Neha Ruch sees the burnt-out working mom. And she has an idea for them

On New Year’s Day in 2016, at the height of the Lean In and Girl Boss movement, Neha Ruch had her first child. A Stanford Business School graduate, Ruch was living the proverbial dream. She had a job she wanted at a tech start-up, was growing her family, and had everything she had worked for.

But while at home with her baby, Ruch had a career rethink. She wanted to break out of the hustle culture and reestablish her relationship with work. She knew she needed a reset. So, she did what everyone told her not to do: she downshifted her job to two days a week, setting aside more time for her growing family.

No one got it, especially her friends and peers. “I had become disenchanted with the corporate world. I really made this choice because I wanted that time for me and it felt right for my family. I had people question if I was going to be bored all day, was told I was wasting my education, that I was giving up. But I was clear that I was making these empowered shifts because it made sense,” she says of her conscious career pause.

Few understand why ‘what do you do?’ is not the innocuous party-starter question that it is made out to be. For many women, it’s a loaded one, especially when you look at the underlying cultural subtext—because for many, what you do is tied up in who you are. Despite this being 2025, and all the conversations around “sharing the load”, the fact remains that a big share of the responsibility of raising children, across socio-economic categories, countries, and cultures, is borne by women. Ruch talks about the default parent—the one who takes care of most child-related chores, schedules, and appointments—a role that is often filled by mums, leaving them overwhelmed and burnt out.

That’s what motivated Ruch to lead the way and embrace her new job profile: “untitled”. At least in the professional sphere. “Ambition has been tied for so long with what we do for a living. When I no longer had a prestigious title, I had to recognise that I still felt like an ambitious woman while caregiving,” she tells me on Zoom. She bet on the idea and the belief that career pauses provided opportunities to develop a more robust, multi-faceted identity and began the process of disengaging professional achievements from self-worth.

Soon she met her community: there were so many women out there, just like her, who had paused or taken a break from their professional lives to recalibrate and create new definitions of what they wanted their days to look like. In, 2017, finding no real resources or guides and encountering resistance around her mindset shift, she started Mother Untitled (recently rebranded as The Power Pause), the world’s first collective for working women that looks at career pauses or downshifts.

The platform and community aimed to bring strong, ambitious women together, to start conversations, to change the perceptions and dichotomies that are so entrenched in society when it comes to working mothers vs stay-at-home mothers, and to provide guides and resources on flexible jobs to help women through the different phases. Drew Barrymore gets it. As does Reshma Saujani, the founder of Moms First and Girls Who Code. And most new moms, too.

“The irony was that I was going to start this new platform empowering women on similar shifts while being on one myself,” she says of the work that took over her career-gap time. “I was going to go slow, I was going to post during naps and nighttime. And it took nine years; I’ve been talking about it long enough. It was a movement. And it’s one that’s grown,” she adds.

It didn’t always seem that way. For the first few years, her work was deeply misunderstood. She was dismissed, the platform was seen as a hobby or just another mommy blog. “I remember someone at my Stanford Business School reunion saying that,” she recalls. But she persisted, and the community now has 2,00,000-plus members, who come to the platform for its curated library of articles, including advice from new moms and directional how-tos tailored for the life stage you are in (ranging from preparing for a career pause to returning to the work force), listings of flexible job opportunities across industries, a rolodex of experts (from financial advisors to maternal wellness practitioners), easily accessible tool kits, and bespoke events with a focus on bringing companies and women together.

Earlier this year, Ruch published her first book, The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids and Come Back Stronger, to put her ideas in print. In the book, she works to reframe the black-and-white ideas of what constitutes motherhood, through testimonials and stories, advice and guidance. 

She proffers advice on how to explain the motherhood gap years in your résumé (“add all the sub bullets and details of any projects you did or experience you gained during your pause”) and how to shed the guilt while getting help. In short, her idea was not to encourage women to take a break; it was to help out overwhelmed moms find a balance and a job that matched their pace.

Not everyone can agree on what success looks like today. Similarly, everyone’s professional journey is also personal. “From a personal perspective, I want to exist in this grey area—-it’s not to say it’s right or the only choice. It’s ever evolving, and it’s unique; it may not look like your [idea of] ambition. So long, we’ve been tied to one version. I choose to run my platform in a smaller, leaner way so I can be there for [school] pick-up. I need to know that I have had the time with my family and I don’t want to look back and have regret. Only I can create those metrics. I will re-examine in five years, but it works right now,” says Ruch.

The flexibility that she is fighting for may cause some friction in the workplace. But Ruch believes that the time is ripe for change. And the key is for organisations and corporations to realise that there is a career movement happening right now that leans towards fluidity. She cites studies in America where one in three women who work out of the house are going to pause their careers, and one in two are going to drop down to 20 hours a week, and, crucially, 90 per cent of the women on pause will wish to go back to work when they’re ready. “One of the challenges as a culture is that we love black and white. We swing to either side, but everyone exists in-between. How can we think about fractional roles, freelance roles, and put them into the eco-system? How can we recognise sabbaticals not as a time off from career but a time to build non-traditional experiences. It has to be a collaboration now between hiring managers and the workforce,” she adds 

Over an hour and a half later, the entrepreneur has shared little tidbits of her work life with me. Now she wants to return to her other life. Ruch is in Long Island for the summer, having just returned from Lake Como, a family trip with her parents and children, and is now enjoying a slower pace for the next few weeks—coffee with friends, tennis lessons. And while summer may have more of these moments, once the kids are back in school she plans to shift gears once again to a 25- to 30-hour work week so she can be there for the children when they come home from school, help them with homework, and deal with the bigger emotions while continuing to do her work. Tuning into the family while also working with your own ambitions, she believes, is universal.

And she’s not wrong. In my career as a writer, I’ve interviewed so many incredible people, but in Ruch’s words I find a deep resonance. This conversation about shifts in values, re-aligning our ambition, and the ebb and flow of what drives us, are ones that my friends and I, all mothers who are navigating the changing dynamics of work and family life, have had for several years. We just didn’t have the right word for it.  Until now.