Coming to Terms : Pregnant Executives Encounter Special Difficulties

When Danielle Werts of Burroughs Inc. in Orange recently met an important client for the first time, she expected him to shake her hand. He didn’t.

He went straight for her abdomen, which was beginning to swell with the baby she is due to deliver in January.

“My mouth just dropped open,” recalled Werts, 30, a district manager of sales. She stood dumbfounded as a virtual stranger proceeded to rub her stomach.

“All I could say was, ‘Um, um, um,’ ” she said. “This was one of my best customers. What could I do?”

Such, a growing number of women are finding, is pregnancy in the management ranks. Treading in unexplored territory, they happen upon unmarked pitfalls such as outmoded attitudes and awkward behavior in the struggle to catch up with a new reality.

Uninvited physical intimacy is only one of the problems faced by the sort of woman who may well go into labor at her desk, who makes business calls from the maternity ward and returns to work in a matter of weeks or even days. She faces a real struggle in gaining acceptance from clients and co-workers in a situation for which precedents--not to mention rules of etiquette--have not been established.

“It’s tough enough being a woman in a man’s world, but now you’re a pregnant woman and you’re perceived as much more weak and vulnerable,” Kimberly Kelly-Isham, a pregnant manager of the housing relocation program with Coldwell Banker in Laguna Hills, said. “Somehow, it’s a lot harder for someone to take a pregnant woman seriously.”

But there are indications that the business world is having to do just that.

Women now make up nearly two-fifths of the nation’s executive, administrative and managerial workers, according to Jill Houghton Emery of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Although management moms still con stitute a small minority of women giving birth, their numbers are rising, according to U.S. Census estimates.

In 1980, for instance, babies of management-level and professional women accounted for slightly more than 7% of the year’s projected 3.2 million births. By contrast, babies of management-level and professional women accounted for nearly 10% of the projected 3.5 million births in 1985, the last year for which estimates are available.

Five or 10 years ago, women were just starting to move into executive positions, said Joan La Rosa, president of the Orange County chapter of Women in Business, a support group for female managers. “They were afraid that getting pregnant would jeopardize their promotions or strides being made by other women,” she said. “They were afraid that management would say, ‘See? We promote them, then they get pregnant and leave. ‘ “

Uncertainty Common

And although more managers are becoming pregnant, many are uncertain how their superiors will respond.

Kelly-Isham, the Coldwell Banker manager, did not tell her superiors until late in her third month of pregnancy, despite persistent morning sickness that interrupted meetings with clients.

“I’d excuse myself and rush out of my office,” she said. “My secretary would come in and offer a cup of coffee. Then I’d come back in as though nothing had happened.” And then there are the questions about the woman’s plans. Despite advanced degrees and years of experience, management women say they must carry the burden of proof when it comes to demonstrating commitment to their work.

“Expect anxiety, fear and a little bit of hostility,” warns Patricia Gwartney-Gibbs, a University of Oregon sociologist who has studied pregnancy’s effect on a woman’s earning capacity.

‘Will You Quit?’

Claudia Hiatt agrees. “They all ask, ‘Will you quit?’ ” said Hiatt, 28, an account executive with Hershey Communications in Santa Ana who is expecting her first baby in April.

Nancy Robb, a senior-level manager at the Lowell, Mass., headquarters of Wang Laboratories, said that 17 months ago when she told her boss that she was pregnant with her first child, he “was panicked that I might not be coming back.” “He kept saying that he was going to visit me in the hospital and come to have lunch with me when I was on maternity leave. He wanted to let me know that he was going to get me back to work one way or another.”

Some women feel that pregnancy raises unfair questions about more than their commitment to their work.

Co-workers “wonder, ‘Can she be trusted?’ ‘Will she break down and cry in the board room?’ ” Kelly-Isham said. “I feel like they’re questioning my competency and my capabilities.”

There also may be pressure to relinquish responsibilities.

Work Given to Others

For instance, one of the managers interviewed for this story said she watched in frustration as two of the three programs she had been overseeing were handed over to colleagues shortly after she announced, at four months, her pregnancy--even though felt fit enough to continue with her duties.

Pregnant women “are frequently made to feel that because they make men uncomfortable, they ought to stay out of sight,” said Mary Von Glinow, associate professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California School of Business Administration.

And questions about commitment do not end with one’s work but may also extend to her family, the women say.

“I’ve had quite a few people sit me down and say how important it is to be a full-time mother and let my husband take care of me now,” Werts, the Burroughs manager, said.

Add to all that the pressure to set an example for working pregnant women in general.

“When I came to Pacific Mutual, I was the first pregnant woman ever on the management level in my department,” said Violet Pasquarelli-Gascon, 30, who was pregnant with her first child when she accepted a position three years ago as senior investment application analyst with the insurance company’s home office in Newport Beach.

“I felt I had to work very hard to show that I could do things and (that working during pregnancy) was OK,” she said. This often meant working late, doing more than she physically felt able to do and generally “overcompensating” to demonstrate her commitment, she said.

With maternity leave averaging six weeks and with the heavy responsibilities of their jobs, management women often decide to take less time off before their deliveries and return to work much sooner than women used to--indeed, much sooner than some themselves feel they should.

Penny Ribnik, 35, vice president in charge of pension plan services for Transamerica Life in Los Angeles and mother of three, wanted to take off as little time as possible four years ago before her the delivery of her first child and ended up going into labor at her desk.

A woman who works at an employment agency had her first baby on a Saturday four years ago. The following Tuesday she was at the office to pick up files so that she could work at home.

