Mita Mallick was barely a month into her parental leave when she got a call from a friend. “I’m thinking she’s calling to check in on me, and we’re having a nice conversation,” Mallick recounts. Then she asked a question that took Mallick by surprise: So are you not going back to work?
Her friend revealed that Mallick’s employer—a large, recognizable public company with a generous five-month leave policy—had posted her job. “I felt like the floor fell out from under me,” Mallick says. “I was just devastated and felt so betrayed.”
Before going on leave, Mallick had already lost out on a promotion that failed to materialize once she became pregnant. She started looking for another job—while freshly postpartum—and never ended up returning to that company.
A few years later, when Mallick was having another baby, she was more prepared. She was up for a promotion and hid her pregnancy for as long as possible. When she was eventually forced to disclose the pregnancy, she went from being a front-runner to being out of the running. Suddenly she was being asked questions like: Why are you in such a rush to get promoted?
When she returned to work after nearly six months of leave, she was given the lowest possible performance rating because the business “fell off a cliff.” She later found out that she wasn’t the only person who had effectively been punished for going on leave.
In the years since Mallick’s brushes with pregnancy bias, parental leave policies have only grown more generous, with some major companies such as Starbucks even extending those benefits to hourly employees. The legal landscape, too, has become much more pro-parent.
And yet, pregnancy discrimination remains pervasive, even as parental leave has become a crucial recruitment tool across corporate America.
Since the beginning of 2026—well before Deloitte and Zoom quietly started cutting back on their leave policies—I’ve been seeking to chronicle how parents, mostly women, are being punished for using a corporate benefit that may well have been the reason they wanted to work at a particular employer in the first place.
- How has parental leave, a policy that research shows reduces turnover and improves retention, been weaponized?
- Why would companies willfully ignore yet more studies which show that generous leave presents little downside for companies, as they tend to absorb the costs of employees going on leave without any significant shifts in output and profitability?
- What leads companies with some of the most progressive policies to fail to adequately support employees who go out on leave?
- Why are some unceremoniously fired before they can even take their leave, particularly at layoff-prone tech companies?
- When women return to work after leave, how is that it’s not uncommon to face subtle—or even pointed—discrimination that can upend their career or trajectory at a company?
For the most part, we have come a long way since the days of women being fired for the mere act of getting pregnant. What happens these days tends to be more subtle, and companies usually find a “legitimate business reason” for the decision, as Joan Williams, a professor at UC Law San Francisco and the founding director of the Equality Action Center, tells me.
In speaking with working mothers and lawyers who have seen firsthand how leave policies can fall short—as well as experts and advocates who are trying to help companies find a better way—it becomes clear that the more common experience, documented in accounts across social media and in lawsuits that have emerged in the last few years, is that workers who take leave face some career repercussions.
Below, I’ll explore why, share some of the most remarkable cases that epitomize this worrying trend, and reveal the four things companies should do if they actually want to support working parents.
As you’ll see, Mallick’s experiences are not an anomaly.
The damning data on rising pregnancy discrimination
The legal and regulatory environment for parental leave has never been better:
- Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have now implemented mandatory paid leave.
- The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) took effect in 2023 after a decade of advocacy, providing hard-won protections and clearer legal recourse for pregnant workers.
- The PWFA was enacted alongside the PUMP Act (Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers), which secured break time for breastfeeding workers to pump, along with access to a private space that did not double as a storage closet or bathroom.
- The very Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that has fixated on so-called anti-white discrimination has also pursued cases that seek justice for pregnant workers.
Despite these new frameworks, there’s rising evidence of the system failing its intended purpose:
- In a 2022 study, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 20% of mothers had faced pregnancy discrimination in the workplace.
- Since the PWFA took effect, the EEOC has seen a growing number of pregnancy-related claims. During fiscal year 2025, nearly half of the 94 lawsuits pursued by the EEOC involved pregnancy discrimination claims.
- A 2024 survey by Parentaly, a parental leave support platform, revealed that women with access to robust paid leave were the most concerned about the potential impact on their career.
- About 45% of women said their leave had negative repercussions.
- People who took around six months of leave were less likely to get a raise or get a promotion within 18 months of returning to work.
