your gender, then that would be your choice. It's the fact that you're weighing up, do I go back to work for my whole wage to just go towards nursery fees or, you know, do I stay at home and us not feel the difference? I think that's what makes me sad about it is that the choice isn't there. Since it's your life, at the end of the day, you should be able to choose whether you want to work or not and what that looks like for you.
>> Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. And that sacrifice of I'm going to use most of my salary to pay somebody else to look after my children. I feel like there's a real just lose, lose there.
But I would like to pivot on the point that we've just spoken around the caring and the choosing to work from home, because obviously there's a huge part of the workforce who don't have the offering or the ability to work from home, who are site-based. What are our thoughts around the people who actually do and want to work site-based and are operational and doing all the frontline work that other people haven't got the flex. They therefore do not have the flexibility to be able to choose where they work from. It's shift-based, it's front-of-house based. How do we support colleagues in that aspect?
>> Beci: I think it's that collaborative planning element of not immediately thinking we won't be able to do any of these things because it's site-based. That only works for office space. I think it would be disingenuous to say that it's not potentially going to be more difficult to figure out what's going to work, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing that is going to work. And things like job-sharing, things like shifting start- and end-times that they work with, school pickups, school drop-offs are reasonable and can be done. It just might take a little bit more work.
So it's having the courage and the patience, I think, to do a bit of trial-and- error and actually to see how many people want that. Because the answer might be kind of sitting there quietly not wanting to poke its head up, that there's a couple of people who want to work agilely in a way that works if they do it together.
And I think the other part of that is that culture piece of who is responsible for childcare that came out. A lot of people saying not only is it always assumed that the mother will do it, but there are a lot of men in the focus group saying, when I then want to go and do the school drop-off, I feel like I can't really ask because it's not what's expected. Whereas if we can have that cultural shift that it could be anybody, that's also going to make it easier to manage those kind of agile options because the pool of people that you can work with is much bigger.
>> Joanna: I think there's a shift for society generally as well, because so many of the appointments, the schools, the things that you may need to leave work early for happen in work hours. So I think having services available, that are not oversubscribed because that's the other issue, isn't it? You get the earlier doctor's appointments and everybody wants them. You know, normalising that kind of approach I think would also be helpful because then it doesn't matter if you're doing shift work, because you've got all of these other options available to you.
>> Beci: And I think, like you said earlier as well, Jo, about that kind of human element, it's also making it clear that it's not just for parents that, like you say, getting doctor's appointments, not first thing, last thing in the day is really difficult, and people need to go to the doctors. People have other responsibilities that they might want to work agilely for. So it's not just solely something about parents. It's really for everybody.
>> Joanna: That's the joy of this space, though, isn't it? Because everything we do isn't just for that one particular group of people. It actually benefits the whole. Which is what's the magic about it.
>> Shireen: Yeah, I love that.
I want to speak more about that, actually, briefly, because you're right. When we talk about reasonable adjustments or guidance around flexible working, it isn't about saying, oh, you're a parent, therefore your life and priorities take precedence over somebody who isn't a parent. And there's so much we could talk about on those topics as well. But I think you're right. It's about understanding: Understanding those adjustments can support everybody. If you have the opportunity for everybody to opt in, opt out, be curious about what could potentially work, as you said, Beci, not assuming that actually we've got to be this rigid about things. What is the flexibility? And I think curiosity comes into it, and understanding that actually we are in 2025, we're soon to be in 2026. I feel like the rule book is very much out of the window as to how we can work in the world. But that could be and should be a positive because we can create some new norms around what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And your point around the guilt of then the father saying, actually, I want to go pick up my child, but that looking awkward, or why is it always the mother?
