When we look back on lockdown, there will doubtless be a myriad of lessons to be learned, but top of that list must be the cautionary tale of what happens when women aren’t in the room. Or what happens when we don’t see childcare as infrastructure and we don’t hear women’s voices. Or worse still, they are excluded entirely. So much so that we don’t even recognise the perfect storm of the collective “return to the office” bravado with the onset of summer holidays and a childcare sector on the brink of collapse. The motherhood penalty is having a devastating impact on women’s careers. Research across almost 20,000 women showed almost half (46%) of employed mothers who have been made redundant, or expect to be made redundant, said that a lack of childcare provision played a role in their redundancy, while 72% of mothers have had to work fewer hours because of childcare issues. In addition, 65% of mothers who have been furloughed said that a lack of childcare was the reason. Creative Equals and Campaign’s Covid-19 Inclusion Pulse shows that women and minority groups have reported higher levels of psychological stress and unfair treatment at work during the Covid-19 crisis. Women were also more likely than men to report unfair treatment, with 16% of women feeling this way – rising to 22% of working mothers – compared with only 7% of men. Percentages that are difficult to swallow but the stories behind them are harder still. From the new business director conducting a pitch from her kitchen, while her son, who has autism, proceeded to climb over her garden fence into her next-door neighbour’s garden, to the single mother whose back-to-back Zoom calls and boundary-free working days led to impending burnout and antidepressants, the crisis demands empathetic leadership, not lazy, masculine rhetoric.