1. There's a large, skilled talent pool sitting outside the workforce
The Australian Bureau of Statistics surveys parents who aren't working about what would bring them back.
In the most recent release, 691,300 parents with children under 15 were not working — 560,500 of them mothers. The highest-rated factor that would bring mothers back was not pay or childcare cost. It was the ability to work school hours, rated very important by 54%.
For fathers, the top factor was different: finding a job that matched their skills and experience, also at 54%. Two different constraints, one conclusion — this is a design problem, not a motivation problem.
Alongside it: more than 660,000 Australian women hold skills that could transfer into technology roles within about six months, on RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics' estimate — a $6.5 billion opportunity. And Grattan Institute analysis found that improving childcare affordability would lift GDP by around $11 billion a year through higher participation.
If you're competing for talent in a tight market, this is the least-contested pool available.
2. You're probably already losing people over it
The 2024 National Working Families Report (Parents At Work and UNICEF Australia, with Deloitte Access Economics, surveying more than 6,200 Australian working parents and carers) found:
28% had considered leaving their job in the past year because of the difficulty combining work and care
74% of women and 57% of men reported feeling stressed balancing work and family — up sharply from 51% and 34% in 2019
50% believe an employee's commitment is questioned if they use family-friendly arrangements
That last figure is the one to sit with. It suggests the policy existing isn't the issue. Whether people feel safe using it is.
The cost side: Gallup puts the cost of replacing an employee at between half and two times their annual salary, and calls that conservative. AHRI's Australian data puts average turnover at around 16%, with 18% of leavers citing flexible arrangements as a reason for going.
Run those numbers against your own headcount and it's usually the most persuasive slide in the deck.
3. The penalty on parents is bias, not performance
This is the most robust finding in the field, and the most uncomfortable.
In Correll, Benard and Paik's study (American Journal of Sociology, 2007), researchers assessed equally-qualified candidates who differed only in parental status:
Mothers were recommended for hire 47% of the time, versus 84% for women without children
Mothers were offered starting salaries averaging $11,000 lower
Fathers received a bonus
In a real-world audit sending matched CVs to actual employers, non-mothers were recommended 1.8 times as often and received 2.1 times as many callbacks
Because the CVs were identical, none of this can be productivity. A Duke University replication (Demography, 2021) found the same pattern persisting.
In Australia, the Treasury's analysis of tax and survey data found the arrival of children reduces women's earnings by around 55% over five years, with men's unchanged — and that by 2019 this explained roughly four-fifths of the national gender earnings gap.
The commercial reading: if the market systematically undervalues a group whose actual performance is unaffected, that group is underpriced talent. Employers who correct for it get better people for the same money.
4. On productivity — what the evidence does and doesn't say
Here's where most articles overclaim, so it's worth being precise.
What's supported: the largest study of its kind — a survey of nearly 10,000 professionals matched to their actual output records, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis and later in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization — found no productivity penalty from parenthood, and that parents were, if anything, slightly more productive on average.
What isn't supported: that parents are "the most productive" or "hardest-working" employees. No research shows that. The authors themselves flag reverse causality — more productive people may self-select into parenthood — and the study covers highly-skilled knowledge work, not every job.
What's genuinely mixed: part-time productivity. A Belgian study of 800,000+ employees across ~7,500 firms found a higher part-time share associated with slightly higher productivity and lower sick leave. But the IZA World of Labor review calls firm-level evidence "largely inconclusive," and Italian data found some part-time structures reduce productivity. Design matters more than the label.
What runs against the argument: absenteeism. Parents of young children take more carer's leave, not less. Any business case that claims otherwise will be picked apart by the first sceptical HR director who reads it. The honest framing is that flexibility reduces the friction causing unplanned absence — someone who can shift their hours around a sick child doesn't need to take the whole day.
Being straight about that last point is what makes the rest credible.
5. Advertising flexibility specifically is the highest-return change
Australian government-backed research by the Behavioural Insights Team with the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations tested how 460 women returners responded to different flexibility wording in job ads.
Ads with specific detail plus a supportive-culture signal made candidates three times more likely to choose the role over "we offer flexible work." And "flexible work available on request" performed no better than saying nothing at all.
At scale, UK research across 20 million+ applications found flexible ads attracted up to 30% more applicants.
This is the cheapest intervention available: it costs four extra lines in a job ad. Our guide on how to write a job ad that attracts flexible talent covers the specifics.
6. It's a whole-workforce issue, not a women's issue
Framing this as a parenting or gender initiative undersells it and limits buy-in.
2.65 million Australians — around 1 in 9 — are unpaid carers, and over 70% are in the workforce (WGEA, citing ABS). The replacement value of that care is estimated at $77.9 billion a year.
Roughly 1.5 million Australians in their 40s and 50s are managing both children and ageing parents.
27% of fathers and partners report discrimination related to parental leave or flexible work on return, and men are twice as likely to have leave requests rejected (AHRC).
Fewer than 2% of workplaces set targets for men's engagement in flexible work.
7. What certified employers actually do differently
Family Friendly Workplaces certification data — covering 750+ employers and around 1.2 million workers — shows certified organisations against non-certified:
92% vs 75% offer flexible hours or locations
76% vs 50% allow purchasing annual leave in advance
85% assess productivity by outcomes rather than presence
And at individual employer level: Commonwealth Bank's Career Comeback returnship program reports a 92% retention rate. Medibank's structured flexibility trial reported a 6.7% lift in engagement and in willingness to go above and beyond, with productivity steady and sick leave down. (Both company-reported.)
The short version
You're competing for talent in a tight market while half a million skilled people sit outside it for want of hours that fit. A quarter of the working parents you already employ are thinking about leaving over the same issue, and each departure costs you half to two times a salary. The people you're overlooking aren't less productive — the evidence says the opposite — they're just systematically misjudged. And the single highest-return fix is writing your job ads specifically instead of vaguely.