For senior women in tech, timed to maternity leave
A private, cohort-based leadership development program to keep your career growing through leave and beyond.
Athena’s Corner exists to make you undeniable, and ready for what’s next.
Sharper decisions. Backed by the people who matter when you’re not in the room. In charge of your narrative. A clear career roadmap. Space for what you can’t bring to work.
We’re in your corner.
It feels handled. The transition notes, the projects closed out, the advice to stop worrying and focus on the baby. All necessary, but incomplete. What actually happens looks something like this.
You assume the promotion’s off the table and your bonus will be lower. You focus on the near term. Decide to deal with it when you’re back.
Your scope gets reassigned, your project finishes under someone else’s name, and the leader who’d make your case moves teams.
Most women get their momentum back around month four. The review lands before that.
Most of this is outside your control. But how you prepare and respond makes all the difference.
Layoffs, reorgs, and recruiter calls arrive suddenly. This date is known, and the window is measured.
Pay is the output, and it lags. We address the inputs: scope, impact, sponsorship, and support.
Fifteen years at Amazon, building and leading teams across multiple business units, with two leaves of my own along the way. The manager approving the leave. The sponsor making the case. The woman on leave, watching the tap on the shoulder stop.
The year a third of my team went on parental leave, our productivity rose. The leaves weren’t the cause; how the team was built was.
I started Athena’s Corner to support ambitious women during one of the most consequential windows of their careers.
“You have more power than you think. Building your career while you grow your family is possible, with a roadmap, the skills, and the right people aligned behind you. None of it happens by default.”
Heather Dawson, founder
We focus on a handful of high-leverage moves that carry you from where you are to where you’re going. Seeds you plant that grow over time, and actions you take starting this week.
Frameworks and support to help you navigate the reorg, the handback, the offer from outside. The answer is yours.
People who know the value you bring and say so in rooms you’re not in. Relationships you’re actively building, starting now.
Communicate your ambition and your value to the people who decide, without apologizing for either.
Detailed but flexible, with your manager’s buy-in: objectives, goals, strategies, and measures, so your path forward is clear even when things change around you.
Six weeks. Learn at your pace, practice in the room, and apply it at work. Two private check-ins.
Same method, applied differently. Most of the time that means growing where you are. Sometimes it means deciding, with a clear head, that where you are isn’t it. There are many right answers, and you get to find yours.
Six months from now
You’re running scope you negotiated, not the leftovers of your old job. The promotion, the raise, and the project with your name on it are back on the table because you put them there.
You said no twice this week, each with a reason, and both read as senior. Someone senior described your work accurately in a room you weren’t in.
The person you were afraid you’d become never showed up. The one who did wrote the roadmap, and the tap on the shoulder has started again.
Everyone in this room is outside your company. No one weighs in on your rating, and no one reports back. Say the thing that would make you a loose cannon at work, and plan around it.
Not in tech? The mechanics travel. Ask.
Motherhood will break you down, and it will make you unstoppable. You still need to drive your career. It’s a lot easier with the right people in your corner.
