Case Study: More Moms

D&AD Future Impact recognises and supports initiatives and products with the potential to drive positive change in the world. In 2019, we chose 11 winning ideas to receive a 12-month programme of support. This included a two-day accelerator with talks and mentoring sessions, hosted at the McCann offices in New York, with the aim of helping these ideas improve, evolve and continue to make an impact in the world.

Here we take a closer look at one of these ideas: More Moms - an initiative aiming to create a more welcoming workplace for pregnant women and new mothers, and combat the creative industry talent drain that happens post-motherhood.

For More Moms founders Louise Dreier and Hayley Parker, motherhood is a design problem. But it’s not so much the thousand and one questions that pop up during parenthood they’re looking to address - it’s one specific thing: the creative industry’s attitude toward mums. 

The pair set up the More Moms project while working together at Droga5, and noticing more and more mothers joining the agency in senior roles. They struck up a conversation about how compatible life and work was for mums, and decided to find out by applying the same methodology and research they’d use for any client Droga5 worked with. Over the course of a year, Dreier and Parker interviewed 70 women to track their career development, and try and understand the challenges faced during each stage of pregnancy, as well as the return to work. 

“What really became very clear to us is that while the agency had invested most of its efforts in the pregnancy and maternity leave section, the rubber really hit the road and the wheels fell off when they returned to work,” explains Dreier. “It’s not like women had babies and didn’t want to work anymore. They had babies, they came back, and tried to make it work and it didn’t.”