Tobi Asare is the founder of My Bump Pay, an organisation supporting working women who have children. Tobi is a law graduate and mother who set up My Bump Pay back in 2018. She has seen the flexible working landscape shift considerably since then.

“Before the pandemic, women working flexibly were often seen as the exception; the one person in the office who worked from home on a Friday or started and left earlier to collect their kids from school,” Tobi says.

“The system to apply for flexible working was rigid and unforgiving, with the onus on the employee to put together a case of points addressing how you’d pick up any slack and proving that it wouldn’t impact your work output. You also had to have been employed in the same role continuously for 26 weeks before you could apply and, if rejected, you had to wait another year before you could apply again.”

Hollie White, 27, is a personal assistant in an estate agency in Essex, and runs the Instagram page Starting Solids With Sunnie. Sunnie, her daughter, was born in 2021; before that Hollie worked 9-5, Monday to Friday in the office. After 10 months of maternity leave, she formally requested to return part-time.

“I also asked if my new hours could be flexible so I could work and look after Sunnie. Thankfully my company was really supportive about me starting a family, so they were happy for me to do this,” Hollie says.

“I now work 15 hours a week over three days, which I mainly do from home. Without flexible working, I wouldn’t have been able to afford to return to my career due to childcare costs. This gave me the opportunity to have both, which is wonderful,” she adds.

“I definitely think it’s something more companies should offer.”

Hollie and Sunnie are proof of how beneficial setups like these can be, and thankfully, later this year, we’re hoping to see the introduction of the Flexible Working Bill. If it passes, it would require employers to consider two requests per year, to consult with an employee before rejecting any request they might make, and scrap the 26-week wait period to allow applications from day one on the job.

Flexible working: what does it look like for women returning to work after maternity leave in 2023?