Raising & Rising is a career day retreat (with two follow-on remote sessions) for mothers in senior roles who are on succession plans and/or who employers are keen to retain and step into a bigger role in the near future. Hosted by coaching psychologist and author Jessica Chivers and parenting author and coach, Anita Cleare.
The first Raising & Rising is taking place in central London on Monday 9th February 2026. Places are £1950+ VAT and our expectation is that employers will sponsor spaces and NOT that women will self-fund.
It is a unique development opportunity for high-achieving talented women to come together for a day of intensive work to explore the blockers they face to career progression and gain tools and strategies for stepping into senior roles with clarity, energy and conviction.
I am the woman who cuts ‘empty’ tubes of toothpaste in half to get the final dregs. I hate waste. Since my book Mothers Work! was published 14 years ago I have been a mission to prevent mothers being wasted at work. I had wanted to write a different book, aimed at employers – “Keeping Mum: How organisations who keep and fuel mothers do it and why you should care” – but when I started thinking about writing in 2009 the world wasn’t ready for it (or so I thought).
I knew back then I wanted to do more to keep women in their careers and get them into the roles they are capable of, but I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to develop the business beyond the stall I had set out coaching people back from leave – and their line managers.
Last month, the University of Bath here in the UK published the results of a study of over 2000 heterosexual partnered parents in the States which found on average, mothers have 67% more tasks on their mental to-do list than father – an average of 13.72 tasks, versus an average of 8.2 among dads. The researchers found that mothers earning more than $100,000 reported 30% less childcare and 17% less housework than those with lower incomes but that there was no less mental household labour because of their status. In short, mothers’ physical household work is tied to their time availability and income but it has no effect on their level of mental load. So mothers who are in, or on a succession plan to go into a really senior role, are carrying so much more than an equivalent father at the same level.
It’s no wonder then that a Gallup study from 2024 showed working mothers are twice as likely as fathers to consider reducing their hours or leaving their jobs due to parental responsibilities. This chimes with recent data from the Leadership Impact Lab at Hult International Business School which highlighted a gender gap in future career clarity. Working mums find it harder to imagine clearly their future career paths. They are also more likely than working dads to feel that their work reputation has suffered as a result of becoming a parent.
Episode 116 of COMEBACK COACH explains why it’s taken me 14 years to co-create Raising & Rising and why it matters. The webinar Anita & I ran for Heads of Talent, Heads of L&D and other HR Bright Minds in November 2025 sets out what’s stopping women (mothers) stepping up and you can watch the replay below.
In this 40 minute webinar we set out what we are seeing in our coaching practices that is stopping women from stepping into more senior roles.
We also shared what research data is revealing about the differences in demands on and experience of working mothers versus working fathers and childfree men, including the study of 6000 married heterosexual households that found mothers who earn more than their husbands take on an even greater share of housework than mothers who don’t out earn their husbands. The researchers put this down to couples trying to compensate for deviating from the entrenched gender norm of ‘male breadwinner’.
