The real lives of professional working mothers with children in their early years: A work, family, and community resource perspective
Griffith University
Afrouz Shoghi is an Organisational Psychologist with over 15 years of leadership and practitioner experience across a wide range of departments and organisations within the health, social services, and education sectors. In particular, Afrouz has led various early childhood education and development strategies across Australia and has overseen and managed research, policy, and programs aimed at enabling workforce, community, and systemic change to promote the importance of early childhood development.
Building on this experience and her own personal experience navigating early motherhood and work, Afrouz is currently finalising her PhD investigating the real lives of professional working mothers with young children. Integrating the principles of Psychology, Social Science and Business, Afrouz’s PhD is aimed at understanding the realities of professional working mothers’ lives from a socio-ecological perspective – where the role of work, family, and community resources are explored in their impact on individual psychological well-being and workplace, community, and family outcomes.
While finalising her PhD research, Afrouz is also now translating her research and her extensive work experience, in designing a social impact venture aimed at supporting working mothers navigating work, career, and family in the early years of parenting. This new venture, workHers, is currently in the co-design phase with various stakeholders and local partners and advocates.
Overall, Afrouz’s personal passion and professional intent is to unlock system capabilities to better support working mothers, and to also empower working mothers to best manage their roles at work and in life. Now raising two young daughters, aged seven and six, Afrouz’s ambition is to continue to facilitate and inform research to understand and better respond to the modern needs of working families, as well as to build communities and resources to support working families navigating work and life during the early years of parenthood.
Afrouz and I found a lot of common ground in this conversation, as we are both navigating the dual worlds of parenthood and academia. Anybody out there who is considering starting a PhD will come away from this conversation with a handful of great places to start, as Afrouz and I pulled at many threads while unpacking her research.
—
This episode of The Knowledge Mill was recorded on the Nathan Campus of Griffith University in Brisbane on June 9, 2025.
Leave a Reply