I started watching Motherland yesterday again, which I hadn't seen for ages, and I was just looking for something to watch. And in one of the episodes, the child hadn't had their swim kit and the school had called the mother who was in the middle of work. She's standing in the stairwell. And then she just said, can I just check? Did you call their father or did you call me? And they were like, no, you called me. Okay, thanks. And she said, banging her phone on the side, it was like I cannot win. And I just thought, absolutely. There is this lack of culture: it's always the first person you call and it happens to be most generally it's the mum who's on the first of that list. So what is that societal expectation? Because when then we're conversely not allowing fathers to then show up because we're creating not the right environment for it. And then when they do, often then they're seen as special and you know, it's abnormal that they're doing that. So I think there's a real cultural piece in there as well.
I have a question around when people are returning to work over a period of time where they're not in, what were some of the challenges that were raised? What were some of the best practices that we saw through those roundtable conversations, through the paper, because we highlighted earlier. And Jo, you were saying this where I think a lot of the conversations around mother having child and then maybe coming back to work. But it's those early years. So I think there's a real focus on the time where the parent comes back to work, but also with older children because I feel like this is a big conversation. So I'd like to focus on that returner piece first. What does it look like after you've been out for a while? And then maybe looking at some of the support for older children and those different life-stages.
>> Joanna: We had a real mix, because I subsequently went into my workplace and asked just out of curiosity what women had experienced there and it was really positive. There was a lot there where they'd said they'd felt really supportive, they'd had great line managers, they'd had the flexibility. But they'd also been given sort of a training programme. I think because training is so ingrained in what we do in the traffic management space that it was quite easy to kind of just bring people back up to speed again. But I think that is one of the areas that I think one lady mentioned that she felt she'd gone on maternity, come back and felt like a new starter because everything had changed, her line manager had changed, all the processes had changed. And she'd gone from being this sort of high-flying, really confident person of a certain level to, yeah, almost taking about seven steps backwards.
Something we mentioned in the webinar a few weeks ago was not appreciating the skills you pick up as a mother and not seeing the value in those, the sudden ability to negotiate with the unnegotiable, you know, organisation, all these sorts of different leadership skills that are actually really crucial for management. That we just overlook and there isn't training for, actually. So you get sort of, you're getting this training course, aren't you? Nearly, almost!
>> Shireen: Is that part of it that there isn't, there isn't almost a, one experience for people, and depends on who your line manager is. And so maybe there should be guidance and training that says when a person comes back, this is. This is. And actually not even when they come back, but whilst they're away. These are the things that should take place. As we know, people talk about keeping-in-touch days and things like that, but I feel like it's a real nuance as to it, isn't there?
>> Beci: And I think by having that in place, then people can use it how they want. At least you've got the kind of foundations there, of this is what you do. Not even just during and after, but before somebody goes off, that you have these times where you set the plan, you talk about what's going to happen so that people know that that can shift and adjust if it's not working, what we're going to do when somebody comes back, how are we going to get you feeling like you're kind of back on track where you were before you went off? And then if people want to use that flexibly and do some of it and not the other, kind of do a pick-and-mix, that's fine, but it's there.
For example, if you had a kind of manager who'd never managed someone who's gone on maternity leave before, it's a lot to expect them to know exactly what to do perfectly first time. So having those foundations there could be really helpful for everybody.
>> Shireen: So we're actually talking about providing some support for the managers as well. And I know Ikea, you call them the golden. Is it the golden middle? Is that what you call them?
>> Beci: Magic middle, I think.
>> Shireen: And I just, that really stuck with me because, yeah, it's really make or break, but you need to support those people who are kind of just squished at every angle. So what support can there be, should there be for managers?
>> Beci: Yeah, I think those kind of processes and guidance notes, anything that they can access really easily whenever they need them. Also any kind of, back to that kind of networking. It's not always networking for the parents. If there's other managers who have supported people through maternity or paternity leave, whatever kind of parental leave we're talking about and have had good feedback from their reports. Can we link those people up and get them talking so that they know? And then it's just great HR support or bringing all these people together so that not everybody needs to have all of the answers. But between you all, you can do it. It's that kind of takes-a-village ethos that then we can give people the support they need.
>> Shireen: Yeah, yeah, I love that there's a real kind of coaching mentality behind that.
