VP, Brand at Electronic Arts, Elle McCarthy, on pregnancy, internalised guilt, speaking up as a leader and breaking societal norms
It’s over a decade ago, I’ve just joined a new agency and he’s asked me to go for a drink with him, saying he takes all new starters out to get to know them better. I’m thrilled at the chance to impress and have written down some ideas I want to talk to him about. I’ve brought my notebook with me, which sits limply unopened on the sticky Marylebone pub table. “Boyfriend?”, I answer yes, we’ve just moved in together. “Oh dear”, he says, “You’re not planning on having babies any time soon are you?”. I answer no too quickly. Why did I answer that? How could I not have? What if I had said yes?... I try to bring the conversation back around to work, he glazes over and orders another round, “Gin and tonic for my companion.”
I didn’t know then that him asking the question was an HR violation - or that his interest was actually because he would later sexually harass me until I left. At the time I received a message loud and clear - this man, in his power, felt that he had a right to my decisions about my body because I worked for him.
Over a decade later, I’m 7 weeks pregnant after trying for a long time. I haven’t told anyone yet, despite being in a role where I feel valued for what I do. I’m on a call with a colleague when suddenly I start bleeding. I say, “A family member is calling me, I’m sorry, it’s urgent” and of course he says, “Please, go, take the call”. A blurry trip to the ER where my husband and I are convinced it’s all over, ends with a doctor discharging us. She shoves a piece of paper into my hand, “Don’t mind what it says, you’ll probably be fine but we have to write this. We will see what happens in a few days”.
The luminous orange form they discharge me with reads in all caps: THREATENED ABORTION. PUT NOTHING UP THE VAGINA.
The next day, shaken and exhausted, I’m back at work, unsure what to make of mine or my baby’s prognosis, and still bleeding. It takes a week to get confirmation of a healthy heartbeat and we continue to take things day by day. I tell my colleagues I’m expecting a few weeks later, which is still earlier than is advised. They are happy for me and supportive. From that moment I give myself more off-camera time when I need it.
At the twenty week scan I’m given a devastating diagnosis and have to take two days off to take hospital tests. It turns out to be a false alarm.
My body is a hot mess and my nerves are shot to bits but I still feel guilty every time I take time away from work for anything associated with my pregnancy.
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First and Second Wave Feminists before us fought hard to be seen and treated equally, but that sometimes meant masking what they were going through, assimilating despite having different needs. And to my surprise, I catch myself doing the same. This comes in part from the toxic interactions I’ve had, like the anecdote about my old boss. It also comes from society constantly sending women messages we can’t help but absorb. For example, the state-backed maternity leave policy in California is more liberal than most. But still, women are given six weeks protected leave for a vaginal birth, and eight weeks for a c-section, as though these are the greatest variable factors rather than being just two amongst many others; delivering pre-term, tearing, the baby’s health, postnatal depression, support level and more.
For many in the LGBTQ+ community, up until recently, workplaces didn’t account for their reproductive rights at all. One story shared with me by a woman took my breath away:
“It’s been 7 years but I recall when I needed to take time off for the birth of my new baby from the ad agency I worked at and they only provided me one week paid of 'bereavement leave'. My wife carried and gave birth to our son and there wasn’t a policy in place for same sex partners and parental leave at the time. I imagine their policies have changed since then as government policies have changed, but still it’s not that long ago and still shocks me to this day that they only offered me a week off and that bereavement leave is the only available category to indicate why I was taking the time off. I took a month unpaid just so I could actually be home.”
The language ‘bereavement’ relating to its opposite event: a birth - is so disturbing and dehumanizing. The fact that the company didn’t have a policy in place at all for non cis-gender couples is far worse.
Why doesn't the US have paid parental leave?
This is good in theory because it decodes parents from the binary of ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’. And because male partners taking a similar amount of ‘bonding’ time to women, can help decode women as the default primary care-givers. But men rarely take this time at the start of the baby’s life or take it all in one go. I wonder how many men feel like they can’t? So, I put the question to an online group of marketers. One person replied with brutal honesty. “My first child was at a consultancy firm where they made it clear my primary marriage was to the company. When I had my second child I worked in a culture where there was A-track or Mommy-track.” Another wrote on the experience of taking leave, “Nothing was asked other ‘when will you be back?’. Given the massive near-future change in your life that will impact your professional life I was surprised. I think it speaks to the US societal separation between church and state - work and family.”
My husband plans to take his ten weeks immediately after me, and whilst he has a handful of colleagues who did the same, he has also experienced more than one person suggest he takes the leave later, ‘when the baby is more fun’. In these instances he explains that he needs to be the primary caregiver for those ten weeks of our childs’ life and that he also wants to do it, as we don’t have any family here to support us. Disrupting the expectations around gender and parenthood can start to happen as people model different ways of being, and talk more openly about their needs but this must expand to reproductive rights generally.
Back when I was trying, a colleague shared with a group of us that she had gone through egg freezing and documented the process on Instagram - the hormone lows, the exhaustion, the many injections that she had to give herself. I remember watching her videos and feeling so grateful to her for making them. It was a window onto a human experience that I had been lacking. It gave me greater understanding of and empathy for that journey. At the same time, I was going through my own different fertility journey, something that I didn’t share. Looking back, this is probably because I felt the subject was taboo. But fertility struggles are common, natural, painful and require some work and time commitment to work through. The fact that I masked this process goes against everything I try to practice. I talk about mental health with my team, I share that I am in therapy, we talk together about our life-work balance in that order. And I have spoken and written about how faking it until you make it doesn’t open the door for others who face deeper layers of discrimination than me as a cis white woman.
It struck me the that I had never heard anyone talk about miscarriage at work or seen a panel on miscarriage in a professional conference. This can be added to a long list of other reproductive rights issues from IVF to egg freezing, to adopting, to fostering and more. A few weeks after my ER scare, I did share what I had been going through with my boss and some colleagues and they often shared in return, something I’m incredibly grateful for. I’m now 30 weeks pregnant, experiencing the new joys and challenges that come with the third trimester and embracing it at work. And I’m making a commitment to speak up more about my own experiences and needs. By reflecting, speaking up, learning and translating those learnings into how I show up as a leader I hope to become a better ally to all people who need better provisions made for their reproductive rights.
Let’s start by breaking societal norms and telling more of the stories we don’t tell.
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