WORE DON'T LACK AMBITION

THEY LACK A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD When women build their careers, it rarely happens under spotlights or inside boardrooms. It happens in the margins of the day.

- By Farzana Baduel

When women build their careers, it rarely happens under spotlights or inside boardrooms. It happens in the margins of the day. Before school drop-offs. After the children are asleep. Between paid work, care work, and the invisible labour of holding families and communities together. During motherhood, that is exactly what entrepreneurship looked like in my own life. But before being a mother, my time was my own. I built my first business at 20, in London. It was modest by any standard: a small tax refund service helping people reclaim money they were owed. But to me, it felt electric. I was young, single, and living in the city of London that hummed with ambition. I could work late into the night without consequence. No one needed me to pack lunches, book doctor's appointments, or remember which day was PE kit day. My time belonged to me. That freedom rarely appears in economic data, but it sits quietly behind it. It is the unspoken advantage that shapes who gets to take risks, who gets to stay late, and who can afford to fail once or twice before succeeding.

Ten years later, I started my second business: a strategic communications and PR firm. This time, I was 30, married, and the mother of a one-year-old. On paper, I was far better equipped. I had experience, networks, clarity, and a deeply supportive husband who genuinely shared the load at home. In reality, it was one of the hardest things I have ever done. The business was built in fragments of time: between feeds and fevers, during nap windows, and at 3am while rewriting proposals on too little sleep. The ambition was the same. The energy was not. Life had become beautifully, impossibly complicated. And if it was that hard for me, with privilege, education and support, what does entrepreneurship look like for millions of other women, carrying most of the cooking, cleaning, childcare and emotional labour alongside the need to earn?

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