A reflection on motherhood, leadership, and conscious organizational cultures.

An article for Mother’s Day — and for everyone who leads, cares, and builds at the same time.

Yesterday was Mother’s Day. And I want to speak to the mothers who lead organizations, teams, projects, and families at the same time. But I also want to speak to the fathers who are learning to care. And above all, I want to speak to those who, from positions of power, have both the opportunity and the responsibility to change the rules of the game.

Because what many call “balance” is, in reality, a very well-dressed lie.

The myth of balance

Balance implies that there are two perfectly weighted scales, and that the job is to keep either one from tipping. It’s a metaphor that sounds reasonable, but in practice it demands that people — especially women — be two people at once, with the same energy, on the same day.

Work-life integration isn’t balance. It’s design.

Conscious design of priorities, boundaries, agreements, and structures. And like all good design, it requires intention, context, and above all, the right conditions to be implemented. No architect designs on land that doesn’t belong to them, without tools and with a ticking clock. But that is exactly what we ask of millions of working mothers every day.

The numbers don’t lie

The data is uncomfortable, but necessary for anyone making decisions from the C-suite.

In Latin America, the pay gap between mothers and fathers reaches 23.7%, while among people without children it is 15.9% — what economist Claudia Goldin called the Motherhood Penalty: the concrete penalty that motherhood imposes on women’s careers and earnings. This is not a talent problem. It’s an organizational design problem.

The 2025 Women at Work X-Ray study by Buk, with data from across the region, reveals that mothers face higher levels of burnout than women without children, and that 46% of women in leadership want to change jobs or are actively trying to. They’re not being fired — they’re leaving. Voluntarily. Because the environment isn’t designed for them.

And when women leaders themselves are asked, 33% of women in leadership positions perceive that men earn more in their organization, compared to only 20% of male leaders who share that perception. The same reality, read from two different places. The gap between those two readings is exactly the size of the problem.

A study by IPADE Business School’s CIMAD found that mothers in leadership positions show significantly higher levels of burnout than fathers in the same positions, with greater exhaustion and depersonalization. Not because they’re weaker. But because they carry more.

The emotion no one names in boardroom meetings

There’s a word that comes up again and again in private conversations among women leaders, but almost never in organizations’ strategic conversations: guilt.

Guilt when you’re at the office and your child has a fever. Guilt when you’re at home and haven’t answered your emails. Guilt for asking for flexibility. Guilt for not asking for it and being late to pick them up. Guilt for having ambition. Guilt for wanting to stop.

This guilt is not a character flaw or a self-esteem problem. It is the direct consequence of living within structures that were designed for people without caregiving responsibilities — that is, historically, for men with partners at home. When those structures don’t change, the individual absorbs the guilt. And in this case, that person is the mother.

On top of this comes the demand — an impossible standard that organizational and social culture imposes simultaneously: being a present, loving, available mother; and being a committed, productive leader, always on. The discourse of multitasking didn’t necessarily liberate women; it often ended up establishing an impossible standard to sustain.

And then there are the expectations — one’s own and others’. The expectation that “you can have it all,” that “those who want to, can,” that circumstances are an excuse rather than a real variable. This narrative individualizes what is structural, turning a systemic failure into a personal one.

Naming these emotions is not complaining. It’s intellectual honesty. And the leaders who have that honesty with themselves are the ones who end up transforming the organizations they inhabit.

What motherhood gives to leadership

I want to say something I feel deeply: motherhood has made me a better leader.

Here’s something that isn’t said enough: motherhood, and parenthood in general, sharpens skills that the most demanding leadership requires.

Tolerance for ambiguity. The ability to make decisions with incomplete information at high speed. Emotional management under sustained pressure. Empathy without losing direction. The ability to hold difficult conversations. Managing multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs.

These are not soft skills. They are the hardest skills in contemporary leadership. And mothers and fathers who are actively involved practice them every day, before the first email of the morning.

The problem isn’t that mothers are less capable of leading. The problem is that organizations value absolute availability over real effectiveness. And that is a flawed strategic decision that costs them talent, diversity, and innovation.

Men are trapped too

This conversation can’t happen among women alone. Because men are also paying an invisible cost: the cost of a fatherhood that the work environment doesn’t enable.

Globally, in 2024, only 105 of 186 countries offered paid paternity leave, according to the ILO. In Latin America, most countries grant between 2 and 15 days, compared to the months mothers receive. This asymmetry is not neutral: it explicitly tells the labor market that caregiving is a woman’s responsibility, reinforcing the structure that later penalizes women.

Men who want to be present fathers face organizational cultures that read active fatherhood as a lack of commitment. Those who ask for flexibility are viewed with suspicion. Those who take their full leave are the exception, not the norm, because the environment implicitly discourages it.

