In the U.S. workplace, it has taken us most of two decades to concede the obvious: Women are different from men. Working women may be able to do everything that men can do, but they also can do one thing more: have babies. A new fact of corporate life, pregnancy is risky business for working women and their employers. In a country that stands out among industrialized nations for its lack of a national policy on parental leave and child care, it is an issue fraught with uncertainties ranging from parental leave to unresolved legal issues involving health threats posed by new technology.
Some businesses already take it in stride; others stumble painfully. But no matter how it is handled, it remains an area marked by a sense of potential liability on the part of employers and possible penalty for women employees.
”Particularly with the older generation-although perhaps not so much with the younger generation-it`s still difficult to see a pregnant woman in an office situation. They perceive it as unnatural,” says Alfonso Duarte, a partner and vice president of Korn/Ferry, an international executive search company. ”It`s almost subconscious that you have to protect this person, so you set up almost a second-class relationship with her. It`s not equal-to-equal anymore.”
Employers, he says, begin to worry: Can she travel? Can she work the long hours? Will she quit?
`THEY`VE BEEN BURNED`
As one executive put it: ”There are extremes that cause employers to be more rigid than they ought to be because they`ve been burned-the `burning`
being by professional women in key jobs who assure them that they will return to work and fail to do so. Unfortunately, this may be the result of company policies that make it difficult for women to tell the truth for fear of losing company maternity benefits.”
Nowhere is this sense more acute than in the professional ranks, where women are relative newcomers. At no point in history have so many women held high-level, high-paying jobs. And because many of them put off having children and are now in their 30s, never have so many babies been born to female executives.
With no precedent to guide them, professional women and their employers are struggling to chart policies, procedures, clear expectations. And there is plenty of ambivalence and trepidation.
Long trained to avoid any mention of gender, many employers are uncomfortable addressing the practical aspects of pregnancy and motherhood on the job, but harbor doubts about the impact on a high-performing woman`s career and her contribution to the business.
TOWARD THE UNKNOWN
Women themselves, after 20 years of aggressively denying gender differences in a bid for equality, are ambivalent about how to handle this undeniable evidence of their femininity. Heiresses to a feminist era when an admission of femininity translated as an admission of weakness, they fear that pregnancy and motherhood may call their competency and commitment into question and, in the eyes of superiors and peers, sabotage their future success.
In some cases, they`re right.
Despite the Federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978-which makes it illegal for employers to treat pregnant women any differently than other employees; to refuse to hire or promote women because they are pregnant; to fire them if they become pregnant; or to force them to take maternity leave if they are able to stay on the job-traditional attitudes die hard.
Moreover, charges of discrimination based on the law can be difficult to prove, particularly in the case of professional women, says Chicago lawyer Joel Sprayregen, who recently took on the case of a lawyer in a large firm who claimed that ”from the time of her marriage, accelerating through the time of her pregnancy, she received less and less work and was frozen out.”
In other cases, fears may be groundless, as Karen Kessler, vice president of communications at the American Stock Exchange, discovered. Kessler recalls that the job she currently holds was about to become available before she had told anyone that she was pregnant with her daughter, now 15 months old. Kessler knew she was a candidate for the job, but was concerned that ”the fact I was pregnant might take me out of the running.”
TAKING IT IN STRIDE
When she told them, however, they took her pregnancy in stride. ”When I was 5 1/2 months pregnant, they made the decision and I got the job,” she says. ”I think women in general underestimate the people they work with.”
In any event, no law can change the way people think.
Although prospective employers are careful not to articulate these sentiments, Korn/Ferry`s Duarte says, the prospect of motherhood can be a specter hovering over the resume of ”any woman from the early 30s on, who is married. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it`s got to. They want to know: Is she for real?” What they mean by that is: Is she serious about her career? No matter that many women must and do return to work, as evinced by such statistics as 55 percent of all children under 6 have working mothers. ”Our conceptual frameworks haven`t caught up with the sociological reality,” says Christine Littleton, a professor at UCLA School of Law with a specialty in reproductivity and the law.
Experts are convinced that eventually economic reality will raise the most stubborn subconscious. In fact, business is fast approaching the point that, from a purely economic point of view, employers will not be able to afford the loss in training and experience represented by derailment of women`s careers because of childbearing.
Between now and the year 2000, more than 60 percent of all new entrants in the U.S. labor force will be women. By then, 68 percent of all working women will be of childbearing age. According to Census Bureau projections, between 80 and 85 percent of them will have a child at some point in their working lives.
A SPLIT COMMITMENT
”I think one of the fears employers have is that a woman with a new baby may be less emotionally committed to her career, that she may be more devoted to her family than to that career,” says Margaret Meiers, a senior associate at Catalyst, a national research and advisory organization dedicated to helping corporations foster the career and leadership development of women.
”I think there`s no question that having a baby will have an impact on a woman`s career and, probably, at least cause it to slow down. But we`re reaching the point where it may not necessarily mean derailment.”
No working mother interviewed for this story disputed that having a child necessitates a reordering of priorities, but many found the commitment question spurious, if not outright laughable.
”Do you know how committed you have to be to have two small children and still come to work and do the kind of work we do? That`s commitment,” says Rochelle Dyme, a partner in a Chicago law firm and mother of two.