>> Joanna: And if you've given people the guardrails through your policy, you've given them the safety net to say, right, here's who you go to if you've got a query or you're concerned. Even if you point, signpost them to the important legal information, you know, what is our obligations as an employer? That way they can. If and when that person comes to them and says, ah, what do I do? I'm, you know, we're having children, you've got the information to hand, haven't you? Because, yeah, that is one area that I think a lot of businesses slip up in is not informing that layer of management exactly what's happening for their people. It always gets overlooked and they get lumbered with all of the really difficult questions. And that just leads to conflict that just didn't need to be there.
>> Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. I remember hearing from people who'd come back to the workplace after a period of return to leave and I remember somebody saying that they'd been deleted on the system so they effectively didn't exist anymore. And I think that's a real message that we're telling people.
When you've come back, Jo, to your point earlier on, feeling like a new start, that really is like a new start. You come back, you don't even exist anymore. I do know somebody who I worked with who returned and had been at the organisation for a while. She lost all of her files, all of her folders. And you know, arguably there's a process around SharePoint and all the stuff. It's a bit of a drag for everybody, but actually from a governance perspective makes sense. But the impact is this person lost a lot of work that they'd worked on. So that the real feeling we're telling people there.
I know when I returned from mat leave and it's only when you have these conversations you kind of realise how not good it was. I remember I didn't have any keep-in-touch while I was away. I requested a call or a face-to-face just before I was returning. And I got told, and I was a permanent member of staff, but I got told, oh, we'd have to speak to the board about you returning. And I just thought that's a really odd thing to say to somebody, not welcome back, we can't wait to see you, because we need to speak to the board about you returning. So I just thought that's a bit ominous. And then when I did return, I returned back part-time. Childcare, all the rest of it. And I remember they got me, I was director level and I was literally clearing out files, like archiving essentially. And then within a few weeks I was made redundant. And so we're talking about the messaging we're giving people: that was a very clear messaging of, actually, your place here has shifted and you're no longer needed. And you know, how are, how are we helping people? How are we supporting people if that's the messaging?
And actually this was an all-female team, so you can't even say there's a gender thing there, because actually it was an all-female team. So, you know, there's some of those assumptions you might make, you can't make really. I think it is about having that one-size-fits-all approach that everybody has some kind of legislative opportunities, a policy, some guidance that you just know that your experience will be the same as somebody else's. And so for me, they're really dangerous things that people can leave the sector, people leaving with such good information. There's that knowledge transfer, there's that succession planning that isn't taking place. What are your thoughts around those experiences or anything to add, like maybe from the paper or other conversations?
>> Joanna: I think something that came up really was that you don't actually stop being an employee just because you have a child. Even in that time that you're not there, you're still employed. The outreach to you should be exactly the same as the outreach to anyone that's working frontline, remote, whatever. You know, it absolutely should be negotiated as to what's appropriate for you, cover. Because something that came through in the book was this idea that, you know, if covering wasn't negotiated, a lot of resentment would build up in the team if they were having to sort of absorb it.
So you don't want all of these little niggly things just kind of bubbling in the background, because that is what then leads to sort of awkwardness and things. But it's otherwise, it comes back to being human again, doesn't it? And having these difficult conversations is not something we're all very keen on doing.
>> Beci: Yeah. I think it linked into what came up a few times as well. Or a lot, in fact, around identity. There were people that said, I feel like I can either be a good employee or a good parent, I can't be both. And they also said, I knew exactly who I was when I was an employee. But then I went off for this extended period of time and became, especially for first-time parents, became a parent, this whole new identity that I had shifted to. And then I've come back to work and now I'm having to try and figure out what that new identity is that encompasses both of those things. So then you add on top of that coming back and your account having been deleted, or people not remembering to welcome you back, that no one's been told that you're coming back that day. That would make such a massive difference. Somebody who's already like, I'm not sure where I fit now, or as you said, Jo, not realising that all of those skills that have been building up have been actually making them stronger. Before you're able to make that connection, you need that support of other people helping you to make those links.
