Professional Women Navigate the Minefield of Maternity Leave

by Liz O’Donnell (Boston)

When Lisa Powers joined Phillips Lytle LLP, a Rochester-based law firm, in 1999, she didn’t think to ask about the firm’s maternity leave policy. She was thinking about her career, not starting a family. However, in 2002 she got pregnant and discovered the firm had “one of most generous maternity policies.” Phillips Lytle offered a six- month leave that Powers says, “was almost fully paid.”

The long leave meant that even though Powers experienced some complications late in her pregnancy, she was able to stop working a month before her baby was due and still take off five months after the child’s birth.

“It’s a huge incentive for coming back and not looking elsewhere,” says Powers. “You are relaxed, it was great. Certainly there is an expectation that you are ready to work when you come back.”

Powers says she did not experience any resentment from coworkers who covered her work. In fact, she says, the firm extends the same benefits to fathers. Despite the long leave, Powers ultimately left the firm because she wanted to work a four-day work week. At the time, the company did not support flex schedules, although Powers believes they have since changed that policy.

Christine Most* who worked at a very large financial services organization tells a very different story. Most was fired this past April and while she says, “I was not fired for getting pregnant and I was not fired for taking leave,” a series of issues surrounding her pregnancy certainly contributed to her dismissal.

Just five months after joining the firm, Most found out she was pregnant. She says she told her boss early, when she was only ten weeks along, and he seemed to be happy for her. He told Most, who was a commissioned salesperson, she would receive 100 percent of her pay for 12 weeks, plus a percentage of her average commissions. Since Most worked in a branch office where there was no human resource staff, and because she had no reason to doubt her boss, she never questioned the policy.

A few months later, while at a training workshop, Most met a woman from another office who had just returned from maternity leave. The woman informed Most that the company’s policy was to pay partial salary for six to eight weeks of leave. “I was ready to cry right in the middle of training,” she says.

For the next few months, Most sorted through HR documents and asked questions but ultimately, “I left truly not knowing what I was going to get paid.”

Most ended up taking a nine-week leave. When she returned, her boss told her to take it easy and to ease back into things. Most told him she was nervous as she had no sales pipeline and several of her sales had been reversed while she was out. “No one had kept in touch with my clients while I was out,” she says. “According to policy: it was (my boss’) responsibility to do those things.”

Most missed quota by one unit her first full month back and was put on probation. She hit her sales target in January but the probation was extended. She was told she needed to hit the number for the next three months. After she missed again by one in March she was fired. Most says the standard policy was to place salespeople on probation only after they missed the quota three months in a row.

In addition to the stress of rebuilding her sales pipeline, Most struggled with pumping breast milk at work.  An office coordinator first told her to pump in the copy room but employees needed access to the copier so Most looked for another location. She then asked to use a conference room. It had a small window but Most planned to cover it with paper. “I was told there was a company policy that said we can’t cover up windows.” The reason, she was told, was the policy prevented people from doing illicit things in the conference room.

The office coordinator then told Most to pump in the bathroom. Most told her boss and the coordinator she needed a different location as she was uncomfortable preparing her baby’s food in a bathroom. “Would you prepare a sandwich in a bathroom?” she says.

Ultimately Most settled on her car as her pumping location. “It was less drama, easier, and I could listen to the radio.” But when she was finished she would rinse her pumping equipment in the employee kitchen. “Someone complained they didn’t like me doing it in the sink. I was told not to do that anymore. I breast fed for five months but ended up drying up by January,” she says.

Despite her experience, Most says she isn’t interested in filing a claim against her former employer. “It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth—rehashing it, attorney’s fees…I feel like it’s better for my emotional well being to just let it go.” And now she is working in a job she loves. “I found a great company doing what I should be doing. Maybe I’ll send (my former company) a thank you note.”

Fifty-six years ago my aunt told her boss she was pregnant and he fired her. In 1979 the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was passed making it illegal to treat pregnancy differently from other disabilities. Yet just last year the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 6,285 charges of pregnancy-based discrimination. And last month, the United States Supreme Court voted in favor of AT&T in a pregnancy-related case. In AT&T v. Hulteen , employees of the telecommunications giant sued because their maternity leave was deducted from their service time, or time they accrued toward pension benefits.  Employees out on non-pregnancy related disability did not have their time out of the office deducted. Since the four women in the case took their leave before 1979, the court ruled they were not protected by the PDA.

In her dissenting opinion of the case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “Certain attitudes about pregnancy and childbirth, throughout human history, have sustained pervasive, often law-sanctioned, restrictions on a woman’s place among paid workers and active citizens.”  The more things change, the more things stay the same.

* Not her real name