World-first research on motherhood and leadership inspires consultancy
26 June 2024
Amanda Sterling began her PhD research after she was passed over for a management position following maternity leave. Now, she works as a consultant to help keep women in the workforce and in leadership.
“I was brought up to believe that women can do anything,” reflects leadership consultant and recent PhD graduate Dr Amanda Sterling. It was disappointing, then, that resuming her career after taking maternity leave proved unexpectedly challenging.
“I struggled to integrate motherhood and work, let alone leadership,” she recalls. “This wasn’t helped by some of the things that happened in my workplace – for example, despite achieving all objective measures of performance, I was passed over for a leadership position.”
Determined to “make sense of this experience”, Amanda embarked on a PhD in Management at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland.
“I ended up uncovering so many stories, similar to my own, where women were struggling to progress their careers after becoming mothers because of irreconcilable expectations to lead like they didn’t have children and mother like they didn’t have careers.”
Her world-first doctoral research – which unsurprisingly has generated considerable media interest across Aotearoa New Zealand – examined the experiences of mothers in leadership positions at some of our most prominent organisations.
Her findings highlighted how leadership norms remain problematic for this group and demonstrated the importance of explicitly recognising and supporting women’s experiences of “embodied motherhood” – for example, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding or caring for young children.
Amanda’s own experiences navigating the competing demands of motherhood and career were “deeply intertwined” with her research, she adds.
“My personal connection became an enabler for empathy and connection, the emergence of rich data, and a vehicle for activism,” she explains. “It was important to me that my doctoral research made a meaningful difference to the inclusion of women in leadership roles.”
This desire for her research to have greater reach in terms of real-world relevance saw Amanda shift focus from coaching individuals – mothers in leadership roles – to transforming organisations.
Her leadership consultancy works with companies which are already making efforts to encourage women into leadership positions – for example, by offering part-time or flexible work hours, parental leave and leadership development programmes – but are still seeing women “stagnate or drop out” before they reach senior leadership roles.
You have to go through this translation process from ‘academic speak’, and how problems are defined in the literature, to ‘practical speak’ and how those problems can be addressed with actionable solutions – and you have to do all that without losing the unique value that the research offers.
“My work is in educating leaders about these challenges, partnering with executives and people and culture experts to help them understand how these play out in their workplaces, and creating actionable road maps for supporting more women into leadership,” she explains.
She’s heartened by the enthusiastic response to her work, which has generated significant interest from companies “looking to shift that stubborn dial on leadership inclusion,” she says. “Now I’m enjoying working with organisations who are genuinely interested in increasing the opportunities for women in leadership.”
Amanda does, however, acknowledge that the process of applying research to solve 'real-world problems' hasn’t been easy.
“You have to go through this translation process from ‘academic speak’, and how problems are defined in the literature, to ‘practical speak’ and how those problems can be addressed with actionable solutions – and you have to do all that without losing the unique value that the research offers,” she observes.
Her participation in the University’s first Researcher Hatchery programme last year eased this transition. Open to researchers of all faculties, the Research to Innovation Hatchery programme is delivered by the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
“The Hatchery programme, particularly the support of the mentors and the challenging questions they asked, was invaluable.
"They kept pushing us to deeply understand the problems our potential clients were facing and gave us the tools to do that. It’s that curiosity, questioning, and continual challenging of my own assumptions that I’ll take away as a key learning.”
Although Amanda admits that she was not initially interested in entrepreneurship as a career per se, having her own business enables her to both “carve out a meaningful career” while also remaining present for her son, now seven.
“It’s not without its challenges, but, for now, it’s a way for me to make a bigger difference with my research, and I’m open to where that leads,” she says.
I think there are significant opportunities for progressive organisations, prepared to commit to the longer-term cultural shifts necessary, to lead the way on this.
After all, there’s still plenty of work to be done in terms of increasing leadership opportunities for women (especially mothers), she notes.
“Most organisations don’t understand enough about what the problem is, let alone how they go about solving it.
"What we still see is a struggle to close the gap in representation, and some areas are going backwards. For example, the number of women in senior leadership in Champions for Change organisations (arguably a more progressive group) dropped six percent from 2022 to 2023.”
The insights from Amanda’s research have thus been invaluable.
“The work I’m doing highlights opportunities for building leadership capabilities that create spaces for a variety of lived experiences to thrive,” she explains.
“I think there are significant opportunities for progressive organisations, prepared to commit to the longer-term cultural shifts necessary, to lead the way on this.”
Encouragingly, it would appear that progress is already being made – evidenced not only by her upcoming collaborations with some “incredible” people and organisations but also by her recent experiences. She recalls making a presentation at a consulting company to a group of senior leaders.
“And the room was almost half-full with men – it’s usually mostly women. It completely changed the vibe in the room and opened up this beautiful conversation about how we all take responsibility for inclusive leadership,” she observes.
“My highlights are those moments where people realise something they didn’t know before, then have the tools to do something with that – and I see the difference that my research makes.”