Many job resources today claim that looking for a job while pregnant is much the same as looking for a new position. at any other time in your life. After all, working mothers are more visible than ever before – Jen Psaki got a promotion for the top White House communications job while pregnant, and Nada Noaman got it dream job in senior management at Estée Lauder while waiting.
Kate Winick was assured of this after she was fired from her director position at Peleton in April 2023, when she was five months pregnant and “terrified.”
“Many people (all men) told me that everything will be fine, companies just want to hire the right people, invest in talent for the long term,” she wrote on LinkedIn on Mother’s Day.
But her experience underscores the grim reality facing unemployed pregnant women: Despite 15 years of experience, including at editorial giant Hearst, the ex-Peleton director says she was immediately excluded from interviews after she reported her pregnancy. of your pregnancy.
“100% of the companies I talked to went from scheduling interviews to not inviting me to the final round,” she added.
Women don’t by law must disclose their pregnancy However, at any point in the interview process, as a corporate employee “who has internalized our existing value system that pregnancy is a liability, a risk and a loss to the company,” Vinik said she feels obligated to do so. Plus, she didn’t want to “ruin the relationship” with recruiters.
After becoming a mother, a marketing executive from New York began showing up for interviews 13 days after giving birth. She says she hasn’t found the perfect job yet, although there have been “several offers, but not the right one yet!”
Instead, Vinik took her career into her own hands and turned to entrepreneurship.
“I was able to quickly build a successful social media consulting practice that allows me to work consistently before and after maternity leave,” she said. Luck. “There are so many women who are struggling just to survive in this situation, I consider myself very lucky.”
Luck contacted Peleton for comment.
“It’s a responsibility”
Vinick’s Mother’s Day post on LinkedIn about how having children affects women’s careers resonated with thousands of users in less than 24 hours.
“I was also unemployed and pregnant,” one user commented. “You described it perfectly. This is terrible, and we are convinced, as you say, that this is a liability. But some of the employees are parents… The only place that hired me when they found out I was pregnant was a diversity and inclusion consulting company.”
“I’ve stopped mentioning that I’m a parent in interviews because, in my experience, interest wanes immediately afterwards,” another added.
Another noted that she had to turn down a job that didn’t allow remote work: “It’s 2024 and we’re still so far behind the mark when it comes to working moms.”
Despite how far the needle seems to have gone for working mothers, managers are even proud homeowners listing in her career at LinkedIn now—many noted that Vinik’s experience highlights that biases are still common and that women are better off hiding their pregnancies from recruiters.
Vinik herself admitted that the continued existence of such prejudices surprised her.
“I was incredibly naive to believe that in 2024 it would finally be possible to become a mother without damaging my career,” Vinik wrote. “I don’t know a single woman whose trajectory hasn’t been affected, temporarily or permanently.”
She called the Labor Club an “amazing resource” for women who have lost their jobs during pregnancy.
The motherhood penalty is alive and well.
It’s no secret that getting a new job is difficult, with candidates constantly complaining about the endless hoops recruits make them go through to prove they’re the perfect fit, from endless rounds of interviews to 90-minute tests and presentations.
However, research consistently shows that for unemployed pregnant women and mothers, there is the added challenge of having to contend with old-fashioned managerial attitudes.
In the UK alone, around a quarter of a million mothers have quit their jobs in recent years due to “outdated and toxic attitudes towards motherhood”, according to equal rights charity the Fawcett Society.
Previously, women told Luck about their experiences of motherhood punishment, including being compared to a broken down race car and being forced to join calls while the baby was bathing.
Plus, pregnant women’s experiences with toxic bias don’t end when their bump goes away—research shows that outdated stereotypes continue to haunt women well into motherhood and have a measurable impact on their long-term trajectory at work.
Princeton University and the London School of Economics collected data from 134 countries and concluded that the motherhood penalty could still affect women’s careers. 10 years after birth.
It’s no surprise that people like Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Allen have admitted to feeling forced to choose between motherhood and career success.