Rethinking Motherhood as Feminist Project Management.

Hi folks,

We’re restarting FPM after a break with a two-part blog series that brings Feminist Project Management (FPM) into conversation with care, life changes, and diapers.

This post is the second in a two-part series (you can read part one here) in which Janna Visser and Laura Dix reflect on motherhood through a FPM lens. These reflections are written from our own voices and experiences. While this series speaks explicitly about motherhood, the reflections offered here extend far beyond parenting alone. The lens of care, interdependence, and invisible labour is equally relevant to other forms of care work: caring for family members, partners, communities, movements, and ourselves.

My little boy turned two in November, and it means (at the time I wrote this post) I am exactly 800 days into the most life changing project I have ever been part of- motherhood.

Balancing raising a small one with work, life and relationships has been a challenge, albeit a very different one from the day job- with more nappies, less appraisals and certainly less breaks. But a beautiful one too- full of joy, wonder and gratitude for him and his presence (and magical chaos) in my life.

Janna and I recently got to talking and reflecting about how our shared but different versions of motherhood are both managing projects in their own way- with all of the invisibility of the care work and the importance of, as she says in her previous blog post, a village to help collaborate around how to do the best for your child and you. 

I wanted to reflect on just some of our FPM principles and how these align with my own motherhood journey so far:

No one size fits all- because projects AND project leadership can be diverse. While it initially jars me a little to think of my baby as a “project”, that's because I know I’ve been conditioned to think of projects as tied to budgets, deadlines and outcomes. But instead, as our recent blog post asks, if we were to reframe the idea of what a project is and who leads them, we might start viewing parenting (and caring more generally) through a new lens. Every child is different, every parent and family set up is unique, and the way we choose to raise our children certainly doesn’t have a one-size-fits all approach. As parents some of us may work as a collective to raise our baby- with a partner, a co-parent, a kinship or our wider community- which requires huge amounts of communication, collaboration and care to achieve. If we opened our minds to motherhood being a form of project management, we reclaim it as something rooted in collaboration, purpose, and transformation - not just deadlines and deliverables.

Process is as important as progress. Having a baby is often measured by their development milestones. We see so much emphasis on their progress (at least in my UK culture)- are they rolling over, walking, crawling yet?- that this can often feel the mark of good parenting and healthy development, but can create anxiety about whether our child is on track or falling behind. Yet if we were to pause and put as much emphasis on the process by which we are parenting (not just what we do but how we do it) we might find that our measurements of how we are parenting shift. Are we living to our values in how we are parenting? Are we taking space to care for ourselves as well as our small ones? What does success really look like for us when it comes to how we want to parent, outside of the traditional measures of progress? 

Sharing power: As my baby becomes a toddler I am feeling the shift from simply caring for him to now actual parenting- deciding the kind of mother (or “Ma” as he has decided to call me) I want to be and how I respond when he pushes boundaries. Perhaps this is simply us reaching a new stage in our project together, and just as our FPM project flow reminds us, it’s OK to re-plan and consider how I grow, nurture and evolve in real time with, for and alongside this tiny human.

Intersectional by design: we talk a lot about how FPM should be rooted in inclusivity and equity, and this is something I have carried through into my motherhood journey. I am white, living in the west, and raising a young white male to be the best he can be, wanting to equip him with the skills he needs to be tough enough to grow up in a world that feels bleaker every year, but tender enough to recognise his privilege and the power he inherently holds without yet knowing it. How we manage this journey together is yet to be seen, but I am conscious of it and trying to build it in small pieces into how I approach being his “ma”.

Where this all leads me is that undeniably being a mother and a caregiver means women are massively equipped to run projects- our time management skills from balancing paid work with emotional labour, capacity to deal with screaming children under pressure, multi-task making dinner whilst tidying toys whilst being smeared with the toddlers dinner- certainly means we are experts at the juggle. 

But it raises a deeper question within me about how this form of managing projects is valued by the wider world, and what it will take for the project management space to recognise and celebrate the work of women and caregivers in care roles that have historically been rendered invisible, undervalued, or dismissed as “not real work”?

Motherhood (and caregiving more broadly) is one of the most complex, emotionally demanding, high-stakes forms of project management there is- yet it sits almost entirely outside what we formally recognise as leadership, expertise, or skill. There is no promotion, no performance review, no budget line, and often no village. And yet the work continues: adaptive, relational, values-led, and deeply human.

I don’t want my son to grow up believing that care is something that happens quietly in the background, done mostly by women, and certainly not something worthy of recognition or power. I want him to see care as skilled, intentional, political work. Work that builds futures and sustains life.

Perhaps rethinking motherhood as feminist project management isn’t about labelling our children as projects at all- but about reclaiming project management itself. About insisting that the ways we nurture, respond, adapt, and hold complexity in motherhood are not deviations from “real” leadership, but blueprints for it.

And maybe, just maybe, the most radical project I will ever manage isn’t raising a child- but raising one in a way that helps change what the world values in the first place.

We’d love to hear from you: what shifts for you when we loosen our definition of a “project” beyond outputs, timelines, and success metrics? Where have you already been practising project leadership, without naming it as such?