Take two women with essentially the same qualifications. Give one of them a career break, and she is 49% less likely to get a callback.
That number should make us uncomfortable, particularly because so much of the conversation around women returning to work still starts with what she needs to do to become employable again.
Get certified. Refresh your skills. Build confidence. Complete a course. Do a returnship. Make the resume stronger.
All useful things, in the right context.
But recent research from India suggests something more complicated is happening: when an upskilling signal was added to the resume, the callback gap barely changed.
And that makes me wonder whether we have spent years trying to fix the wrong side of the problem.
The finding that should make us rethink the intervention
What really caught my attention was what happened when researchers added an upskilling signal to the resume, such as a recent certification or course.
The callback rate barely moved.
That matters because so much of what we have built around women’s return to work is based on the assumption that the break has created a skills deficit which the woman needs to repair before employers will consider her seriously.
We have returnship programmes, market-readiness bootcamps, certification pathways, confidence-building workshops and a whole vocabulary around helping women become “job ready” again.
These interventions can absolutely be useful, particularly when someone has been away from the workplace for several years and wants to rebuild confidence, reconnect with professional networks or get familiar with tools and practices that have changed.
But if adding a recent certification to an otherwise comparable resume does little to change the employer’s response, then we need to be honest about what these programmes can and cannot solve.
Perhaps the problem is not sitting entirely on the candidate side of the equation.
So what might actually be driving the penalty?
If a skills signal doesn’t significantly change the outcome, the pattern starts to look much more like an employer perception problem.
And the way that penalty varies across sectors is particularly interesting.
The disadvantage appears stronger in skill-intensive, high-stakes fields such as finance than in areas such as HR, where broader competencies and experience may carry more weight.
If employers were primarily worried about technical skills becoming outdated, you would expect a recent certification or course to do more of the work of reassuring them.
Instead, the penalty appears to become stronger in environments where employers may also be making assumptions about commitment, continuity and whether someone who has taken a career break will stay.
That is a very different problem from skill currency.
A career break can become a shortcut for making assumptions about a woman’s future commitment to work, her availability, her ambitions or how likely she is to leave again, even when there is very little evidence in the application itself to support those assumptions.
And then there is the question of where you are hiring
The fact that the penalty appears larger in smaller firms and in regions where diversity practices are less established is also worth paying attention to.
A lot of hiring still happens through informal judgement.
We talk about structured hiring, competency frameworks and objective criteria, but in many organisations there is still a significant amount of decision-making that sounds like, “I don’t know if she will fit,” “I’m not sure how committed she is,” or “Why did she take such a long break?”
Those statements can feel like reasonable hiring concerns because they are framed as assessments of future risk.
But sometimes they are simply assumptions dressed up as judgement.
And a resume cannot do much to counter an assumption that the evaluator has already made about the person behind it.
There is one group we should be paying much more attention to
I find the experience of women returning to their own organisations particularly interesting here.
When a woman takes a career break and later returns to the same organisation, the organisation already has something the external employer doesn’t: evidence.
It knows how she worked, what she delivered, how she handled responsibility and what she contributed before she left.
The break still happened, but the person isn’t an unknown quantity.
That tells us something important about where some of the difficulty may actually lie.
The risk employers perceive may have less to do with the career break itself and much more to do with what they imagine about someone they don’t yet know.
Which is why I think organisations should be asking a very practical question: what are we doing with the women who already know us, and whom we already know?
Do we keep in touch with women who leave for a career break?
Do we have an alumni network that is actually used rather than simply existing on paper?
Do managers know which former employees might be interested in returning?
Do our talent teams actively look at former employees when roles open up, rather than starting every search from scratch?
Do we have a process for reaching out to women who left on good terms and may now be ready to come back?
These are relatively simple questions, and yet most organisations have no systematic answer to them.
Where I think the intervention needs to move
We should absolutely continue investing in returnships and upskilling where they genuinely help women rebuild confidence, capability and professional connections.
At the same time, we need to spend equal energy examining what happens on the other side of the hiring table.
Ask hiring managers what concerns come to mind when they see a career break on a resume, and then ask whether those concerns are based on evidence about the candidate or assumptions about people who have taken breaks.
Build structured evaluation criteria that make it harder for “commitment” or “fit” to become vague proxies for personal assumptions, particularly in the early screening stages where a candidate can be rejected before anyone has actually spoken to her.
Track callback, interview and offer rates for candidates with career breaks against comparable candidates without them, because if we don’t measure where the drop-off happens, we are left guessing about where the problem sits.
And perhaps most importantly, stop making the entire return-to-work conversation about how women can make themselves easier for employers to say yes to.
The data is telling us something we should take seriously. We keep asking women to become more ready for the workplace.
Maybe some of our organisations need to become more ready to recognise the value of someone whose career hasn’t followed a perfectly uninterrupted line.