>> Shireen: Beci, tell me about some of the stuff that Kier are doing.
>> Beci: A lot of it with Kier is around culture. Culture is such a massive thing for us. So around that agile working piece, it's really getting out all of the information about that.
So we've got a smart working toolkit and within that it says all of the different kinds of things that you can do. Because I think people just hear smart working or agile working, you think it's part-time. It has things in there about different shift patterns, about job-sharing, about all sorts of stuff. And it also has case studies of how that's worked for people. So going back to that point of it not just being for parents, people can see in different business areas, in different roles, for different reasons, how we've managed to use this. So it's just getting that conversation out and talking about that whenever we get the chance.
And then we've got a mentoring programme, we've got development programmes for different groups that we're always encouraging people into. And then we have our gender alliance network and a working families group as part of that now. So it's trying to have the conversations and have them often, but have them as organically as possible. We want to get to the point where these things are being spoken about as if they always have been spoken about and we've never had to push it, which I think we are definitely getting towards. But it's trying to... There's no point us putting loads of different policies in or pushing out guidance if people don't understand the why or the culture isn't there to back it up. So I think that has to be the first really strong foundation that you build so then the rest of it can succeed. Otherwise you're just kind of setting it up to fail or setting a few people up to be guinea pigs and hoping for the best. And if it works, brilliant. If it doesn't, it's not particularly fair on the people that you try it with.
>> Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. Joanna, from your conversations and other work that you do with Women in Transport and certainly around this campaign, what are your thoughts around industry, what we can do, what we should be doing?
>> Joanna: I think there's some really good examples out there. Somebody reached out after our webinar the other week from Transport for Greater Manchester with something they'd done to improve maternity, paternity and adoption policies and especially around the leave part of that. And they'd even done some exceptional circumstances work on stuff in the neonatal space, miscarriage, shared parental leave, all those kind of things. And they've done some of their own benchmarking. They believe that they have some of the most family-friendly policies in comparable organisations now. So something we've, I've, got permission from them for is to bring that forward as a case study so that we can exemplify the stuff that organisations are doing in this space.
We always come back to the so what, don't we? So we've got the whitepaper, we're going to keep pushing that out and raising awareness, but I think we need to now move on to that next stage of what good practice is happening out there that people can copy. So I think policy is a really good place to start. As you said, Beci, working on the culture piece as well. So I think it would be great to have Kier as a really good benchmark and example of that. So, yeah, I think there's some good stuff out there. It concerns me that there are still a lot of gaps and that this isn't business as usual. But, yeah, that seems to be the way with a lot of these sort of areas, unfortunately.
>> Beci: I think the breadth of those policies is really important as well, because we've done the same in Kier. We've got obviously maternity, our enhanced maternity pay, shared parental leave. But then we've got fostering, we've got adoption, we've got surrogacy, we've got those neonatal policies. Because that was something interesting that I think came up in the focus groups and I think you've touched on Shireen at those different stages. We had a few people chatting about becoming step-parents and how that isn't always something that people think about, that you think of from newborn onwards, but you suddenly have a 7-year-old in your life, or whoever it may be, and that shift is again different. So it's trying... You're never going to be able to have a policy for absolutely everything, but you can have enough that you can then work within all of those to find things that work for your employees.
>> Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. And Beci, how do we make sure, and we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but how do we make sure that things are not just left in policy and they become living and breathing ways of working? And at some point, to Jo's point, at some point, it does become business as usual and becomes industry as usual and as human being as usual. But how do we take it from policy and guidelines into something that's practical?
