The income gap no one talks about: school holidays

It's Term 2, day one. The kids are at school. I'm sitting at my actual desk, in actual silence, drinking a coffee that is — for the first time in two weeks — still hot. And I'm staring at a backlog that is going to cost me my next two weekends to clear. Because school holidays don't pause the work. They just push it.

I run my accounting firm on monthly retainers, so technically the income kept coming. But let me be clear: the work didn't stop. The deadlines didn't move. The clients didn't pause. What actually happened is that two weeks of work compressed itself into every spare moment I could find — and what I couldn't fit in is now sitting in a backlog that I'll be working through this weekend. And probably next weekend too.

That's the version of the school holiday cost that nobody talks about. It's not always lost income. Sometimes it's something harder to measure: lost time, lost rest, lost weekends. The work still gets done — it just gets done at 10pm and on Saturdays. And over time, that has a cost too. On your health, your relationships, your capacity to actually grow your business rather than just maintain it.

The cost nobody puts on the balance sheet

Here's the thing that I don't think we talk about enough: it doesn't matter if you're a business owner, a freelancer, or an employee. When school holidays hit, women are the majority impacted. The default still lands on Mum. And with it comes a financial cost that is real, measurable, and almost entirely invisible in public conversation.

I say this without blame toward my husband — he's a sparky, he physically has to be on site. It genuinely makes logistical sense that I handle the school holiday juggle. I work from a laptop. I have flexibility. I get it. But watching him walk out the door at 7am while I'm simultaneously answering a client email, planning a playdate, and racing to a dentist appointment that was probably a year overdue — there's something about that moment that sits in your chest. And in your bank account.

12 weeks a year. Do the maths.

Australia has four school holiday breaks a year. Add it up and we're looking at roughly 12 weeks — nearly a full quarter of the year — where the default childcare solution is Mum. Not always. Not in every household. But in the majority? Yes. And we don't talk about what that actually costs.

For me, as a business owner, the equation is brutally simple: if I don't work, I don't get paid. There's no sick leave, no holiday loading, no paid parental leave for school holidays. Every hour I'm not billing a client, chasing new work, or building my business is an hour of lost revenue. Multiply that across 12 weeks, across the years it takes to raise children to independence, and you are looking at a staggering number that nobody ever puts in front of women when they're planning their careers or their businesses.

This is where the wealth gap is built

We talk about the gender pay gap as though it's some abstract policy problem. But I see it in the numbers every day as an accountant. I see it in the super balances of women in their 40s and 50s. I see it in the revenue graphs of female-led businesses. The gap is not built in boardrooms. It's built in these quiet, invisible weeks where women step back — because someone has to — and the financial consequences just quietly accumulate.

Women who reduce their hours don't just lose that income. They lose the compounding of that income. They lose the super contributions on those earnings. They lose the momentum in their business or career that would have led to the next opportunity, the next client, the next pay rise. These are not small numbers over a lifetime. They are life-changing ones.

Wouldn’t it be easier working for someone else?

I sometimes wonder this myself.  But here's the truth: the problem doesn't belong to business owners alone. Flexibility in modern workplaces has improved — hybrid work, flexible hours, work from home. But the mental load, the default responsibility, and the financial cost still fall disproportionately on women regardless of employment type.

The employee takes leave she didn't plan to use, or reduces to part-time and never quite scales back up. The freelancer loses clients because she was unavailable for two weeks and they found someone else. The business owner watches her pipeline dry up because she couldn't chase new work while she was running the school holiday juggle. Different circumstances, same systemic problem.

We need to start talking about this

Whether you're a business owner, a freelancer, or an employee — if you pulled back during these school holidays, I want you to know that the cost of that is real, and it is not your fault. We are operating inside a system that has never properly accounted for the economic value of what mothers do, or the economic cost of what they sacrifice.

Naming it matters. Talking about it matters. Because the first step to closing a gap is being honest about where it comes from.

These 12 weeks a year are part of the answer. And it's time we said so out loud.

Term 2 is here. I'm back at my desk with a to-do list that stretches into next weekend. And I'm thinking about every woman who is in exactly the same position — recalibrating, catching up, quietly absorbing a cost that never makes it onto anyone's balance sheet.

You're not behind. You're carrying something invisible. And you're doing it anyway.