Trapped between the Past and the Future: Temporal Orientations and the ‘Becoming’ of Post-Maternity Extended Career-Breaks among Women Professionals in the UK

This article uses agentic temporality as a focal construct and provides insights into women professionals’ transition to motherhood and extended career-breaks. It explores the connection between their temporal orientations and extended career-break decisions. The article posits that an extended career-break develops out of women professionals’ experiences in the past and an anticipation of the future in the context of motherhood and professional demands. The article builds on Emirbayer and Mische’s temporal view of agency to understand the phenomenon of extended career-breaks following maternity leave among a segment of women professionals in the UK. Qualitative data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with 42 professional women in the UK and analysed thematically using NVivo. We find that three temporal dimensions: distant past, recent past and distant future interact in a complex non-linear dynamic, revealing the gendered and structurally constrained exercise of temporal agency of women professionals in their extended career-break decisions.