Women’s Voice: Motherhood can be the force to push you out of your comfort zone

In a day where men and women have a perceived level of equality, we fail to recognise the disparity of equal opportunities amongst women.

An E&Y report at the end of 2019 stated that the retention of women after maternity leave is critically important because that is when most organisations see women fall out of the workplace.

Women biologically have to make choices that their male counterparts don’t, which is to choose between motherhood and sometimes their careers. Some of us recognise this and fail to accept the glass ceilings caging us.

Our story was born through a friendship that took us through our careers at different junctures of our life, and it wasn’t till having our respective second children that we realised that something needed to change.

Cultivating successful careers within the energy sector, as our lives progressed, so did at times our choices.

Motherhood is not just a natural progression of life, it is an emotion from the moment a woman sees two lines on a testing pen. She has to adapt her life, ambitions and goals around a new biological priority where there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach.

With this in mind, we embarked on a journey of entrepreneurship where we could thrive on the tacit knowledge harnessed and acquired through our professional background and use it to create a strong business where we can create our own blueprint of what success can look like.

Coming from a structured environment it is challenging from being part of an established brand to creating one from scratch and that too, to ensure it becomes profitable and successful.

To keep evolving and adapting the business with variables such as the pandemic challenged us further, and made us diversify our offering to ensure we were able to sustain the brand through this unprecedented time.

We are still on that journey, which is riddled with highs and lows, but the important aspect is that we are still on it. Though we are indebted to the paths we have had to date, which have enabled us to run our SME on the skeleton of a rigid corporate structure, we forged our own path of ambition as two independent women who have motherhood to thank in pushing them out of their comfort zone and being less afraid to just “go do it.”

Zahra Jaffery and Geraldine Beacon are co-founders at Ineza