Kate Winick was five months pregnant and “terrified” when she was laid off from her job at Peloton, she said in a recent LinkedIn post.
She spent the next three months applying for jobs. However, after disclosing her pregnancy to potential employers, she found that they all declined to bring her in for a final interview.
Candidates don’t need to disclose pregnancy during the hiring process, and in fact, it’s illegal at a federal level to refuse to hire someone because they’re pregnant.
To avoid hiring discrimination, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission advises hiring managers not to ask about pregnancy in a job interview altogether.
However, the ex-Peloton director chose to tell her future employers about her pregnancy, as she says she’d internalized the idea pregnancy would mean a loss to the company, but was ensured that it wouldn’t hurt her job prospects.
“Many people (all of them men) told me it would be fine, companies just want to hire the right people, invest in talent for the long term,” she said in the LinkedIn post.
However, despite having over a decade of experience, she found that the advice she received about disclosing her pregnancy didn’t ring true.
“100% of the companies I told went from scheduling interviews to declining to bring me in for a final round,” she wrote.
She found herself subject to what is commonly referred to as the “motherhood penalty,” an umbrella term for the disadvantages women can experience after having children, which encompass pay, promotions, and hiring.
“I was incredibly naive to think that in 2024, it was finally possible to become a mom without taking a hit to your career. I know no woman whose trajectory hasn’t been affected, temporarily or permanently, ” she wrote.
In an email to Business Insider, she added: “We have to stop pretending that being a stay-at-home mom is the default for American families.
“We need policies that support women having both children and careers,” she said.
Research has shown that motherhood can still cause a hit to women’s careers.
Last year, Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics for her 16-year-long research into this topic. She found that of graduates from top MBA schools, female MBA graduates who choose to have children faced more career setbacks than their male counterparts — including less job experience, more career interruptions, and a decline in earnings.
Pregnancy can also present a hurdle for those who have freelance jobs, and have an income reliant on short-term contracts.
For some, remote work during the pandemic presented an opportunity to conceal their pregnancy. Anna Wexler, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, previously told BI that concealing her second pregnancy during the pandemic meant that her career had been less affected than during her first pregnancy.
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