The Los Angeles designer has turned the maths of motherhood into art, pairing sharp visuals with an essay that’s funny, angry and backed by hard numbers.
There’s a particular kind of maths that creative mothers do in their heads, usually at 11pm, usually while staring at a laptop in a quiet kitchen. It goes something like this: How many hours did I actually work today? How many of those were interrupted? And how much of my brain was simultaneously tracking school pickup, missing socks and the precise location of a packed lunch?
It’s an invisible spreadsheet that never balances, and it rarely shows up on a payslip. Rachel Many has decided to make that spreadsheet visible.
Her new project, Mother Load, pairs striking posters with a companion essay that does something a lot of think-pieces about working motherhood fail to do: be both funny and angry, backed up with numbers that should make every agency leader wince.
The posters themselves are sharp. Price tags stuck across a woman’s face like she’s reduced stock at a clearance sale. A supermarket receipt itemising “maternity leave tax”, “guilt” and “invisible labour” next to a total that simply reads “too much”. A manila folder labelled “portfolio review” with a child’s crayon family drawing tucked underneath.
It’s a clever, plain-speaking design bringing attention to a subject that usually gets buried in euphemism.
The numbers behind it
Rachel’s essay relies on a December 2025 analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which found that mothers working full-time, year-round earned only 74.3 cents per dollar that fathers earned. That figure becomes the running theme through the whole series: 74 cents to the dollar, printed large on a receipt, stuck to a face like a markdown sticker.
The penalty compounds with each child, resulting in an estimated 5 to 7% drop in earnings each time. And it isn’t only about pay. An audit study found that childless women received more than twice as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers with identical resumes. Meanwhile, fathers tend to get the opposite treatment: a documented bump in perceived competence and authority, sometimes called the “fatherhood premium”.
Same life event, completely different price tag, depending entirely on the contents of your undergarments. Not to mention that the years a creative career is supposed to accelerate are exactly the years many women start families.
There’s no neat checkpoint where motherhood politely waits for a quieter moment in your CV; it arrives, as she puts it, regardless of where you’ve got to on the ladder.
The brutality of consolidation
However, that’s just the start of the story: the first penalty isn’t the new one. Rachel goes on to describe how that old bias is colliding head-on with a fresh one.
The creative industry spent 2025 in a brutal consolidation cycle. Omnicom cut over 4,000 jobs following its IPG takeover, WPP folded Ogilvy, VML and AKQA under one roof to “optimise” operations, and roughly 10,000 agency roles disappeared across the year. Teams didn’t vanish so much as thin out, leaving fewer people doing the work of several, with AI fluency now an unspoken job requirement on top of everything else.
For a parent with finite hours, that’s a brutal equation. There’s no spare evening to mess about with AI and fail safely at it when the evening is already spoken for by dinner, bath and bedtime. The point isn’t that mothers can’t adapt; it’s that an industry run entirely on slack is asking everyone to find time that, for some people, simply doesn’t exist.
And yet, as Rachel points out, the skills leadership claims to prize most right now—juggling competing priorities, managing limited resources, staying calm under unpredictable pressure—are exactly the skills mothers practise daily, just in a different setting. Nobody runs a masterclass in prioritisation quite like someone negotiating a toddler’s nap schedule against a client deadline.
Key takeaway
It would be easy to file Mother Load under “personal project, nice pictures, moving on”. That would be a mistake. What Rachel has done is take a structural problem that usually lives in dry policy reports and translate it into the visual language creative people actually respond to.
For agency leaders and studio owners, Rachel’s work is worth thinking about because it refuses to be either a rallying cry or a pity party. Rachel is clear that she’d choose her children again in an instant, and she’s genuinely curious about the new tools reshaping the industry.
Her argument, then, isn’t “anti-progress”. It’s that progress built entirely around speed and constant availability that will quietly filter out a particular kind of talent—and that talent happens to be disproportionately female and experienced.
