The hidden bias against taking career breaks

While policies aimed at supporting working parents have become increasingly prevalent in professional services firms, one senior lawyer has stressed that these measures don’t always result in tangible and real opportunities.

Editor’s note: This story first appeared on HR Leader’s sister brand, Lawyers Weekly.

Speaking recently on The HR Leader Podcast, Porscia Lam, a senior procurement lawyer at ANZ, discussed the unique challenges she encountered while attempting to re-enter the legal profession despite an increase in availability of support for parents transitioning back into the workforce.

After taking a three-year hiatus dedicated to caring for her son, Lam shared that her efforts to transition back into the job market proved to be more challenging than she had initially anticipated.

“When I was applying for jobs again to re-enter the workforce, a lot of the large professional services firms had a policy of interviewing a certain number of people who were parents returning from an extended career break.

“But it didn’t necessarily translate to job interviews for me. I applied for jobs for a good solid six months, and during that time, I did not receive a single interview offer except for the job that I ended up getting,” she said.

Lam expressed her astonishment at the difficulty level she encountered, particularly given her established career, graduating from a reputable university, and extensive professional experience.

“[It] was completely unexpected for me because up until that point, I’d had what I thought was a really great career. I had been to a good uni, had really great marks, been picked up by a top-tier law firm straight out of uni and then gone on to work for quite a number of blue-chip clients,” she said.

“I never really got to get to the stage of explaining why I had taken that break from my career because I wasn’t getting interviews. Even though I put it on all my cover letters and all my applications that I was the parent of a special needs child, I wasn’t given the opportunity to explain further.”

Despite various initiatives by companies designed to facilitate the reintegration of parents into the workforce, Lam shared how these measures failed to result in tangible opportunities for her.

“In my experience, [this] was despite there being lots of policies out there to support working parents without a personal introduction from someone in [the] firm who actually could vouch for you, I found I was just hitting a brick wall,” she said.

Lam revealed that what ultimately helped her break back into the progression was not the formal application process but rather the strength of her professional network.

“What ended up actually helping me get a job in the end was putting the word out there to my professional networks that I was looking to return to the workforce. As soon as I did that, I got a much warmer, much more enthusiastic response [from] the people that I was speaking to, even though they may not have been advertising jobs [or] recruiting,” she said.

“The conversations with people were certainly like … the area of law that you practise in hasn’t even changed that much over the last few years.”

Lam argues that organisations with this mindset overlook a substantial pool of highly skilled professionals eager to re-enter the workforce and a diverse range of industry expertise.

“The shame in all of this is that many people in my position go out when they leave the workforce when they actually have a huge amount of technical expertise and industry experience, and they’ve still got a lot more to give.

“You’re potentially losing a lot of people who could hit the ground running extremely fast because of the amount of experience and exposure that they’ve had over the last couple of years leading up to them taking a career break,” she said.

She expressed that encountering this experience was profoundly demoralising, causing her to devalue her capabilities as a lawyer and leading her to believe that she would be unable to continue her profession.

“But from my perspective, I just remember feeling like I’m in my early 40s and does this mean my career is over? I’m never going to work again? Do I now need to go back and upskill in something else? Am I unemployable as a corporate lawyer just because I’ve taken a couple of years off?

“I remember feeling quite lost. I remember wondering whether, at some point, I lost the ability to press send on my emails because I just couldn’t believe that I wasn’t getting a response to any of these job applications that I was putting out there,” she said.

Lam asserts that organisations that do not share this perspective about career gaps should consider providing opportunities to these individuals.

“My message is give us a chance, give us the interview. If the only thing counting again does is the fact that we’ve got this gap on our CV and we’ve said we had to take this time off to be a full-time carer for our child, our parent who’s ageing or whatever it might be, because quite likely that person has got so much expertise still to offer and now has gained all these other soft skills from their experience as a carer,” she said.