Just one day after accepting an offer for her dream job, Deanna received some more big news — she was pregnant with her first child.
“Honestly, I was pretty terrified,” she admitted. A 36-year-old marketing and advertising executive, Deanna had watched many women who became mothers leave the workplace, get demoted or be forced to “lean back.”
“I loved what I did,” she said. “I worked hard to get into the leadership position I was now about to step into, and I was afraid — afraid of what having a child would do to my career.”
Deanna entered her new job a few years ago with these intense fears, mixed with a good amount of guilt about the timing.
“I was so focused on making sure I was contributing all I possibly could from the beginning because I wanted, and needed, to keep this job,” she said.
After her first trimester, Deanna faced her fears and told her bosses about the pregnancy.
“It went pretty well,” she said. “Actually, my company didn’t have a maternal leave policy — apparently nobody had ever gone on maternity leave in the company’s history — so I figured this was a great opportunity and I volunteered to help write the policy.”
After extensive research, Deanna presented her findings to her company.
“The data was showing that if you give women six months of leave, the odds that they not only come back to that company but stay in their career for the next 10 years doubles,” she said. “With this one move, we could make huge gains in retaining women for the rest of their careers.”
Deanna’s suggestions, however, were immediately shot down. Instead, the owner decided on 12 weeks of short-term disability, during which Deanna ended up receiving 40% of her pay. The plan was that she would return to the office three days a week on her first month back, but then back to her normal full schedule.
“There was no negotiation,” she said.
Deanna worked right up to her due date, but when her baby didn’t come on time, she said she was induced without her consent.
“Then they still couldn’t get the baby out, so I had a C-section, during which the doctor tore an artery,” she said. “I hemorrhaged 6 liters of blood on that table … I could hear them saying that I wasn’t going to make it… I ended up having multiple surgeries to save my life.”
A week after the birth, Deanna received an email from her work.
“They wanted to know if I could get on a call,” she said. “I had to explain to them that no, I almost died so I can’t right now. And at the same time, I was facing this grief that, because of what happened, I’d never be able to become a mother again… I said they could email me any questions.”
For the first nine weeks of her 12-week leave, Deanna had to have 24-hour help and was medically forbidden to even lift her baby.
“From weeks 10 through 12 I was out there touring daycares and looking at these babies under fluorescent lights and just weeping,” she said. “I had so much guilt from not being able to care for my own baby that I just couldn’t do it.”
She decided to hire a nanny, but that came with a major cost.
“I realized that after paying the nanny, I would be taking home less than $5 an hour, but I had to do it.”
For the first few weeks back part-time, Deanna said things started to turn around — she started to feel energized and sharper, finally a bit more like her old self.
“I felt proud,” she said. “Like I had outmaneuvered all the odds that were stacked against me.”
Unfortunately, that feeling didn’t last long.
“My baby suddenly started waking up more and more during the night,” she said. “Two times, then three, four, then five times a night to breastfeed. I was sleeping maybe two or three hours a night, and that’s when all the trauma from the birth started hitting me full force. I was reliving it, feeling like every organ in my body was shutting down.”
Sobbing on a Zoom call, Deanna told her employer she would not be able to come back full-time.
“It was humiliating,” she said. “This was not how I wanted to show up to my work. I felt like a failure — as a mother and as an employee.”
Again, without any conversation or negotiation, Deanna was told she would be made a contractor but would be paid at the same hourly rate as she made as a salaried employee.
“I lost all my benefits, and with the extra taxes I would be paying as a 1099 I would now be making substantially less per hour for doing the same work I did before I had my baby,” she said. “But I was told that the owner was proud of the accommodations they were making and that it was a good deal and I should take it.
“I did the math and with childcare I would now be taking home less than $1 an hour,” she said. “With the toll all of this was taking on my mental and physical health, my baby’s health and my family, I had to face the fact that I had to leave.”
Deanna’s guilt and work ethic pushed her to stay another two weeks and finish up some projects.
