In a world where AI keeps advancing, women who step away from work for family, caregiving, health, entrepreneurship, or simply life, risk returning to an environment that has moved on without them. This article explores how gender, circumstance and the accelerating pace of technology shape who gets to keep up, and asks what a fairer future of work might look like if women returning from career breaks could re-enter on equal footing.
Quick Takeaways
- AI is accelerating workplace change, which means even short career breaks can create a gap between workers and the environments they return to.
- The AI skills gap is not always purely about technical ability; it can also reflect unequal exposure to new tools, workflows, and workplace learning.
- Equal access to AI does not automatically create equal opportunity. Two individuals can use the same technology while beginning with very different levels of context, confidence, and support.
- Women returning to work should not be expected to erase years of professional experience simply because the tools around their work have changed.
- AI readiness should mean more than rapid adoption. Employees also need enough agency to understand, question, and make informed choices about the technologies reshaping their jobs.
- If AI is going to transform work, workforce policies should also include clauses to step away, return, relearn and still have a meaningful path forward.
Table of contents
A few weeks ago, I sat in a room with women leaders, including acting Minister for Manpower Ms. Jasmin Lau – setting the scene about what happens when life stops being linear, especially for women.
They call it the rat race, right? Keep moving, keep climbing, and try not to lose your coordinate. Because if you are not ahead, you are clearly behind.
In a world where constant advancement is celebrated, standing still (for women) to fulfill personal or societal roles, can feel dangerously close to falling behind.
My previous years in social psychology research made me wary of treating confidence as something people simply have or lack. Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy offers a useful lens: our sense of capability is shaped by experience, by observing others, and by the environments in which we learn. That feels especially relevant to the rat race idea. When someone steps away, what changes is not simply the number of weeks or months on a CV, but their distance from the everyday experiences that quietly build confidence.
“A career does not need to be uninterrupted, to be meaningful”
At this year’s Singapore Council of Women’s Organizations (SCWO) Summit for Action on Gender Equality (SAGE), the conversations moved between career ambition, life transitions, and the pauses that shape women’s working lives. This was also the premise of SAGE 2026, which asked what work should look like in a longer working life, when education, employment, care, and reinvention no longer happen in a neat and linear sequence.
Source: her world
September 2026: Strategic Partnerships Team of VI was invited to attend the SAGE conference to learn about industry updates and how women can contribute meaningfully to these evolving trends
These pauses are not a single story. A recent PwC study of women returners across 9 countries found that women stepped away from work for various reasons including pursuing education, maternity leave, health reasons, travel, and entrepreneurship. It is a useful reminder that a career break can mean so many different things.
During her opening address, Acting Minister for Manpower Jasmin Lau offered a line that stayed with me and I believe to many women in the same room was that: “A career does not need to be uninterrupted, to be meaningful.”
I liked the sentence immediately because it felt both generous and true, but the longer I sat with it, the more I found myself thinking about what happens during the interruption itself. A woman may leave work for 2 or 3 years and return with the same intelligence, judgement, and experience she carried with her when she left, only to discover that the workplace’s expectations around those abilities have changed. Systems have been replaced, new tools have become ordinary, familiar processes have been redesigned, and colleagues who remained have spent those years absorbing hundreds of small changes through meetings, mistakes, and everyday conversations. The woman returning has not forgotten how to work; what she has lost is the tacit knowledge, proximity to a workplace that continued evolving while her attention was needed somewhere else.
The distance created by time away
The recent SCWO and NTUC Women and Family study gives this question more weight:
- 8 in 10 women polled who had taken, or were taking, a career break intended to return to work, yet nearly seven in ten believed that doing so made finding suitable employment more difficult.
- Flexible work arrangements were the most desired form of support, cited by 61 per cent of respondents.
- Importantly, many women were already refreshing their skills, updating their CVs, and actively looking for work, while those returning after longer breaks could find themselves navigating weaker professional networks alongside changes in technology and workplace practices.
This is not uniquely a Singapore concern. The Asian Development Bank has framed women’s participation across the whole of Asia as both an equity and economic-growth issue.
We tend to describe the distance between a returning worker and a changed workplace as a skills gap. The phrase sounds practical, but it also locates the problem almost entirely inside the individual: she needs to catch up, become more confident, and become more AI fluent.
Confidence, however, is rarely built in isolation. It comes from sitting through enough meetings that the language begins to feel familiar, from being trusted with something before you feel completely ready, from watching other people make mistakes and eventually making a few of your own. Over time, these small moments and experiences accumulate into something that looks, from the outside, like confidence.
