Feature: Real Stories of Maternity Leave

It is predicted that any day now in the United States more women than men will go to work due to the impacts of the recession. Male dominated industries have been hit hard by layoffs and women are returning to work to support themselves and their families. Now consider these facts from the Census Bureau: there are 5.6 million working mothers in the U.S. Of the mothers who gave birth in the last year (most recent data is from 2006), the majority, 55.9 percent, were in the workforce and 36 percent of those women worked full-time.

Given these numbers, it would be reasonable to assume that women who are pregnant at work, take maternity leave, and reenter the workplace are fairly well supported. After all, isn’t it just good business to ensure that half of your workforce is set up to succeed?

One should never assume. Despite policies like the Family Medical Leave Act, which grants eligible employee up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee, among other things, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, women still face challenges, both blatant and subtle, when they are working and pregnant. And it’s not just general laborers like LaNisa Allen, who was fired from her job at a Totes/Isotoner Corporation for taking unauthorized breaks  to pump breast milk, who face unfair practices. Discrimination extends from the warehouse to the boardroom.

Gayatri Bhalla, a Yale MBA who was working as a vice president at a consulting firm, got pregnant after three years on the job and took a twelve week maternity leave. “My reviews were all excellent and I brought in more business than my sales target.” But at the end of the year, Bhalla was told the firm would not pay out her full bonus because she had taken time off. Bhalla says she pushed back but got nowhere.

She eventually changed jobs and became a senior vice president and practice group leader for an interactive agency. Then she got pregnant again. Her new firm did not have a maternity policy so Bhalla had to draft it. The company ultimately agreed to pay her for six weeks through disability insurance, a common practice at many companies.

While she was out, Bhalla says a “huge new business opportunity” came up in her practice area. So, despite being on leave she pitched, and won, the business. She returned to work only to be laid off six weeks later. “It was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “The partners were not supportive. They said they were eliminating my position but they replaced me four months later.”

Bhalla says she did not pursue any legal action against the firm because, “I don’t think I wanted to believe ill of my coworkers so I just sort of accepted it. It left a bad taste in my mouth. But who has the time and energy? I had a family and needed to look for another job.

“The more senior I got the more difficult it was. It’s just heart breaking, particularly in small companies where there might be fewer women at the top. It sets a bad precedent.”

Liza Barry-Kessler says she had a great experience after the birth of her first child. While she couldn’t afford to take the full 12 weeks under the FMLA, her employer worked with her to combine disability and a part time schedule so she could take nine weeks of leave. But when she got pregnant a second time, the same employer laid her off.

“I had totally planned (for the second leave). I saved up vacation so I would have four weeks off at 100 percent pay and then six or eight weeks on disability.” (Many insurers pay six weeks of disability for a vaginal birth and eight weeks for a caesarean section.) But then, Barry-Kessler says. “The economy began to slide into free fall.”  The company set her termination date for after her due date so that the birth would be covered by insurance. “They handled it as well as they could have handled it,” she says. “They laid off others too. It was not a targeted anti-pregnancy decision.”

But what struck Barry-Kessler was just how hard it is to make it all work as a parent. She says she spent six months looking for a job and eventually moved across the country with her partner and launched her own law firm and started blogging about her life at Lizwashere.com. “Wow did I get jealous of my online friends and our friends in Canada who get a year fully paid. We provide twelve  weeks of unpaid leave. Only someone who is middle class can make it work at all. It’s not just that Canada found a way to make it work; it’s that the U.S. hasn’t.”

These stories aren’t uncommon. Many women cobble together vacation, sick time and disability so they can afford to stay home for a month or two after giving birth. Or they return to work only to learn their bonus has been cut and they’ve fallen out of favor. And many of them walk away without a fight, because they are exhausted, worried about the repurcussions, and focused on their future.

Even the women who consider their experience a positive one, are working during leave, losing needed income, and returning to work sleep deprived only to express breast milk in bathrooms, airports and company parking lots. As one nonprofit fundraiser who did not want her name mentioned said, “(Having a baby) is a precious time in life and it should be very sacred. But the fact is women have to rush through the process and hurry back to work and pump in a closet.”

Andrea Vanderbeek* says she hopes she can be a role model for other women, based on her experience. Vanderbeek was the vice president of marketing and advocacy for a non-profit. When she got pregnant she “had been there for over a decade, put my dues in and had a lot of flexibility.”

She opted to take a working maternity leave for several reasons: she says her job would have been difficult to fill short term, and, she loved her work. “We really did not have any maternity policy, simply because everyone in the organization couldn’t be replaced.”

Vanderbeek had accumulated enough sick time and vacation time to stay at home for three months after she gave birth. “I worked the whole time and even took my son to media calls at four weeks.” But, if Vanderbeek was using earned time off and working during that time, wasn’t she, in essence, working for free?

“Now that we’re talking about it and I look back, none of it actually makes sense,” says Vanderbeek. “I’ve never been a time keeper – this is my job and I’m going to get it done. It was flexible. I never felt slighted or cheated in anyway. It was really a good experience.”

Not fully understanding leave benefits is another common occurrence for women taking maternity leave. Often, they will be told one thing from their direct manager, another from the human resources department, and yet another from the insurance company. And when women are already busy prepping their coworkers, bosses and clients for an extended leave, figuring out their benefits can become a low priority. Michelle, a teacher in New Jersey who is currently on leave, says of her benefits package, “It’s a pretty reasonable policy. But I feel like it changes every time I read it.”

Not only are the policies confusing, they are lagging behind other countries. According to a report from the Center for Economic Policy and Research, the United States has the least generous parental leave policies among 21 high-income countries they studied. Businesses may not be any under any legal obligation to support working women who give birth, but those who don’t are taking a gamble. Without family-friendly work/life programs, they risk alienating more than half of the work force.

Says one ex-Wall Streeter wishing to remain anonymous, “One of my decisions to change careers after twelve and a half years on Wall Street was due to the lack of support during maternity leave.”  In addition to having her sign a statement saying she would come back to work after her leave, the company prorated her bonus to adjust for the time off and then laid her off upon her return. So this former equity research analyst started her own company. “I’m not going to let someone screw me over like that anymore.”

*Not her real name.