“The owner came to me in that time and said, ‘Could you do me a favor and let everyone know that you are leaving because it’s what you want and not because of anything we did?’ There were a lot of young women working at our company, so I guess she was concerned.”
Far From an Isolated Case
Deanna’s struggles are not unique. The United States is the only developed country in the world without a federally guaranteed paid leave, which means companies are free to make decisions based on what is best for their business and families essentially get what they get. Family and Medical Leave only guarantees a job will be protected for 12 weeks, it does not include any pay. It also doesn’t typically apply to companies with fewer than 50 employees — or about 40% of the American workforce.
That leaves a system that is inherently unequal. The more you make, the more likely you are to receive paid leave, while 95% of workers in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution do not have jobs that provide paid family leave.
At the same time, having a baby has become more dangerous.
According to a study from Blue Cross Blue Shield that examined 1.8 million pregnancies in the U.S., pregnancy and childbirth complication increased by 16.4% and 14.2% respectively just between 2014 and 2018. Even more disturbing, a Centers for Disease Control Study found that between 2018 and 2022 the number of mothers that lost their lives giving birth grew 93% from 17.6 to 33.6 deaths per 100,000 live births. For black women, that rate is even higher — 44.8 per 100,000 births.
Louisiana ranks second in the nation for maternal deaths at 40.7 per 100,000 births. For perspective, in other countries like Germany and Australia, that number is about 4 deaths per 100,000 births.
And then there’s the loss in wages and promotion disadvantages that commonly accompany becoming a mother — a phenomenon so prevalent it has its own name, the motherhood penalty.
No Bump With a Baby
Regardless of whether they have children, American women have never been paid equally for their work. During World War II, when women’s participation in the workforce surged as they stepped up to perform the same tasks as men now serving overseas, women in manufacturing received an average pay of $31 per week, while men received $55.
That gap in earnings has closed some, but it still exists, and women who become mothers are much more likely to feel it and feel it more intensely.
According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, in average working woman in 2023 made 88 cents to the dollar of a working man. If she was a mother, that dropped to 74 cents on the dollar.
Louisiana ranks dead last when it comes to gender pay gaps, with full-time working women starting out not at 88 cents but 73 cents on the dollar.
Why do mothers see a harder hit?
About 100 years ago, only 20% of women worked, and only 5% of those were married. Women’s roles were largely confined to caring for the home and family.
Today, 84% of women between the age of 25 and 44 are working full-time. The problem is, they’ve taken on a full-time job while also keeping the old one.
In marriages where women and men make about the same salary, wives are still spending more than double the amount of time doing housework — 4.6 hours per week vs. 1.9 hours per a 2023 Pew Research Center study. They also spend on average two hours more per week on caregiving. (Husbands, meanwhile, average 3.5 hours more on leisure activities per week than their wives).
And that’s just the physical labor. There’s also the mental load — juggling the never-ending barrage of emails and lists and calendars and overall needs of everyone in the household, from who needs to wear a plain white shirt to school on Wednesday, to keeping a mental note of how much milk is in the fridge. According to a University of Bath study, mothers manage 71% of household mental load tasks and 79% of repetitive daily tasks like childcare and cleaning.
Stuck in the Past
American society still operates on the antiquated idea that most families include a stay-at-home parent. While the average full-time worker receives two to three weeks of vacation per year (among the lowest in the world), a typical school-age child is on vacation 12-14 weeks in a year — and that doesn’t include early dismissal days or the fact that school days typically end hours before the workday. This huge gap leaves parents scrambling year-round to find (and afford) childcare.
And care is not cheap. The average cost of a summer day camp in the U.S. is $73 to $87 per day. In 2024, Americans paid an average of $13,128 per child for care — 29% more than in 2020. In fact, American families pay the largest percentage of their salary in the world to childcare.
As in Deanna’s case, the high cost of childcare forces women to prioritize flexibility over pay in their jobs or pushes them out of the labor market entirely. This harms not only individual families, but the economy as a whole.