Someone who spends 3 years inside a workplace therefore gains more than 3 additional years on a CV – she gains context. Someone who spends those same years away does not lose her ability, but she does lose access to the slow, almost invisible accumulation of knowledge that comes from simply being present while work changes. This is why I have started to wonder whether some of what we call a confidence gap may also be an exposure gap. The distinction matters because the first explanation places almost all responsibility on the returning worker, while the second asks us to consider the conditions in which professional confidence is actually built.
What is workforce fairness in the age of AI?
AI is also entering a labour market that was never completely even to begin with. The International Labour Organization has found that women are more concentrated in occupations exposed to GenAI, while stressing that exposure is not the same as job loss. The point is not that AI will simply replace women, but that a fast-moving technology is arriving on top of older inequalities.
Those numbers are striking, but sitting at SAGE made me read them somewhat differently.
Technology can move quickly because technology does not have a body that needs to heal, qualifications to pursue, a family to care for, or periods of life in which something other than work has to take precedence. People do. AI did not create the inequalities surrounding career breaks, care responsibilities, or difficult re-entry, and it would be too simplistic to claim that it did. What it changes is the distance a workplace can travel while someone is away. SAGE conference described women as facing a possible “double exposure” to disruption from the digital economy and AI, particularly where existing patterns of employment and career interruption already create vulnerabilities.
For that reason, I am not convinced that workforce readiness should simply mean encouraging everyone to adopt new technology as quickly as possible. Stanford HAI’s research on what workers actually want from AI points in a similar direction: people were most interested in AI taking on repetitive work while they retained agency and oversight. Understanding technology and being enthusiastic about it are not the same thing, and workers should be able to ask what new systems mean for their jobs, their privacy, their autonomy, and the value of expertise they have spent years building. Two employees can be given access to exactly the same system on the same morning while arriving with very different histories: one may have spent the previous year hearing colleagues discuss it, experimenting with it and watching the work around it evolve, while another may be encountering it for the first time after returning from a career break. Their access may be equal, but their starting points are not, and acknowledging that difference is not the same as lowering expectations.
That distinction is also where workforce fairness comes in and it is not a linear solution. I think of it simply as this: people should not have their prospects quietly decided by gender or by the circumstances that pulled them away from work. Amartya Sen’s “three children and a flute” thought experiment, discussed by the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, captures why this issue matters.
Fairness is not always about giving everyone exactly the same thing, like the flute experiment below. In the context of AI, equal tool access may be the starting point; workforce fairness asks whether people have a meaningful chance to benefit from it.
Returning should still mean moving forward
SCWO’s research similarly argues that the question is not only whether women can return, but whether suitable opportunities exist, whether workplaces support them once they are back, and whether they are able to stay and progress. Some women in the study reported accepting lower pay or less senior positions in exchange for arrangements that better suited their circumstances, while flexible work alone was not always enough if workloads remained unreasonable or opportunities for progression narrowed. Acting Minister Jasmine Lau made a related point in her opening address when she argued that flexibility should not carry an “unspoken career penalty”.
I think the same principle should apply to career breaks themselves. Time away may mean that parts of someone’s technical knowledge need refreshing and some tacit workplace knowledge needs rebuilding, particularly when industries are changing quickly, but that is very different from assuming that the value of everything she knew before has disappeared. A woman returning to work should first feel safe and supported, and be able to learn what is new without being asked, implicitly or otherwise, to prove from the beginning that everything she achieved before her career break still counts.
Perhaps that is why the idea of “pathways” at SAGE stayed with me. A pathway suggests movement without demanding a perfectly straight line, leaving room for pauses, changes in direction, and different speeds without assuming that the journey has ended. If we are serious about building workplaces for the future, then our idea of readiness must have room for the reality that human lives will remain less predictable than technological progress.
Humanising the future of work
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, but we can change the conditions under which we are expected to play. For us humans and especially women, stepping away from work could mean caring for a child or parent; for others, it means battling illness, financial insecurity, or circumstances that leave little room for choice. And for many, these realities intersect.
As AI reshapes the world of work, workplace policies should adapt as not to build a future that rewards the employees who can adapt fastest while leaving behind those who took a break. The promise of progress cannot belong only to those already best positioned to benefit from it. A future of work worth building is one in which no woman’s circumstances become the ceiling on her potential, and no career break, however necessary, determines the limits of her future.
