April 28, 2026
After graduating from the GSB, I was running brand for a startup founded by another alum. I’d been feeling a call to take time to be more thoughtful about what came next, but I didn’t have a reason until I had my son.
Editor’s Note
In this ongoing series from Stanford Business magazine, we ask Stanford GSB alumni to reflect on a major life change and what they learned from it.
Neha Ruch, MBA ’14, is the founder of The Power Pause and the author of The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — and Come Back Stronger Than Ever.
The early days of parenthood were sleep-deprived and messy, but there was something quite freeing about having a child who didn’t want you to be anything besides who you were. Yet as soon as I said I was taking my foot off the gas, I started hearing everything from “Are you giving up?” to “Why did you bother with business school?”
I met so many women who were similar to me, either negotiating part-time work or consid- ering freelancing or taking a full pause. None of them matched the dated stereotype of a stay-at-home mom.
When I later commissioned a survey called American Mothers on Pause, one of the first questions I wanted to ask was, “Who comes to mind when you think of a stay-at-home mom?” The most common response was June Cleaver — a fictional character from the 1950s show Leave It to Beaver. When we asked which working mothers came to mind, Michelle Obama, Sheryl Sandberg, and Beyoncé were the top three responses. That power chasm was so extreme — the reality of modern womanhood is somewhere in between.
I felt compelled to start using nap times and nighttime to start planting seeds for the work that’s grown into a book and a platform for ambitious women who are leaning into family life for a chapter.
I spent a long time trying to find a new language around stay-at-home motherhood because the sociolinguistics of it are so flawed. It implies stagnancy, a step back. I wanted people to see it as a shift, and I wanted to infuse it with a sense of dignity and possibility.
It’s exciting that women are talking about their career breaks more. (And men too.) I interviewed Betina Cisneros, MBA ’92, who had been at Yahoo! and at Time Inc. She’d taken a four-year break for her kids, and she reclaimed it on her LinkedIn. The CMO of the NBA recently talked about stepping into her “power pause.”
There is no “having it all.” By sharing what’s working and what’s not, we put more options on the table. That’s really the point of this work. It was never to say career pauses are the right choice. It’s to say that it is another choice in the long game, and it can be a strategic one. It can unlock a really powerful next chapter. — Told to Dave Gilson
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