By Keith Davenport
Almost everyone knows someone in Johnson County who stepped away from full-time work to care for children, only to find it surprisingly difficult to return. These are often experienced, capable individuals who want to re-enter the workforce but are counted out of hiring processes due to a break in their resume.
This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “mom tax.” It shows up in subtle ways: longer job searches, fewer interview requests, lower salary offers, or assumptions about availability and ambition. It disproportionately affects mothers, but it can apply to anyone whose career includes caregiving, part-time work, gig workers, or those with squiggly career lines.
Resumes tend to amplify this problem. They reward continuity and penalize pauses, regardless of context. A gap becomes a question mark. A part-time role becomes a signal of laziness or lack of qualifications. Valuable experience gained outside formal employment like managing complexity, prioritizing under pressure, and negotiating competing needs rarely fits neatly onto a single page.
Most employers don’t intend to exclude returning parents. But under volume pressure, resume review often becomes a process of elimination. When there is a question mark in the hiring manager’s head, that often turns into an addition to the “no pile” because they don’t have the time to try to fill in the gaps.
The cost of this approach is significant. Johnson County businesses miss out on experienced professionals who bring maturity, judgment, and adaptability to their work. Caregivers often fill their time with part-time jobs and volunteer work that develops capacity and workplace skills, but won’t show up on a resume. Instead, families absorb the financial impact of delayed re-entry or underemployment. And the broader community loses the benefit of talent that is ready to contribute.
Some employers are beginning to recognize this gap and adjust how they evaluate candidates. Rather than treating career pauses as disqualifiers, they’re focusing on whether applicants can demonstrate the skills needed for the role today. That shift opens the door for candidates whose experience doesn’t follow a traditional trajectory but whose capabilities remain strong.
Skills-based hiring tools are one way employers are supporting this change. Platforms like MythicHire allow candidates to demonstrate transferable skills and decision-making ability directly, instead of relying solely on resumes. Instead, candidates can fill in all of those nontraditional experiences and receive credit in MythicHire’s weighted scoring system. This creates an opportunity to be evaluated on what they can do, not on how neatly their career fits a template. Meanwhile, the hiring manager receives the benefit of real-time candidate scoring so they don’t lose time in the applicant review process.
This approach benefits employers as well. Teams gain access to candidates who are often highly motivated, efficient, and accustomed to managing competing priorities that traditional applicant tracking systems would screen out. Many returning parents bring leadership experience that was developed outside the workplace but translates directly into professional settings and MythicHire identifies this.
Addressing the “mom tax” isn’t about special treatment. It’s about designing hiring systems that reflect reality. Careers are rarely linear. Life happens. When evaluation methods account for that, businesses make better decisions.
