Five years ago, when Katharine Zaleski was a hard-charging manager in the media industry with no kids, she routinely found herself assuming working mothers were less reliable, less focused. Then, she had a child of her own and realized what a dick she was being.
In a piece at Forbes, Zaleski owns up to some of her worst assumptions, and it’s not pretty. In one instance a few years ago, she attended a partnership pitch meeting where she took one look at the many photos of another woman’s kids in her workspace and concluded she was way too into mothering to follow up with. While working at HuffPo and The Washington Post in her mid-twenties, there were more instances. Zaleski writes:
I secretly rolled my eyes at a mother who couldn’t make it to last minute drinks with me and my team. I questioned her “commitment” even though she arrived two hours earlier to work than me and my hungover colleagues the next day.
I didn’t disagree when another female editor said we should hurry up and fire another woman before she “got pregnant.”
I sat in a job interview where a male boss grilled a mother of three and asked her, “How in the world are you going to be able to commit to this job and all your kids at the same time?” I didn’t give her any visual encouragement when the mother – who was a top cable news producer at the time – looked at him and said, “Believe it or not, I like being away from my kids during the workday… just like you.”
I scheduled last minute meetings at 4:30pm all of the time. It didn’t dawn on me that parents might need to pick up their kids at daycare. I was obsessed with the idea of showing my commitment to the job by staying in the office “late” even though I wouldn’t start working until 10:30 am while parents would come in at 8:30 am.
Then, in what you might enjoy as a delicious comeuppance, she had a kid of her own, a daughter, and found herself in the age-old conundrum that stops every new mother in her tracks for at least a moment: How will I be a good mother without shortchanging my career? How will I be a good worker without shortchanging my child?
She writes:
I was now a woman with two choices: go back to work like before and never see my baby; or pull back on my hours and give up the career I’d built over the last ten years. When I looked at my little girl, I knew I didn’t want her to feel trapped like me.
She consulted the existing literature, from Lean In to you-can-never-have-it-all missives, but soon found out neither was super helpful in her situation. Zaleski didn’t want to have to simply adhere to the existing status-quo of a male-dominated work culture to get by now that she had a child—ironically the very thing she expected other mothers to do, and yet still assumed they weren’t doing well enough. She wanted the rules to change to meet her needs and those of other mothers.
While this is, of course, a bit ironic, there is no education quite like experiencing the problem first hand. And who better to get shit done then a new recruit from the dark side? While I was never in a position of power to do anything about whether other mothers I worked with had the resources they needed, I could see how the workplace didn’t exactly do anything to help the misperceptions of them as less reliable, or less ambitious. If you’re the parent who will leave work with a sick child, for instance—and that is often the mother—you may very well seem like someone who will drop your responsibilities at a moment’s notice.
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