A few cracks in the Baby Bump Ceiling

In recent months, three exceptionally prominent female journalists with large TV followings appeared on the air visibly pregnant and worked right up to their delivery dates. 

Margaret Brennan of Face the Nation, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur, and Kasie Hunt — a political correspondent and host of MSNBC’s weekly program Kasie DC — did not leave TV when their pregnancies became very evident.

Perhaps most remarkably, Face the Nation, the largest of all Sunday public affairs programs, which in 2017 had an average of 3.538 million viewers, broke all the rules. The network hired Brennan, a CBS News senior affairs correspondent, to replace John Dickerson as anchor while she was expecting. Just two months after her hiring was made public, Brennan announced that she was five months pregnant with her first child.  

Until recently, viewers almost never saw visibly pregnant women broadcasting news on television — much less heading up a major Sunday network news show. The Baby Bump Ceiling was very real for women. Will these three cracks in that ceiling put a dent in a harmful stereotype? Maybe so. 

The rap on women employees is that once they have children, their loyalty to their jobs takes a body blow. Men who become parents don’t have to face this kind of scrutiny.

Just being of reproductive age puts a woman in a precarious position when it comes to being hired. In fact, females of that age face obstacles to being hired even if they are neither pregnant nor even married. In reviewing the research, Time reports, “Just being a woman of a certain age may mean we’re on the receiving end of the unspoken thought: ‘Well, she might have a baby soon.’” 

Restrictions on the employment of pregnant women have a long history in this country. In 1908, the Supreme Court upheld the limiting of women to 10-hour workdays. The reason? “As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical wellbeing of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race.”

Even more restrictions were in place in the 1950s and 1960s. As Livia Gershon writes in Jstor Daily, “Laws promising to protect women by discriminating against them in the workplace became common, and it was only in 1964, with the passage of Title VII of the Federal Civil Rights Act that they were invalidated. But, even then, it was unclear how actual pregnancies should be treated.”

Pregnancy and motherhood continue to be stumbling blocks for women at work, thanks to the cultural stereotypes that mothers can’t be good workers. Men, on the other hand, get a bonus from fatherhood. Sociologist Michelle Budig, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, an expert on the parenthood pay gap, found that men’s earnings increased more than 6 percent when they had children. But women’s pay decreased 4 percent for each child they had.

In a classic study, Cornell sociologists Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and Ian Paik asked male and female subjects to rate application materials for pairs of fictitious job applicants who were equally qualified but differed on parental status. Both males and females rated mothers as less competent; less committed; less suitable for hire, promotion, and management training; and more deserving of lower salaries than females who were not mothers and than males, regardless of their parental status.

Even in high-paying fields, mothers are stigmatized as not being up to the challenge. Louise Marie Roth studied gender inequality on Wall Street for her book, Selling Women Short. She notes that since all women are expected to be mothers at some point, their devotion to their careers is viewed with suspicion. As a result, women are often not considered for career-building assignments, just because they might have children. When they did become mothers, managers and peers believed that they had less commitment to their jobs — despite the fact that these women did not significantly cut back their work hours. “Mothers received an average of 53 percent as much money as fathers while working 92 percent as many hours.”

A report in The New York Times underlines the problem. Natalie Chertoff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg write, “Whether women work at Walmart or on Wall Street, getting pregnant is often the moment they are knocked off the professional ladder. Throughout the American workplace, pregnancy discrimination remains widespread. It can start as soon as a woman is showing, and it often lasts through her early years as a mother.”

The Times reviewed “thousands of pages of court and public records and interviewed dozens of women, their lawyers and government officials. A clear pattern emerged. Many of the country’s largest and most prestigious companies still systematically sideline pregnant women. They pass them over for promotions and raises. They fire them when they complain.”

The three journalists whose pregnancies were clearly visible on television broke ground simply by being seen. But they also defied the stereotype that mothers are not suited for high-level jobs. 

Katy Tur, during the last weeks of her pregnancy, partnered with her NBC colleague Jacob Soboroff on a four-part MSNBC documentary series American Swamp, which launched on Sunday, July 28, three months after she gave birth to her son. Variety noted, “In the first broadcast, Tur and Soboroff journey to Arizona and Montana to look at how big money influences local elections. In another, they examine who has influence at Mar-A-Lago, the Florida club controlled by President Donald Trump.”

As for Margaret Brennan, before the birth, and now, she is the only woman serving as a solo anchor of a major Sunday political affairs show. Face the Nation continues to battle for the top spot among the Sunday shows.

MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt gave birth to her first child, a boy, in September. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “While it’s still early days, Hunt’s show, Kasie DC ... has increased the network's ratings 16 percent in the time slot from the same quarter last year, beating out CNN (809,000 total viewers vs. 611,000) but losing to Fox News, which attracts 1.13 million viewers.”

Hunt’s visible pregnancy garnered her praise from fellow news reporters, but also some unfriendly and hostile comments. According to Today.com, she “had the perfect answer to someone on Twitter who asked her why she was ‘getting so fat.’” 

“‘I’m 8 months pregnant?’ she tweeted. Her response quickly went viral, racking up more than 65,000 likes and retweets.”

Of course, the high-powered women on TV had access to resources not readily available to the average mother. Tur had a difficult unplanned cesarean section and the incision became infected. Delivery and post-delivery complications were challenging. Moreover, noted USA Today, she had “a host of unexpected issues occurring after giving birth, including struggling to breastfeed and having to get a psychiatric evaluation.”

Fortunately, her high-profile position brought with it generous maternity benefits. Moreover, thanks to her husband’s paid paternity leave benefits, he was able to be home.

Almost five months after the birth, Tur returned to her co-anchor post at MSNBC Live. Since then, she has been a prominent and strong voice in support of better paid parental-leave policies. She said upon her return: “It is insane that 25% of women go back to work after two weeks — two weeks! — and I think it’s insane that seven out of 10 men go back after 10 days or less.”

Even though they had more support systems than most, the trio showed the viewing audience that being extremely pregnant was not the end of the road for their careers. And that motherhood has not curtailed their ambitions or their ability to perform.

These small cracks in the Baby Bump Ceiling may help to put more fissures in the harmful stereotypes about the capabilities of pregnant women and new mothers. Maybe, as these stereotypes are eroded, biases and assumptions about workers who are pregnant or who are mothers will also diminish.