Such dedication might backfire, though, in encouraging superhuman expectations. “There is this notion that pregnancy is nothing and that true women can drop their babies in the field like the peasants did,” Gwartney-Gibbs, a mother of two and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, said. “Some of us, however, are mortal, and we’re devastated for four months before pregnancy and six months afterward.”

And sometimes even dedication is not enough. A buyer for a major department store who asked not to be identified said she had to give up her job because her employers would hold her job for only six weeks, the customary length of maternity leave with that company. Knowing that it would take her longer to prepare for and recuperate from her pregnancy, her first, she felt she had to choose between a job she loved and having children.

Uninvited Intimacy

The most common grievance, however, is that pregnancy often leads to an uninvited intimacy with co-workers and clients.

“It was amazing the level of conversations I’d have with people I didn’t know about biological functions,” Robb, the Wang manager, said. “Men would tell me specific things that went on during a Caesarean section that their wife had or certain intercourse conversations based on what their doctor had told them to do.”

And that intimacy would not end with conversation, the women say. Co-workers and clients would pat their stomachs or even hug them.

“I’ve never been a touchable person,” Kelly-Isham said. “Even when I dated, people automatically knew this, but suddenly all that has changed.” And all that made keeping the distance necessary for a supervisor much more difficult, she said.

Yet for all the special difficulties management women face, they usually have fewer troubles than their lower-ranking counterparts because they are more likely to be seen as valuable employees by their superiors, management experts said. “If a woman is a star, (her superiors will) bend over backwards,” Diane Kellogg, associate professor of management at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., said. “But for the regular woman, they’ll make no special allowances, and she’ll decide that she can’t return” to work after the baby is born.

Control Over Schedule

Further, “they are the ones who are fully capable of negotiating good deals, and they earn enough money to take time off if they need it,” said Marcie Schorr Hirsh, career counselor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and co-author of “Managing Your Maternity Leave” (Houghton Mifflin, 1983).

In addition, a manager usually has more control over her schedule. Kelly-Isham said: “I can get off a day here and there without raising eyebrows, but how many secretaries can get away with that?”

Not all attention directed at pregnant managers works to their disadvantage, however.

There was a sales representative with whom Werts had been playing phone tag for months. “Finally I met her in the hall one day and she got all excited and blurted, ‘You’re a mom too!’ Suddenly, we had something in common,” she said. “Now we’re working on a $150,000 deal.”

Positive Effects

Kellogg said the intimacy pregnancy evokes can in fact be positive in professional relations between men and women.

“One of the problems women managers have is in being tied into the social network,” she said. “Men don’t know what to do with a person who looks like a woman and is a professional--it’s counterintuitive. But as soon as she gets pregnant, they can relate to her because she reminds them of their wives.”

Kellogg said she discovered that pregnancy can also bridge gaps between female managers and their non-professional support staffs.

She said she noticed that when she was pregnant three years ago with her first-born, “women who had a hard time relating to me because they were not professional suddenly had something to say to me. I thought of pregnancy as a positive experience because it gave people more of an opportunity to get to know me.”

And there may be increased respect for those who can successfully manage executive-level responsibilities and pregnancy.

“In the eyes of senior management, I proved that I could balance a lot, and that made me seem more responsible and capable,” said Catherine Kinney, 34, a vice president for equity sales and customer service at the the New York Stock Exchange who received significant promotions after the births of her two children.

Often after a manager bears a child, a company’s pregnancy policy is either established or clarified, clearing the way for others. Though they are still are the exception, there are now special company programs for pregnant managers.

Pacific Bell, for instance, allows its managers to “telecommute” to work with computer equipment first used to alleviate traffic during the 1984 Olympics. Western Medical Center in Santa Ana has begun offering one-night “Executive Pregnancy” seminars to address the problems of management-level women who plan to deliver at that hospital.

There are several steps that can help to handle the situation better, academicians and managers themselves said.

“If you have tangible proof of your commitment, then colleagues and clients are less likely to question your intentions to return to work following the birth,” Kellogg said.

Successful Strategies

That may mean waiting to become pregnant until you’ve already been admitted to the management ranks. However, stating one’s intentions is often enough. Promises must be backed up with behavior, though. As Kellogg said: “You have to manage the press around yourself. A woman has to point out that she is planning to continue her work load, and she has to give very clear signals of that.”

When it comes to untoward intimacy, some women report success with simple confrontations.

“Finally one day I called everybody in and said, ‘There will be no daily comments on my pregnancy or weight,’ ” Kelly-Isham recalled. “Now I let them slide by the first time, then remind people the second time.”

As for announcing the pending birth, experts advise against it during the first three months of the pregnancy, when the possibility of miscarriage is the greatest. In cases where the woman’s age warrants amniocentesis, they recommend waiting for the tests results at four months.

Ultimately, however, nothing appears to succeed like success. Women who have demonstrated that they can juggle pregnancy and work responsibilities report less resistence the next time.

Kinney is one of them. When she took a six-month leave six years ago to give birth to her son, she was manager of product development with no supervisory responsibilities.

After she returned, Kinney was moved to another division with three people reporting to her. That number had grown to six by the time she delivered her daughter eight months ago. With a department consolidation shortly after her maternity leave, she became a vice president in charge of 26 people.

Now her motherhood and upward mobility has become the butt of jokes. One friend, noting the weight Kinney has retained from her last pregnancy, recently asked whether she was pregnant. Responded another: ‘Yes, she’s going for senior vice president.”’