Case Study: More Moms

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.”

The More Moms research revealed that a large number of women left after a year - something Dreier and Parker call ‘the one-year dropoff’. They created an experience map that looked at some of the issues women faced - which clustered around the return to work period - as well as a suite of interventions. These cover simple things such as letting returning mums start on a Thursday, to reduce the stress of their first week, as well as more ambitious solutions including on-site daycare and flexi-time. Even minor things can make a difference, says Dreier, such as leaving out guides to breast-feeding, to forestall awkward questions from coworkers.

“There is no silver bullet,” she says. “You have to do a lot of things, and take a 360° approach to tackle this problem. That’s how we designed our menu to tackle those challenges.”

And although More Moms is aimed at women, its founders believe it could have a profound impact on the way we all work.

“We talk about diversity, but that’s a narrow word that we think of in terms of race and sexual orientation - which are very important - but we need to think of it in a broader sense,” explains Dreier. “That means people at different life stages, and other ‘edge users’, whatever those may be. Moms are an edge user, because only about 5% of women at Droga5 are moms compared to 80% of the general population.

“The premise is that if you design for an edge user, you end up making the experience better for everyone else,” she adds. “We don’t want these interventions to be just for moms, because then you stigmatise the group. They have to be for everybody.”

After their initial phase, Dreier and Parker are now expanding the More Moms programme. A $3,800 Future Impact development grant, awarded by D&AD, is funding the research needed for in-depth interviews with mothers from other agencies, agency bosses, as well as the work needed to revise the findings and experience map. Longterm, the pair want to explore how they can bring the initiative into creative industry workplaces around the world.

Are you working on a project that's challenging the status quo? Whether it's a design, business or service initiative - if you're using creativity for good, we want to hear from you. The deadline for Future Impact entries is 15 July. Click here to find out more.