Real co-parenting — the equitable sharing of care between the responsible adults — isn’t possible when organizations only grant leave to one of the two.

When fathers care, mothers can lead with less guilt. When fathers care, men also become better leaders. When fathers care, children grow up in a fairer model of the world. This isn’t a women’s issue: it’s a matter of family and organizational architecture.

What we can do as conscious leaders

This is where I want to pause. Because for a long time, this conversation ended at the diagnosis — at the problem, the data, what organizations should do. And that’s still necessary. But there’s something more that I can do. That you can do. That we can do from where we stand.

Being a conscious leader mother isn’t just about surviving the system. It’s also about transforming it from within.

1. Name what you feel — without apologizing for it. The guilt you carry in silence has a name, and naming it to trusted people within your organization, or in honest conversations with your team, breaks the illusion that you’re the only one. You’re not the only one. And when you say it out loud, you give others permission to say it too.

2. Design your boundaries before the system designs them for you. Work-life integration doesn’t happen because the environment allows it — it happens because you decide what your non-negotiables are and defend them with the same energy you’d defend a strategic proposal. What time do you stop? When are you present at home without your phone? Which meetings do you set, and which do you decline? These aren’t luxuries: they’re design decisions.

3. Use your position to change the rules of the game. If you have decision-making power, use it. Review your own work-life policies — not the ones that are written down, but the ones that actually happen. How many people on your team have taken their full paternity leave? What happens culturally and tactically to those who ask for flexibility? Are you measuring results or presence? Mother leaders who reach the top have both the opportunity and the responsibility not to close the door behind them.

4. Make other mothers in your organization visible. When you sponsor a mother colleague for a leadership position, when you mention her in a talent review, when you defend the fact that her performance didn’t decline with motherhood — you are changing the narrative. Not with speeches: with concrete decisions.

5. Normalize co-parenting in your environment. If you have a partner, the agreements at home are just as strategic as the agreements in the boardroom. Is care actually shared, or only nominally? Does he have the same emotional permission to be present as you do? It’s not about competing — it’s about co-designing. And if you lead people with families, talk to them about co-parenting. Normalize men caregiving. Normalize women leading.

6. Take care of your own health without guilt. Maternal burnout is real. 65% of working parents report symptoms of exhaustion related to work-life integration, and mother leaders are in the highest-risk group. Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish: it’s sustainable leadership. The best decisions aren’t made from a place of exhaustion.

7. Build community with other mother leaders. Not to complain — to learn, share strategies, and normalize each other’s experiences. The leaders who have the greatest impact on this conversation are the ones who decided not to carry it alone. Find your people.

8. Build your support network. Building a support network is also a strategic decision. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, caregivers, domestic workers, pediatricians, or therapists can become part of the ecosystem that makes it possible to sustain work and family life with greater presence and less overload.

What C-level leaders need to do

If you run an organization, this is not an HR conversation. It’s a strategy conversation.

Some reflections to prompt action:

1. Audit your policies honestly. Are your maternity and paternity leaves comparable in duration? Are they actually taken? What happens culturally to those who use them? Written policies that go unused are just decoration.

2. Measure what matters. Do you know how many women with children are in your leadership pipeline? At what point in their careers do you lose them? Why do they leave? If you don’t have that data, you haven’t made the problem visible.

3. Question the culture of availability. 7 p.m. meetings, the expectation of immediate responses, weekends, “always available” as a synonym for commitment — all of this effectively discriminates against those with caregiving responsibilities. And that increasingly includes men who want to be present fathers.

4. Design real flexibility, not cosmetic flexibility. Flexibility that only works “when nothing urgent comes up” isn’t flexibility. Flexible work that creates guilt when used isn’t a policy: it’s a trap.

5. Make co-parenting an organizational value. Celebrate fathers who take their leave. Make visible the men who prioritize caregiving. Break the male silence around these tensions. Shared responsibility at home begins with cultural signals at work.

6. Have uncomfortable conversations. Have these conversations in your Executive Committee, on your Board, with your peers. Work-life integration as a business strategy begins when those with the power to change it stop seeing it as a mothers’ problem.

In closing

Today, on Mother’s Day, I want to recognize all the women who lead while caring, holding, organizing, accompanying, and sustaining.

Not because they do it all alone. But because, even amid multiple demands, they keep building spaces for growth, love, and the future.

The challenge isn’t to endure more. It’s to design better.

Designing more human cultures. More conscious leadership. More shared relationships.

Because work-life integration isn’t balance. It’s design. And all design begins with a decision.

Which one are you making?