“The message to moms is clear and it’s deliberate,” said Deanna, “you’re on your own. Figure it out.”
What Can Be Done?
Local mom Amy Landry was working as an HR director when she found out she was pregnant.
“The first question I got from my employer was, ‘You’re coming back, right?’” she said. “I said, ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I? I worked hard to get here and I love my job.”
She was initially told she’d be allowed flexibility in her work schedule after giving birth, but the reality when she returned was not so kind.
I was told my multiple people “Your husband makes enough money, you really should be staying home,” said Landry. “My boss actually told me ‘You can’t have a successful career and be a good mother at the same time.”
Landry’s anger turned to action.
“I thought, if I’m experiencing this, so many women are,” she said. “We don’t have a voice…455,000 women left the workforce last year. We need to do this differently.”
In 2017, Landry created a program called Diapers to Desks (part of her company, Landry Training) to offer mothers the support she wished she would have had and work with companies to better support their employees.
“Sixty-three percent of mothers report a bad return-to-work experience,” Landry said, “and 80% are worried about balancing the demands of work and motherhood. One in three will end up leaving their job within 18 months.”
The program can be purchased by companies or individuals and provides guidance that starts during pregnancy and continues through the return to work. Included are live community circles where women can connect with other women.
“One of the reasons we see this pay penalty is that women are negotiating from an unempowered place, and the mother and company start functioning from fear,” noted Candace Schrag, the community circle facilitator for Diapers to Desk. “What we do is help bridge that gap. The bottom line is that companies that invest in their people receive a much larger ROI because they end up buying loyalty, buy-in and productivity.”
Landry noted that after increasing their parental leave and launching flexible work options and support, a woman-led company called F5 Collective in Australia saw job applications increase by 140%.
While the United States fails to provide even the minimum support to families, other countries facing dropping birth rates have gotten creative with solutions.
Italy, for example, offers a universal child allowance — a monthly payment to families determined by income level and number of children, while Poland exempts families from paying income tax if they have two or more children and make under a certain amount per year. In South Korea, the government pays new parents about $694 per month in a child’s first year and half that every month for the second year.
Countries are also subsidizing childcare. Swedish parents do not pay more than 3% of their income for the first child, 2% for the second, and 1% for the third. Iceland and Norway limit full-time childcare fees to under $300 per month and Norway provides 20 hours per week of free childcare to low-income families.
Since Malta launched universal free childcare in 2014, female labor participation has increased from 40% to more than 70%.
Now a small business owner, Deanna said she is committed to doing better for her employees.
“We just had an employee who had unexpected heart surgery and was out for four months,” she said. “We paid him his full salary during that time because we wanted him to come back and be well. We all have a moral and ethical obligation to solve these issues, and we can do it. I’ve worked for businesses that have solved much more complex problems than maternity leave.”
Paid Leave: We Need to Do Better.
The United States is the ONLY first-world country that does not have a national paid leave policy.
Countries vary widely in what they provide (typically funded through social security), but most offer some amount of 100% paid guaranteed leave, with the most common amount being 14 weeks.
6 weeks – 4 countries
7 weeks – 4 countries
8 weeks – 6 countries
9 weeks – 7 countries
10 weeks – 5 countries
12 weeks – 21 countries
13 weeks – 11 countries
14 weeks – 24 countries
16 weeks – 8 countries
17 weeks – 4 countries
18 weeks – 12 countries
20 weeks – 5 countries
22 weeks – 1 country
26 weeks – 3 countries
35 weeks – 1 country
39 weeks – 1 country
52 weeks – 1 country
Did You Know?
American companies who invested in child care benefits for their employees experienced up to 425% returns on their investments. (Source: 2024 Boston Consulting Group study)
The “Fatherhood Bonus”
While mothers are financially penalized for having children, fathers tend to have the opposite experience.
In 2023, fathers with children under 18 earned 23% more than their childless counterparts. (Source: Bankrate study, 2023)
Be Part of the Solution.
Change only comes through collective action.
Local organizations to check out:
National organizations to check out:
