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“Congratulations Evelyn Castle. I sincerely hope organizations can do better… I wanted the same [maternity leave], but was not given the chance. I had no choice, I had to choose my baby, which I don’t in any way regret. But now, I am trying to get back on track and it is all so hard.” — Aishat Adeyemi
When our CEO and Co-founder, Evelyn Castle, shared her reflections on maternity leave on LinkedIn this year, the response was overwhelming, but also revealing. Alongside messages of congratulations came disheartening testimonies from women who had been forced to choose between their health, their child, and their careers.
One comment read:
“I unfortunately had to leave my job this year because I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum and had no official time off that I could take at work. Maternity leave is meant for postpartum recovery and to raise the child. Difficult pregnancies however are not taken into consideration and a lot of women are forced to leave their jobs.” — Commenter 2
These weren’t isolated sentiments, they pointed to a systemic problem.
For decades, workplaces have been structured around the needs and norms of the 20th century male breadwinner with a spouse at home. That legacy is still visible today, even though women now make up nearly half of the global workforce.
Across industries, women routinely encounter obstacles that stem from this outdated template. Many face unequal pay, limited access to senior roles, opaque promotion systems, and lack of representation in decision-making.
The most visible is the “motherhood penalty,” lack of pregnancy accommodations, and policies that don’t support caregiving. These issues are reinforced by environments that signal, often unintentionally, that women do not fully belong: inflexible work hours, absence of lactation rooms, safety concerns during late-hour shifts, and cultures that reward presenteeism over performance.
One commenter captured this perfectly:
“I wish I’d had a model like this when I was preparing for maternity leave… Building systems that honour people as whole humans, with all the roles and seasons they navigate, is such important work.” — Molly Seaton-Fast
Recent global workforce trends show a new and telling pattern: women, including highly educated, high-performing professionals, are opting out of the workplace in notable numbers. In the U.S., between January and July 2025, 212,000 women left the workplace while 44,000 men joined it, according to government labour data. While this data is U.S.-focused, it’s only a matter of time before similar trends emerge globally.
Journalists and researchers have begun calling this trend the "Power Pause". Rather than being pushed out, many women are making active, intentional decisions to pause, scale back, or redesign their careers. As writer Issie Lapowsky noted in her New York Times piece and BBC interview, these women aren't “failing” to juggle work and life, they’re reassessing whether the structure of work is worth staying in.
This “Power Pause” is not about individual choices in isolation; it is a signal of systemic misalignment. It reinforces what women across sectors have long stated: The workplace was not designed with them in mind.
And without intentional redesign, companies stand to lose not only women, but the leadership, expertise, and stability they bring.
The message is clear:
Women don’t need sympathy, they need systems.
From day one, EIV was built with a gender lens at its core. But having women-led companies is only the starting point. We also want to ensure that every woman within these businesses, founders, managers, and frontline workers, experiences an environment designed for her success.
To achieve this, we developed a Gender Scorecard, an easy to use tool, to assess how well our portfolio companies are supporting women.
The EIV scorecard leverages the framework of the Shared Environmental Analytics Facility (SEAF) Gender Equality Scorecard but it’s made more suitable for EIV portfolio companies.
1. Leadership & Governance: This includes women represented on boards and in senior decision-making and leadership commitment to gender equity
2. Workforce Composition: This measures the percentage of women overall, women in technical or male-dominated roles and inclusive hiring trends in the company.
3. Recruitment & Retention Practices: We measure equity in recruitment processes, pathways for women’s career progression and professional development opportunities
4. Compensation & Benefits Equity: This metrics underscores the gender pay equity, health insurance, childcare, and wellness programs and benefits tailored to women’s realities
5. Workplace Policies & Flexibility: This measures paid maternity and paternity leave, flexible work arrangements, return-to-work programs for mothers.
6. Culture & Safety: Including Anti-harassment mechanisms, employee perceptions of safety and inclusion, and gender-sensitivity training
Our goal is simple yet ambitious:
Ensure that at least 75% of our portfolio companies implement strong female-friendly employment packages, from flexible work to robust parental leave.
We do not view this as charity. We view this as a sound business strategy that strengthens retention, morale, and performance across entire teams.
We invite other organisations, big or small, corporate or startup, to take a leaf from this playbook. Gender-inclusive workplaces do not require massive budgets; they require intention.
Here are four steps any company can begin with:
Assess where women feel supported and where they don’t. Listen to their lived experiences.
Pregnancy, postpartum recovery, childcare, and health complications should not derail a career.
A culture is only as strong as its managers. Invest in empathy, flexibility, and bias-awareness.
Use tools, like our Gender Scorecard, to measure progress and hold your company accountable.
Here’s our EIV Gender Scorecard, a practical guide to help you assess how inclusive your workplace truly is. Because when workplaces work for women, they work better for everyone.
At EHA Impact Ventures, we envision a future where no woman has to choose between her family and her ambition. A future where maternity is seen not as a setback but as a season. Where women return to work without fear, without penalty, and without the silent burden of navigating systems that weren’t built for them.
We see companies where policies reflect empathy, where leadership reflects diversity, and where talent is nurtured at every stage of life.
And we see a world, one we are building alongside our founders, where stories like Aishat’s and Molly’s are no longer the norm, but a distant memory.
Women don’t need to “fit” into workplaces. Workplaces must evolve to fit women.
And at EIV, we are committed to leading that evolution.