"After Hours" Belongs to The Very Hungry Caterpillar
If you want to know who the tech industry was designed for, look at when it schedules its most important conversations.
Corporate world calls 6-8pm "after hours". What follows the regular 9-to-5 work day is optional. For parents, those hours are anything but. Between 6 and 8pm on any given weeknight, I am negotiating down from three bedtime books to two, supervising a bath that somehow gets water on the ceiling, and reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar for the four hundredth time. What I am not doing is networking.
And yet, if you look at where careers are actually built in tech, the panel drinks, the meetup pizzas, the "casual" post-conference catch-ups, they almost always land in that "after hours" window. The hours are a non-negotiable trifecta of dinner, bath, and bed for every parents of young children.
This isn't an accident. It's a design choice, which it tells you exactly who the system assumes is showing up.
And before anyone says "this is a women's issue" - it's not. It's a parenting issue. The data shows that millennial and Gen Z dads are more involved than any previous generation. Pew Research found that dads have tripled the time they spend on childcare compared to 1965, and 57% of millennial dads say fatherhood is central to their identity which is just one percentage point less than mothers. They want to be at bath time. They want to do school pickup. But the industry punishes that too. A dad who leaves at 5pm to be home for his kids faces the same "not committed" side-eye. He just gets it with an extra layer of confusion, because the system never expected him to care. Fathers who actively parent are opting into the same structural disadvantage that mothers never had the choice to opt out of.
The Visibility Hustle
But the 6-8pm problem is just the most obvious version of something bigger: the way our industry measures commitment, relevance, and readiness is systematically stacked against parents.
Take the green squares on a GitHub profile, that grid of contribution activity that's become a kind of informal résumé. Take a year off for parental leave and your grid goes cold. Scale back to part-time while your kid is small and your output halves. It doesn't matter that you spent those months problem-solving under conditions of extreme sleep deprivation and resource constraint (skills, by the way, that translate beautifully to engineering). The grid doesn't capture that. It just shows silence.
And here's the part that should make everyone furious: AI agents can now generate commits, push code, and keep a GitHub grid glowing green while a person does absolutely nothing. GitHub's own Copilot coding agent can autonomously write code, create branches, and push commits to pull requests. The metric was already a poor proxy for skill. Now it's not even a reliable proxy for showing up.
The same goes for LeetCode, HackerRank, and every other coding challenge the industry uses to filter candidates. HackerRank's own 2025 Developer Skills Report found that 66% of developers now prefer practical challenges over abstract algorithmic puzzles, and 82% already use AI tools in their development process. There's even an entire cottage industry of AI-powered tools designed to solve these tests invisibly during live interviews. So what are we actually testing? A person's ability to do something a machine already does better? We're penalising parents for gaps in a performance that AI has made meaningless, while simultaneously refusing to update what "qualified" looks like.
Or consider continuous learning: the expectation that you're always upskilling, always across the latest framework, always shipping side projects. If your child finishes school at 3:30pm and you're the one doing pickup, your day has a hard stop that most of your colleagues don't. The hours between 3:30 and 8pm aren't yours. They belong to school lunches that need packing, homework that needs supervising, and small people who need you to be present. The "just spend an evening on it" advice that saturates tech culture assumes you have evenings to spend.
Who Gets to Stay Relevant?
Here's what frustrates me most: re-entry programs and return-to-work schemes are framed as generous. As though the industry is doing mothers a favour by letting them back in. But the reason women need "re-entry" in the first place is that the system made it structurally impossible to stay.
We don't have a pipeline problem. We have a retention problem dressed up as a personal choice. Nearly half of women who enter engineering leave by mid-career, and institutions with better childcare and parental leave have twice the number of women in STEM faculty.
A woman doesn't leave STEM because she lost interest. She leaves because the conference is in another city for four days and her partner "can't take time off." She leaves because flexible work was technically available but culturally punished. She leaves because every metric the industry uses to measure her — commits, publications, conference talks, networking — was designed around someone who has a partner at home handling the unpaid shift.
And now, when she tries to come back, there's a good chance an AI screening tool rejects her non-linear CV before a human ever sees it. By 2025, 83% of companies were using AI to screen resumes, with 67% acknowledging bias risks — including systems that penalise employment gaps linked to caregiving. The two-year gap that represents raising a child gets flagged the same way a two-year gap for anything else does: as a risk. We've automated the bias and called it efficiency.
What Actually Works
I don't want to end on the problem without naming what I've seen work, because some teams and organisations do get this right.
Shift the clock. Lunchtime talks, morning coffees, 2pm workshops. Networking doesn't have to happen over wine at 7pm. The best communities I've been part of made their most valuable conversations happen during business hours.
Rethink your proxies for commitment. A green GitHub grid is not a measure of skill — especially now that AI can generate one. Publication gaps don't mean knowledge gaps. Interview processes that weight "recent activity" over capability are filtering out exactly the experienced, resilient people you want.
Normalise the career non-linear. A CV with a two-year gap followed by a PhD followed by an industry pivot isn't a red flag. It's a sign of someone who kept going when the system wasn't built for them.
This Mother's Day, I'm not asking for flexibility as a favour. I'm asking why an industry that prides itself on innovation still designs its culture around the assumption that serious professionals don't have bath time at 6:30.
If you're a mum in STEM reading this — you didn't fall behind. The track moved.
And if you're a dad who's been at bath time instead of the networking drinks — thank you. This fight is yours too.