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To tell or not to tell?
Despite all the talk of family-friendly policies, despite the growing number of working mothers, despite long-standing antidiscrimination laws, working women still agonize over whether, when and how to tell employers or potential employers about impending motherhood.
Nancy Kaplan, a 33-year-old Boston lawyer, remembers wearing oversized jackets and loose -- but not ''maternity'' -- dresses as her pregnancy progessed and her anxiety grew: Would her colleagues think she was shirking her duties when they learned she would need maternity leave? Would her boss? How would the law firm's eight-member staff manage without her?
''I kept waiting and waiting for the right time,'' said Kaplan. ''I was so concerned they would be upset. There never seemed to be the right time to tell.''
When she finally did, Kaplan was pleasantly surprised: ''They thought it was wonderful news.''
Not everyone is so lucky.
The number of pregnancy-related complaints filed with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission rose from 3,000 in 1991 to 4,170 in 1994. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination reports that its most- frequently-asked questions concern maternity leave and pregnant workers' rights.
Mary Iodice is among those who called the state agency. The Framingham woman had been a bookkeeper at a small firm -- Motor Parts Inc. in Wellesley -- for four years when she became pregnant in 1985. After training a temporary worker to do her job, she went out on maternity leave. Six weeks later, she learned that she had been permanently replaced.
Last year, the MCAD ordered Motor Parts to pay Iodice $36,000 in damages. Today, however, she is still smarting.
''This was a situation where I got along fine with my boss until I told him I was pregnant,'' said Iodice, 34. ''After he found out, there were comments like, 'It's too bad, we were doing so well. It's too bad. Now, I have to find someone else.' ''
Other women note that bias need not be so blunt or so obviously illegal. Indeed, the subtler forms may be more pervasive: the woman who reveals her pregnancy and loses a coveted promotion or perk; the job candidate who topples from the top contender spot after arriving in a maternity suit; the executive who becomes an unwilling nominee for the Mommy Track.
Asked whether a job seeker should reveal her pregnancy to a prospective boss, Boston employment lawyer Ellen Messing was emphatic. ''I wouldn't,'' she said.
Consider the case of a Boston area professor who, even now, does not want her name used.
Fearing that baby talk would scuttle any chance of getting a job, she kept her plans to start a family secret until she had secured a teaching post at a Massachusetts university.
After giving birth to her first child more than a year later, she took only a brief leave and returned to find a department that fully expected to support and accommodate her -- all the way back to the nursery.
''There was the assumption that I couldn't do it, that I wouldn't be able to cope,'' the woman said. ''The attitude was: 'When she can't do it anymore, we'll all figure out a graceful exit.' ''
She didn't exit, but managed to beat back the Mommy Track expectations and went on to become a full professor.
''There is this sort of madonna and child image of working mothers,'' she said recently. ''Once you become pregnant and have a child, they can't see you in any other light.''
''Technically, employers cannot discriminate, but let's face it,'' said Ellen Kossek, a human resources specialist at Michigan State University, ''if two people are vying for a job and one is pregnant or planning to start a family and the other is not, who is more likely to get it? That kind of thing is still a big, big worry for many women.''
Specialists say pregnancy discrimination is probably more prevalent in small firms than in large: ''Filling in'' is a bigger problem, and employers are less savvy about discrimination law.
Two years ago, for instance, the MCAD ordered Reynolds Brothers Inc., a small construction firm in Canton, to pay $70,000 in damages to Patricia Vance of Mansfield. Vance was fired in 1987, three months after she revealed that she was pregnant.
''The company claimed I was not performing my duties satisfactorily, but I had gotten a big bonus just before Christmas break and I was a good employee,'' said Vance, 35. ''The whole thing was incredible.''
When the Families and Work Institute of New York surveyed the executives of several companies about maternity and family leaves last year, it found that 15 percent considered them too expensive and problematic.
The group also found ''the major predictor of a supervisor being supportive of family issues'' to be, not gender, but ''whether or not that person had children or elder care responsibilities,'' said Ellen Galinsky, co-president of the institute.
''Some women managers were no more supportive than men. Having not had the experience, they couldn't empathize, or they were suffering from selective amnesia and couldn't remember ever having the experience at all.''
Roderick Fox, a senior vice president of employer services at Associated Industries of Massachusetts, a trade association representing 3,400 companies, doesn't defend discrimination but does request a little more sympathy for employers.
''If a person can't work for any reason, pregnancy or whatever, somebody else has to pick up that workload,'' he said. ''Certainly, a smaller employer with less people to spread the work around has a bigger burden.'' Fox believes the situation will improve as more women demonstrate that they can perform the job as they had before motherhood and as more return to work after maternity leaves.
''Employers want to know: 'Is she going to be absent a lot? Can I get the work accomplished in her absence?' It's a business issue, not a personal one,'' said Fox. ''Having someone out and absent only increases the pressures on everyone else.''
Add to those practical considerations a welter of societal assumptions built up over centuries when a woman's place was in the home.
In the words of Jane Fountain, a professor of organizational behavior at the John F. Kennedy School of Government: ''There is a wide gap between the policies meaningful people put in place and the images and assumptions people walk around with.''
One professional complained that when she revealed her pregnancy, people at work became overly solicitous, as if she were no longer capable of managing her work. Assuming she did not want to travel, her supervisor removed her name from a list of employees who had been cleared to participate in an event out of town. Without consulting her, he assumed that she wanted a lighter, more flexible workload.
Mary Jane Stirgwolt knows all about assumptions.
This spring, Gov. Weld nominated the 40-year-old Salem city councilor to a $65,000-a-year post as Essex County register of probate. When her name came up for confirmation by the Governor's Council, she was 8 months pregnant.
''What are you? Superman?'' asked Dr. David Constantine of New Bedford. ''The most important thing is that little baby and that family. . . . I think you're over-demanding yourself.''
The 57-year-old Constantine says he was not questioning Stirgwolt's ability to do the job, just the 16-hour days she would be required to worked if appointed to the new position.
''I had no problems with an eight hours-a-day job. But with that job and the Salem City Council position, she would be working 16 hours. That's a lot of work, a lot of hours,'' Constantine said. ''I don't even know many men who do that.''
Stirgwolt, who gave birth to a daughter last month, didn't see it that way.
''If I'd had the interview a few months before the eighth month or a couple of weeks later, this issue would never have come up,'' she said. ''Would I have mentioned it? I wouldn't have because I don't think pregnancy speaks to the ability to do the job. . . . What this forced me to realize is that decisions are not always made on merit.''
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