Why return-to-work for women starts before she resigns

“A successful return is not simply that a woman is back on the payroll.” – Koh Yan Ping, CEO of the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations (SCWO)

For many women, the decision to leave the workforce is not made on the day they resign. It happens over months beforehand, in a slow negotiation among schedules, workloads, and caregiving demands that eventually breaks down. By the time the resignation letter arrives, the employer often sees only the final act.

That sequence is one of the central findings of Women’s Workforce Re-entry: Challenges, Barriers and Opportunities, a study by the Singapore Council of Women’s Organisations (SCWO) conducted with NTUC Women and Family, which drew on focus group discussions with women across four return-to-work profiles alongside a review of local and international return-to-work initiatives.

For Koh Yan Ping, CEO of SCWO, it reframes where the work of bringing women back into employment actually begins. “Retention is really the first return-to-work intervention,” she tells HRM Asia. “For some of the women we spoke to, a career break was not an abrupt decision. It came after months of trying to reconcile work with caregiving, while dealing with rigid schedules, heavy workloads, limited leave or inconsistent access to flexibility.”

The difficulty for employers is that the pressure rarely announces itself. “A woman can still be committed to her career and performing in her role while finding the overall arrangement increasingly difficult to sustain,” Koh says. “By the time she resigns, the organisation may see it as an individual decision rather than the end point of a much longer process.”

Some of the women in the study had asked for modest adjustments, including flexible hours, a few days of leave, or a transfer to a location closer to home, and were turned down. Others never raised the question at all, having already observed that taking urgent leave for caregiving was being read as a signal about commitment.

Koh is careful not to frame every career break as a workplace failure. “The research does not suggest every career break can or should be prevented,” she says. “But where a woman wants to remain in employment, we should be asking whether there are avoidable workplace barriers contributing to her decision to leave.”

Flexibility on paper, flexibility in practice

Flexibility is where those conversations most often break down, though the study suggests the problem is no longer the absence of a policy. Flexible work arrangements (FWAs) were named by 61% of women polled as their most desired form of return-to-work support, yet women described experiencing that flexibility unevenly depending on the role, the workplace or the manager.

“The distinction is really between having flexibility available and being able to use it in practice,” Koh says. “It is whether employees feel able to access it, whether managers implement it consistently, and whether the arrangement actually accommodates the realities that made flexibility necessary in the first place.”

The arrangements women raised most frequently were working from home, flexible start and end times, and part-time work. Some found the last of these to be flexible in name only. “Some found that part-time meant a smaller salary for the same workload,” Koh notes. “That is flexibility on paper, not in practice.”

Managers sit at the centre of that gap, though Koh does not think the fix belongs to them alone. “Managers are important because they translate policy into employees’ everyday experience. But the responsibility cannot sit with individual managers alone,” she says. “Organisations need to create greater consistency in how flexibility is understood and implemented, so that an employee’s ability to make work fit does not depend primarily on who she happens to report to. Nor should the responsibility rest on women to negotiate a workable arrangement on their own.”

The offer is not the finish line

The research also challenges the assumption that a signed offer ends the problem. Women in the study described accepting lower pay, more junior roles, or contract positions to get back in, often after long searches that quietly reset their expectations.

“Getting back into employment is not necessarily the same as getting back into suitable employment,” Koh says. The questions that follow an accepted offer, in her view, are whether the role makes appropriate use of the woman’s experience, whether there is a route to rebuild skills, confidence and professional networks, and whether there is still room to progress.

What frequently goes wrong, she says, is that “everyone assumes the hardest part is over. But caregiving does not disappear when a woman returns to work; it usually continues alongside her job.” Some women received little onboarding because experienced hires should already know how things work, even when tools and processes had changed during their absence. Flexibility often remained at the manager’s discretion, and some hesitated to use it for fear of how it would be read.

“Flexibility without a manageable workload or a path to progression can still result in someone leaving again,” Koh says. “A successful return is not simply that a woman is back on the payroll.”

Designing for that outcome is complicated because returners are not a single group. The study deliberately included women returning after maternity leave, mid-career women returning after caregiving-related breaks, mature women aged 50 to 65 with extended breaks, and women who had tried to return without success. It covered both PMET and non-PMET experiences, referring to Singapore’s classification of professional, managerial, executive and technical roles and those outside it.

Their requirements diverged accordingly. Women returning after shorter breaks generally needed less retraining, while those returning after longer absences more often faced weakened professional networks and unfamiliar workplace technology. PMET returners looked for support tied to their sector, role and seniority; non-PMET returners placed more weight on practical training, predictable schedules, accessible locations and viable pay.

The nature of the caregiving matters as well. A return after maternity leave tends to be anchored to a milestone such as securing infant care. Eldercare offers no such certainty, and some women reported that employers were less understanding of breaks taken for it.

Koh’s conclusion is not that each profile needs a programme of its own. “It is not to design a sufficiently flexible pathway that can respond to different starting points,” she says, meaning examining what an individual needs to return successfully rather than inferring it from the length of her break. “Standardise the opportunity to return, rather than assuming the journey back must be standardised.”

Support that stops short of placement

That framing also shapes how SCWO reads the wider landscape. Its review identified 33 non-government return-to-work initiatives delivered by 26 organisations, operating alongside existing public support. Of the 20 women-specific initiatives examined, 75% offered coaching or mentorship, and 55% offered technical, digital, or vocational training. Only two provided job matching or placement support, and two offered structured paid placements.

“International models more often combined paid placements with mentoring and peer networks, giving returners a clearer route into a permanent role, whereas women-specific support in Singapore was concentrated more heavily around preparation,” Koh says. “Singapore does not have an absence of support. The question is how the different paths of that ecosystem connect across a woman’s journey.”

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Each stakeholder carries a different piece of that. Community organisations contribute ground-level understanding of women’s circumstances, which underpins SCWO CoLab, a platform that brings the council’s member organisations together to translate research into community-led solutions. Government sets the conditions through policy, standards and caregiver support. “Employers make those conditions real,” Koh says. “They ultimately create the opportunities women are trying to access.”

That includes the hiring conversation itself. Many women told researchers their career breaks were scrutinised at interview, with questions about marriage plans, who would look after a sick child, or whether a parent’s care needs had been “resolved”. Caregiving responsibilities, marital status and pregnancy are among the protected characteristics under Singapore’s Workplace Fairness Act, the country’s forthcoming anti-discrimination legislation, which is expected to take effect by the end of 2027.

For HR, Koh suggests the problem framing needs to widen. “The question should not only be, ‘How do we hire more returners?’” she says. “It should also be: ‘How do we retrain women before they leave, create suitable pathways back when they do, and ensure that when they return, they are able to stay and progress?’”