- Even the fear of discrimination can prove damaging: The Bipartisan Policy Center found that a quarter of women had considered leaving their jobs due to a lack of accommodations or concerns about pregnancy bias.
Employers are all too aware that parental leave can be a major selling point, which is why companies like Salesforce and Patagonia boast about their policies. At the same time, companies have reversed remote work policies and mandated that workers return to the office, to the detriment of working mothers and parents who benefited greatly from the flexibility of working from home. Employers seemed eager to invest in family-friendly benefits when they were jockeying for talent in a tight labor market—but they appear less motivated now that they have the upper hand.
Take Netflix, which was once known for an exceedingly generous policy that allowed people to take up to a year of leave. Now, the company reportedly discourages employees from taking more than six months.
Indeed, paid leave policies have fluctuated in 2025, according to an annual benefits survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.
- 2024: 33% of employers offered paid leave to care for immediate family.
- 2025: 31% of employers offered paid leave to care for immediate family.
The current political environment may also give employers more cover to act with impunity, whether that means cutting leave policies or dismissing working mothers without fear of reprisal. President Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), enshrined in executive orders, have relieved federal contractors of their obligations to conduct pay equity audits that helped prevent discrimination against women or people of color.
As corporate America has gone quiet on DEI—largely driven by the threat of legal action—some employers have already cut back on career development programs for women, according to a report published by Lean In and McKinsey in December. Big tech companies like Meta and Google have hit pause on diversity reports that publicly disclosed their progress on hiring and retaining women, along with DEI programs intended to boost representation in leadership and technical roles.
“The question in my mind is whether the whole assault on diversity and inclusion by the Trump administration is creating a climate of permission for some of the bad old ways to come back,” says UC Law SF’s Williams. “You don’t have to read many tea leaves to understand that.”
The consequences of taking leave
The cuts some companies are making to parental leave are selective; Deloitte reduced leave only for back-office workers and support staff. “It’s not decreasing parental leave for the professional managerial elite,” Williams says. “That’s just unbelievable—that a rich company like Deloitte would choose to do that.” (In a statement to Fast Company, a Deloitte spokesperson said the company was “modernizing its talent architecture to provide a more tailored experience reflective of our professionals’ broad range of skills and the work they do serving our clients. Benefits are regularly updated and will be tailored for a small subset of professionals to better align with the marketplace.”)
In the corporate world, the kind of bias that derails careers is often more insidious, striking after employees announce a pregnancy or return from leave—even at companies that tout their leave policies or benefits for working parents. Women are passed over for promotions or quietly pushed out. Someone covers their responsibilities while they’re on leave, and then their scope suddenly changes when back from leave. It’s not unusual for women to decamp for another job after going on leave, often because of a negative experience.
When Beth Wanner lost her job after 15 years as a marketing executive in tech, she scrambled to find something new—no easy feat when she also happened to be newly pregnant. Wanner— now the founder and CEO of the leave coverage agency Mother Cover, which helps companies backfill roles while employees are on parental leave—couldn’t fathom being knocked out of the workforce for well over a year. That meant she had to find a new role before the baby arrived.
“I was always nervous about what starting a family was going to mean,” she says. “But I think I was very naive to what those pressures were.” She was eventually hired into a new role, albeit not for very long. “I told them I was pregnant, and they did not hide at all how upset they were, saying ‘Why did you choose us?’ and talking about how they put their blood, sweat, and tears into this company,” Wanner adds. “[They were] almost insinuating that me being there and taking leave was going to damage the company.”
The company had a progressive parental leave policy: four months fully paid and an additional four months unpaid. But Wanner was the first female executive at the company and would have been the first to go out on parental leave. Due to medical complications that put her at risk of a hemorrhage, she told her employer that she would have to start her leave a few weeks earlier than planned. She was fired three business days later—when she was eight months pregnant—and has been pursuing legal action for the last three years.
The motherhood penalty
“I’ve definitely seen more of the motherhood penalty,” says Cara Greene, a partner at the workers’ rights law firm Outten & Golden. “The first leave—maybe there’s not resentment or penalization around it. But when a woman takes a second leave or third leave, then it starts to engender hostility.”
The shift can be gradual and may not happen immediately after an employee returns from leave. “Instead of it being a month after your leave, it’s more like a year,” says Greene, whose cases typically address workplace discrimination. “It’s long enough for the biases to have really seeped in, but also for [employers] to have created a record to substantiate the decisions that they’re making.”
