A Reddit post shared recently captures something many working professionals sense but rarely articulate. The author of the post works in HR at an international bank in Bengaluru. She has been with the organisation for a decade. Within HR, she sits in employee relations, the team that handles grievances, performance improvement plans, and difficult conversations. The people employees turn to when something goes wrong. She is currently on maternity leave.
It ends this month.She knows she cannot return to work immediately. She does not have steady support at home. As she puts it plainly, “I don’t have support and I have solo parent most of the time.”
So she does what the policy allows. She applies for a six-month sabbatical. It is unpaid. It is listed as an employee benefit. It can be taken for anywhere between three months and a year. The request is rejected.
A rejection without a conversation
“What got flabbergasted was the way it was just rejected without even hearing me out,” she writes. There is something telling about that sentence. Not the rejection itself, but the absence of dialogue. No meeting, or attempt to understand context.Just a decision.This is where many employees realise that flexibility exists only until it requires adjustment. Policies may allow for exceptions, but people often do not.And when decisions are delivered without conversation, they carry a different kind of weight. They tell you not just what the answer is, but also how much your situation matters.
When employee-friendly culture stays on slides
The post points to a deeper contradiction. Her team regularly positions the bank as caring and employee-friendly. This is the same HR function that educates managers, resolves complaints, and reinforces values.“The amount of preaching and projection that is done by my team across the bank to prove that it’s an employee friendly bank is unreal,” she writes.What follows is sharper. “Hypocrisy to the core!”The line lands because it exposes a familiar gap. Many organisations are fluent in the language of empathy. Fewer are comfortable practising it when it disrupts workflow.An unpaid sabbatical does not cost money. It costs planning. It costs accommodation. And those costs are often harder to justify internally than financial ones.
A benefit that exists, but not when you need it
The request itself is modest. “After all I’m only asking to use my benefit, which is actually unpaid leave,” she notes. Then adds a detail that makes the refusal harder to explain. “Btw, I’m with the bank for 10 years.”This raises an obvious question. If long tenure, policy backing, and zero financial cost are not enough, what exactly qualifies someone to access these benefits?Many employees slowly learn that some policies are aspirational. They exist to signal progress, not necessarily to be exercised in moments of strain. The moment you need them most is often when they become hardest to use.
When support does not come from where you expect it
Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of the post is this observation: “What’s funnier is that my entire team are women.”There is a widespread assumption that representation automatically leads to solidarity. That women in leadership will instinctively support other women navigating motherhood and work.Institutions shape behaviour and roles demand compliance. And sometimes, those who have adapted to rigid systems end up enforcing them, consciously or not.The author’s conclusion is blunt. “My learning is that corporate is unpredictable and it’s actually the women who don’t support other women.”
What maternity leave really exposes
Maternity leave has a way of stripping corporate life of its softer language. It forces organisations to decide whether they are built for real lives or ideal workers.Many companies say they support working mothers. Fewer are prepared to absorb the disruption that support requires.When a new parent asks for time and is met with silence instead of conversation, the message is clear. Care is conditional. Flexibility has limits. And those limits are rarely written into policy documents.
The quiet lesson employees take away
What makes this story resonate is that the author understands the system from the inside. She is not misreading corporate behaviour. She has helped enforce it.And still, she is surprised by how quickly empathy evaporates. That is often how these moments land. Without malice, but without humanity either.For many employees, this is when the gap between corporate values and corporate decisions finally becomes visible.