Breast Pumping at Work Makes the Gender Pay Gap Worse

For a breastfeeding mom just returning to work, Sarah Madden has what would be considered the best-case scenario. Her employer, the nonprofit Guidestar, has a brand-new Oakland office with a lactation room that the 36-year-old can duck into whenever she has to pump. The ability to video chat limits her need to travel. And, she describes her co-workers as generally accepting.

Yet, just a couple months back from maternity leave, Madden can already see the “longer-term consequences” breastfeeding can have on her career. She has to leave meetings early; she can’t schedule back-to-back calls all day; she feels pressured to travel more. On a recent conference call, someone called her out for not flying cross-country for the meeting. “I have a baby,” she explained.

Not all women have it as good as Madden, and many working moms feel that they get stigmatized or penalized for breast pumping at work. A new survey shared exclusively with Bloomberg from Aeroflow, a breast pump provider, found that half of the 773 women surveyed had concerns that breastfeeding at work could impact their career growth. Half of the breastfeeding working moms also said they have considered a job or career change.