Jack Tuckner, an employment lawyer, believes that despite the passage of critical laws like the PWFA, not much has improved—at least not yet. “I’ve been seeing these same types of cases for a quarter century now, and it seems that nothing ever changes,” says Tuckner, who frequently represents clients who face gender bias and especially pregnancy discrimination. “If anything, it’s all getting worse.” Tuckner points to an HR executive he is representing, whose replacement effectively took over her job while she was out, leaving her in a diminished role.
When I previously wrote about tech workers who had been impacted by layoffs while pregnant or on leave, some of them suspected that they had been marked for layoffs in part because they were not working for part of the year. Tuckner says this has happened more frequently as tech companies have made sweeping, recurring job cuts, likely because they are increasingly using AI to make layoff determinations.
In his experience, the companies typically agree to pay more severance to stave off a lawsuit.
Weaponizing the performance review
A lawsuit brought against Deloitte this year suggests this might be a symptom of a larger issue, in part because of how performance is appraised at many companies.
Joanne Barela, a former human capital consultant who worked at Deloitte for 13 years, sued the firm over claims that she had been penalized in her performance reviews after going on parental leave. In 2024, Microsoft settled a similar case with the California Civil Rights Department for more than $14 million, which determined workers had allegedly faced retaliation and discrimination for taking protected leave.
In her capacity as an HR executive and advisor to companies, Mallick has also found that it’s not unusual for to see employees who return from leave get penalized when performance reviews come around. “Especially at large companies, when you’re doing things on a bell curve, it can be unintentional,” she says. “That’s when bias creeps up—and then all of a sudden, you’ve [given] all the women who are on leave the lowest possible rating.”
During her tenure at Deloitte, Barela had been promoted three times and consistently received high performance ratings. But her ratings were lower during the two years that she went on parental leave, and she was eventually laid off—a decision that the suit claims was informed by performance metrics.
These performance assessments are described in the suit as the primary reason that determines whether someone gets a raise or bonus. Barela’s lawyers have connected with a number of women who say their performance ratings were docked after going on leave, and the suit is now a proposed class action. It alleges that Deloitte unfairly evaluated people who went on leave against those who had worked the full year. (When reached for comment, Deloitte denied the claims in the suit. “We vehemently disagree with the allegations in the complaint and intend to defend ourselves vigorously,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We are committed to nondiscrimination and are confident we will prevail based on the facts.”)
“We’ve heard of some women who were terminated and others who felt like they got less compensation—and some who felt both, like Joanne,” says James Finberg, who is representing Barela in her case against Deloitte. As with other employers, it seems Deloitte thought that simply expanding parental leave benefits was enough to ensure workers would get the support they needed. “I think Deloitte touts itself as being generous,” Finberg says. “And yet, we’ve had a woman say that when she told her manager that she took the full amount the company offered, the manager was very surprised.”
A persistent stigma
You might expect that standardized leave policies would help alleviate the disproportionate impact of this kind of discrimination on women. But even when a company offers generous leave for all employees who have a child, regardless of gender or family structure, workers still don’t always take the entire leave they are entitled to—and there is a persistent stigma around men in particular.
Despite the shift in access to paid leave, utilization among men remains lower, and many men worry about how they will be perceived for going on leave. In a 2025 study conducted by Northwestern University, nearly two thirds of men said they took less than two weeks of leave. And while U.S. Census survey data shows that the number of men taking any parental leave has markedly increased since 1994, women are still more likely to use their full leave. In the 12 weeks after their baby was born, half of mothers took paid parental leave, while just a third of fathers did so; women were also far more likely to take time off without pay, with one third of them going on unpaid leave as compared to 13% of men.
John Mullan, another lawyer representing Barela in her case against Deloitte, says he is seeing a “constant stream of exemplars” when it comes to men who face consequences at work for taking leave. That can include people who return from paternity leave and “suddenly [find] themselves getting a negative performance evaluation,” he says, or those who get targeted by a small reduction in force that “doesn’t make business sense to them.”
