Bain & Company Hey, MBB folks. I am curious about maternity policy in your companies. I am not asking about the length of the maternity/paternity leave. I am interested in the overall team attitude to colleagues expecting or recently having kids. Does this fact impact staffing, pyramid affiliation, bonus, and promotion decisions (for example, delaying it to after coming back from leave if the delivery date is close to the expected promotion date, etc)?
Boston Consulting Group McKinsey & Company Bain & Company
Depends what you’re after here. Policy-wise, there is a lot at McK in place to try to help new parents, including assistance “rolling on” from maternity leave (if you are the birthing parent) that includes ratings protection (your next rated performance review cannot be lower than the previous one before your leave started) and help with staffing to reduce your cost to a team so that they can bring in more help.
In theory, it sounds great. What I’ve seen, as someone who has taken maternity leave in the last 2yrs, is that it’s not enough. These things help when you come back, but for “default parents” (often moms), integrative consulting is highly unsustainable. Many birthing parents who also become that default parent find themselves switching to internal roles or leaving. Even if you get 3 great projects with understanding people, there is no guarantee or predictability around that 4th project that’s going to screw you. Even on a predictable project, client demands and travel are so hard.
For what it’s worth, I’d give it all up for my little one and she is worth it in every way… but these firms have a LOT of work to do to make the partner path tenable and sustainable for people without stay at home partners or significant family support and/or wealth.
Most people are decent about it, but I also had a senior colleague tell me “your child is not more important than my meditation” re: childcare-related time boundaries. (FWIW, our personal time was never juxtaposed where she couldn’t have hers if I had mine. It was bizarre and hostile, and it’s not uncommon because so many people here do not have children.)
I’m a C1 mom in NA and feel super supported. There are lots of parents in our leadership team and they make their parenthood visible, which creates a psychologically safe environment for me.
I can’t speak to the behind the scenes decisions about promotion, but based on my experiences below I really can’t see parenthood impacting your trajectory meaningfully unless performance has slipped.
In terms of staffing optimally for both personal and professional development needs, staffing has been very open to my needs. Most of them are parents themselves on an internal rotation. For example, I don’t travel but am open to cases that require more of a grind. It is easy to avoid travel cases in big offices at Bain. Immediately after mat leave I was staffed on an internal case with more sustainable hours, which was a good way to ease back in. Now am on a more demanding client case, but team provides me flex when needed (WFH, protected time). I just need to make it up some other time during the day. I’ve never missed a “deadline” and often go above and beyond.
In terms of other people’s attitudes, if anything I’ve gotten way more respect from teammates, peers, and partners for being able to pull it off as a junior member of the team.
In terms of the balance at home, for us, neither spouse is the default parent. I set expectations with my spouse around this early in our parenthood journey. We aim for the load to be 50/50, but sometimes I rely on him more for household chores. I feel adequately present for my child. Because of this model, one fortunate result is that our child prefers us equally (I realize sometimes when a child clings to one parent, it’s harder not to be the default).
Hope this is helpful. 10/10 recommend being a parent at Bain
Yeah that’s sad as fuck. I don’t want to not see my kids during the week, sounds like a dystopian way to live.
Happy to be getting out of this sweatshop of a career.
I’m working off one example but we had a new mother join one of the most intense projects I was on, shortly after coming back from maternity leave.
Her baby was (obviously, and rightly so) her main priority and it hindered her performance, and she struggled to keep up with the pace. Ended up rolling off after 7 weeks
I think there’s an implicit performance cost once you become a new parent especially for the first time and while a majority of teams are willing and happy to accommodate, the harder projects will definitely expect more out of you