>> Beci: I think it's stories. I think that is the case across most D&I topics. It's bringing them to life. Because when I used to work in HR and I used to be horrified at the things people didn't know about policies, or the policies people didn't know we had, actually, if you haven't needed them, there's no reason really for you to know that. No one's sitting in an IMS and reading every single policy that a company has every day. So it's bringing them to life so people know about them before they need them. Because actually, once you're in the situation where you need one of those policies, you're already thinking about a million other things. So if you can already have that knowledge, that's going to make everything much less stressful for you. So it's case studies, but it's doing lunch-and-learns where employees can share their stories. Encouraging if you've got internal intranets, we have a site called Your Kier that has community pages. It's getting people to post on there, knowing that it doesn't have to be this very long blog. It could be a paragraph that says, I came back from maternity leave. My manager did this. It was great. And it's something that other people can see because otherwise they're not always going to know people have their jobs. And that's what their brain is mostly filled up with. But if they can see these real personal stories, there's a connection that isn't just policies and words.
>> Shireen: Yeah, I love that, really bringing it to life. And that's certainly something we try with the podcast and with the whole Intersectionality workstream, which is that it's impossible to live everyone's life experiences. That's just, you know, acknowledged. But what we can do is we can be curious and we can share and we can be vulnerable in spaces where that vulnerability is honoured. But it means we can learn, we can absolutely learn by listening, and being curious around other people's challenges, other people's life storeys. And, you know, we've said this already around the sense of the adjustments that we make actually benefitting everyone. And so why would we not do that? And even beyond the motherhood penalty, we've acknowledged that actually this is caregiving, it's kind of parental responsibility. All words that we can use. But in life, if we're looking after other people, in any sense, I mean, we could talk about the sandwich generation, which often have dependencies older and younger. There's a lot that's coming out through how we just support other people. And we've spoken a lot today about that human approach.
But we do know the data is already there. We've deliberately not gone into the data because I think we've moved further than data in the sense around business benefits. We already know that we need people to be retained in the sector. We already know that more diverse teams outperform those that are not diverse. But that's all old stuff. We know that already, but how do we move it further forward? And I think this paper, this conversation really makes it practical, really makes it tangible. It's really kind of underlined and underpinned by collaboration and how we work with other people. You said it yourself, Beci, some people are doing some really good stuff. Why would we not learn from them? Success does leave clues, but also so do people's mistakes. And actually, let's talk about the things that didn't go so well and we can learn from them and make them better. So thank you so much for that.
I think my last question is around looking at those recommendations and if there's one thing that our listeners can do, and I'll... Spoiler alert. Please download the document, have the conversation. The recommendations are all listed in there. If you go to the Women in Transport website, it's all on there under the case study area. And if people were going to listen to this conversation and take one thing away, what would it be? Joanna, I'll come to you and then I'll come to you, Beci.
>> Joanna: I'm going to cheat. I have two. A big one for me is normalised, flexible working. So it's a default, not a perk. I don't like how the media frames it as a bad thing. It is really productive, it's really positive and it's not a sign of reduced commitment. And it comes in so many different shapes and sizes, as we've sort of explored already. And, secondly, narrow that parenthood pay gap through better parental leave policies, career progression, pay transparency, all those things. Have a plan and get it.
>> Shireen: Thank you. Beci?
>> Beci: Yeah, I think look at what you have in place to support people outside of them kind of asking HR and things like that. So look at those guidance documents. Look at things, and that's not just around maternity leave, but that is around career progression, that is around what kind of development is going to be there in place immediately when someone gets back. If that's something they want. Just look at if... Put yourself in the position of somebody who is a parent or who is a manager who's never managed somebody going off. Have a look through your resources and see if there is actually anything and how easy it is to find, because sometimes you have these things but people have no idea where they are. So I think making sure that that is out there and then encouraging people to talk about it when they do use them and when they're helpful.
>> Shireen: Great. Thank you. Again, yes. Please, listeners, let us know your thoughts on the topic: what's worked, what hasn't worked, just general experiences. Stories, tell us how your experiences have been. Please do download the document and we look forward to welcoming you to our next episode. But thank you very much to our guests today. Thank you.
>> Sonya: Thank you for listening to the Women in Transport podcast. Together, we're championing inclusion and celebrating the women driving change across the transport sector. To join the conversation, connect with us and explore more stories, head to the episode show-notes.