It’s also yet another glaring sign that access to parental leave should not be left to the whims of private employers. But without a federal policy that gives all parents access to paid leave, there’s little hope that this culture will meaningfully shift anytime soon. “I think that cultural bias against it really discourages and chills a lot of men from taking the full leave,” says Greene at Outten & Golden. “Certainly, I’ve seen the case where men do take the full leave, and then there’s almost ridicule around [it]. For me, that is gutting because it’s only when men start to fully engage and be equal caregivers and take equal leaves that the penalty against women for doing so is going to be minimized.”
The role employers should play
If companies care to retain some of their best talent—if for no other reason than their bottom line—then they can and should take measures to ensure they don’t drive away working parents. In a 2025 KPMG study, about three quarters of working parents said having children boosted their motivation in the workplace. But over half of them also expressed that it was challenging to balance childcare responsibilities with work expectations.
“If we can help companies deal with the real logistical challenges that come with a key member stepping out, we can chip away at some of those unconscious biases that lead to discrimination,” says Wanner at Mother Cover. “I don’t believe that most companies and leaders set out to not support parents. But I think those ingrained thoughts of: ‘This is actually really tough for my company,’ or ‘how will I operationalize this?’ is where leave policy doesn’t go far enough. We need concrete plans for how somebody goes on leave.
Have a plan
Not having a real plan to manage employees who go on leave is itself a plan, she argues. “We think that they’re not going to come back, so we don’t support them,” Wanner says. “We don’t put in the right processes, and then they leave, and then we say: ‘Oh, see, we were right.’”
As founder and CEO of Sparrow, a tech platform that helps HR teams manage their leave policies, Deborah Hanus has seen countless edge cases that illustrate why companies should be extraordinarily thoughtful and specific about how they navigate different leave scenarios. “I think sometimes people think of leave as if it’s just a compliance thing,” Hanus says. “Over a couple of years, it can actually affect quite a large portion of your workforce, and people talk about their experiences.”
Re-onboard employees
One of the simplest things companies can do differently is implementing a clear return-to-work program and essentially re-onboarding employees when they are back from leave. (Some companies have adopted ramp-up policies that allow employees to make a more gradual, part-time return to work.)
Parental leave coaching of some kind can be beneficial to employees and companies, especially for first-time parents who may be very committed to working but also cannot fully anticipate how they will feel upon their return.
Some employers have come up with creative arrangements to address this issue: A few years ago, the baby formula startup Bobbie started allowing parents to take eight additional months of leave without pay, stacked on top of four months of paid leave. The company’s founders hoped a more flexible approach to parental leave would enable a smoother reentry to work for new parents—and they even published their policy to encourage other companies to reevaluate their own programs.
Redefine performance reviews
Hanus also believes companies should have a clear policy on how they manage performance reviews for people who go on leave. “I’ve talked to some companies that are thinking about this, where they say: Just default to ‘meets expectations,’” she says. “I actually think it’s even better to do an average of the last two performance ratings.”
Mallick, the HR exec whose employer posted her job while she was on parental leave, suggests conducting a performance review before someone even goes on leave. The idea is that people may miss a performance management cycle while they are out.
Train managers to support parents
Perhaps the most critical thing companies can do differently, however, is training their managers adequately—or managers may have to take the lead themselves, in the absence of company policies that support new parents. “They’re going to be the first line of defense,” Hanus says. “Usually, people tell their manager and then HR. Sometimes it’s a situation they haven’t seen; they don’t know how to handle it. And even in the process of trying to be empathetic, you can say some things you’re not supposed to say.”
At a moment when employers are divesting from diversity programs and fearful of scrutiny, Hanus argues there is still value in analyzing demographic data to ensure you aren’t inadvertently discriminating against working parents. “You don’t know if you’re consistently managing out caregivers, if you don’t know who’s a caregiver,” she says. “But that is something that most companies aren’t tracking.”
There’s little evidence, for example, that women simply drop out of the workforce after having a baby, even as employment figures indicate that the share of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dipped by three percentage points in the first half of 2025—a trend that should scare corporate leaders, as many women grapple with competing pressures. More often than not, those employees leave for another job, or because they don’t feel valued upon returning to work.
“In my experience, how you’re treated when you’re heading out for leave, or when you’re on leave, will dictate whether you return or not, and I see this pattern over and over again,” Mallick says. “I always say: No one gave you permission to slow down my career. So why are you making these choices for me?”
