Here's the Plan.: Your Practical, Tactical Guide to Advancing Your Career During Pregnancy and Parenthood - Softcover

Allyson Downey is an entrepreneur, writer, and parent who has built a career on the power of trusted advice. In 2013, she launched weeSpring, a Techstars-backed startup that helps new and expecting parents collect advice from their friends about what they need for their baby. weeSpring has received accolades from TechCrunch, Mashable, CNBC, and the Daily Mail, and it was heralded as “Yelp for baby products” by InStyle magazine.

Allyson has an MBA from Columbia Business School, an MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts, and a BA from Colby College. She serves on the board of Democracy Prep Public Schools, one of the country's top charter management organizations, and lives in Boulder with her husband and two children.

A couple years after I finished business school, there was a point at which all of my friends were pregnant. It was like a chain reaction via email: I’m having a baby in January!” Me too!” I’m due in November!” Though it felt like a bizarre coincidence, it shouldn’t have. Having each put in our time and, having established a little professional stability, it made sense that it was time” to start families. (I mention this because a lot of newly pregnant women suddenly feel very alone. It doesn’t help that we’re expectedeven encouragedto keep our pregnancies secret until the end of the first trimester.)

No one talks about pregnancy in professional terms before you get pregnant. You might have a colleague who has taken maternity leave, or you might have done some digging during your interview process to find out what the policies were. But there’s no coursework or formal training in how to keep your career on track when you have a baby. My friend Margo called it the missing class” in our MBA educations. It would have been a lot more practical for me,” she said, than the price elasticity of demand and microeconomic theory. Should we send a note to the dean?”

Many women, for instance, are astonished to find that they aren’t entitled to any paid parental leave after the birth of a child; to get any paid time off they need to cobble together accrued vacation time or sick leave. To really give us time to save enough funds, this information should be shared in high schoolnever mind in college or graduate school.

I certainly was astonished by the experience I encountered when I was pregnant with my first child.

In 2010, I graduated from Columbia Business School with a plum job lined up on Wall Street. I say plum” because I consciously chose it; I had a strong sense of what I wanted, and I researched it carefully before deciding. For one, a commission-driven business-development role appealed to me: generate X revenue for the firm, get paid Y dollars. Since so much of the job was about meeting with clients, I could bend those meetings around my schedule. And because the concept of forced face time (the act of physically being present at the office, to signal that you’re working hard) was less relevant in this position, ducking out for a pediatrician visit or coming in after school drop-off felt very feasible.

Whenever I sat down to meet with a woman in the firm during the interview process, I asked her about balance and family. I raised those questions candidly, whether it was an off-the-record informational session or a formal interview, and I think I received candid answers.

At the time, I talked to every woman I could. Pretty soon after I started my job, I realized I had in fact talked to all of themthat the New York office had only a handful of non-administrative women in a staff of nearly 100. I should have seen that red flag early on: on the day when I received my job offer, two managing directors took me to lunch. After we made all the requisite small talk, they asked me to join the firm, and I asked off-handedly what percentage of the division was female. But while I had requested a number, they answered me in names. Well, there’s ______, ______, _______ in New York and _______ in Boston. We’ve got _______ in San Francisco, and ______ in Chicago.” Now, I don’t think it was an exhaustive list, but they were doing the mental equivalent of counting their (non-secretarial) female employees on their fingers.

I saw this overwhelmingly male culture as a challenge. I was sure I had more mettle than the women who’d come before meI was more tenacious and assertive. I believed that, if I wanted it badly enough, if I worked hard enough, my gender need have nothing to do with my ability to succeed on Wall Street. And I was rightfor a while. The same calculated, meticulous, incessant follow-up that had served me well in previous jobs was starting to work for me in this role, too, and the firm noticed. In one of our quarterly check-ins, the managing director who ran the New York officeessentially my boss’s bosstold me that, in a field with a notoriously high attrition rate, he believed I was their best hope for success out of our incoming MBA class. Soon after, when I announced my pregnancy, I told him I planned to take only six weeks’ maternity leave because I wanted to signal how committed I was to the job.

A couple weeks later my doctorconcerned about pre-term labor, told me, I want you off your feet. You should be working from home 75 percent of the time.” From there I went straight to my office, having emailed my direct manager en route. I packed up my laptop, pulled together documents for face-to-face meetings, got a network-access encryption key from IT, and left. I could make phone calls and send emails from anywhere; this wasn’t going to slow me down. And in fact the first problems I encountered manifested as just red tape details. My encryption key wasn’t working, but IT couldn’t get to it right away, and they didn’t know how to install the phone software I’d need to make calls from home in compliance with company policy. But then, because it looked like I was progressing toward labor, I had a few emergency trips to the hospital. I was 23 weeks pregnant; if you deliver at that gestational stage, there’s only a 10 percent survival rate. If you can get to 24 weeks,” my doctor said, it’s 50 percent.”

I fired off an email to my firm, sending it to both my boss and my HR contact. I explained that I had to be entirely off my feet, but emphasized that I would still like to work from home. I asked to set up some time to discuss logistics. No response. Voicemails I sent to the same effect also got no response. I emailed the managing director who ran the New York office. Silence.

I did this every day for two weeks. I also started Googling employment protection during pregnancy” and how do I find an employment attorney.” Wracked with anxiety, not just about my baby but now also about my job, I asked my doctor what to do. Was I about to lose everything in one fell swoop? Copy me on your emails to them,” she said. Ask them what additional documentation they need.”

Finally a response: I got a call from HR. The HR contact told me simply, On Monday, you should call our insurance provider to initiate your disability leave.” She didn’t present it as a choice or offer me any alternative; the call lasted a few minutes and addressed only the human resource implications. No one asked me what I wanted. No one other than HR talked to me at all. I never heard from my direct manager, or the managing director of the New York officethe one who’d told me how promising my trajectory was. And that was the last day I worked on Wall Street.

When I resigned by phone, I worked to keep my voice level despite feeling like I’d throw up. I explained that I believed I had been the subject of pregnancy discriminationand that I couldn’t imagine returning to a workplace that treated women as I had been treated. I had one request, and that was for an exit interview with a senior managerso I could make sure someone in a decision-making role was aware of my experience.

Taken at 30,000 feet, there’s a fair amount of ambiguity about what exactly I experienced. Were the actions of my firm (or inactions, in this case) discriminatory, or were they more of an indicator of general incompetence or bureaucratic bungling? Why were so few women doing the theoretically family-friendly job I’d signed on for? Was what I’d experienced endemic? Were the men I’d worked with really that oblivious to what it takes to retain female employees? Or did...