San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Employers help working moms ship breast milk from the road
“We have a large population of women who were ... doing a lot of travel. They asked us for this.”
Carrie Altieri, IBM’s vice president of communications
Morgan Mohun-Gholson was sitting in a New York hotel room far from her baby girl, thinking, “What am I going to do?”
Bags of breast milk, enough to feed her 10-month-old for 48 hours, sat in an ice bucket in the hotel mini-fridge. Mohun-Gholson, a sales manager at Pinterest in San Francisco, had another meeting the next day in Ohio.
Determined to keep her daughter on breast milk, she flew six hours back to San Francisco with bottles packed on ice she got from an airport bar and delivered them to her husband before flying out again.
She won’t face such an arduous journey again: A few weeks later, she discovered her employer would ship her breast milk for free.
“I almost broke down in tears I was so excited,” Mohun-Gholson said.
By the numbers, employers don’t seem to be doing enough to persuade mothers with young children to stay in the workforce. From 1975 to 2000, the proportion of mothers with children younger than 3 who worked rose from 34 to 61 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2017, it had barely grown to 62 percent.
In seeking to attract and retain women, a growing number of tech and finance companies are adding breast milk shipping, directed at new mothers who often travel for work. Pinterest uses a 3-yearold Palo Alto company called Milk Stork; Goldman Sachs offers MilkShip, a new service from LifeCare of Shelton, Conn.; and some companies handle the logistics on their own.
Milk Stork sends a cooler with a post-
“The reason I chose the name Milk Stork is because it’s like the second delivery you’re doing.”
paid shipping label to the customer’s destination. Mothers can pump up to 72 ounces of breast milk, package it, and drop the box in the hotel lobby for overnight shipping anywhere in the U.S.
The service starts at $139 a day, and several Bay Area companies offer it at no cost to their female employees. Milk Stork says it has 133 business customers, and more than a hundred other firms reimburse traveling moms who sign up on their own.
Mohun-Gholson’s job requires frequent overnight trips to visit advertisers. When she came back to Pinterest after her maternity leave, she said she didn’t travel for the first couple of months “purely because of the milk situation.” She worried that her work suffered as a result. Seeing the company’s advertisers in person shows that Pinterest is invested in the relationship, she said.
Then she saw a sign in a Pinterest mothers’ lounge, where she pumped her milk, advertising the Milk Stork benefit.
The next time she traveled, Mohun-Gholson logged onto Milk Stork and plugged in the details of her trip. She pumped on the flight to Los Angeles and packed her breast milk into a Milk Stork cooler at her hotel. There are no gel packs or dry ice; the cooler evaporates small quantities of water at low pressure that protect the milk from changes in temperature during shipping.
Milk Stork commissioned a survey of its customers; 91 percent of participants said they were more likely to accept business travel assignments because of the benefit. Studies show that women who planned on returning to work in shorter time frames are less likely to start breastfeeding in the first place. Mothers who work full time tend to breastfeed for shorter durations than do parttime or unemployed mothers.
CEO Kate Torgersen said she never considered pitching businesses on Milk Stork when she started the company in 2015. She figured employers wouldn’t spend money on a service for a very specific subset of their workers.
Today, most of Milk Stork’s revenue comes from individual customers who are reimbursed by their employers, but more than 600 businesses have expressed interest in becoming corporate clients and offer the service at a discounted rate to their employees. Torgersen hired her first salespeople this year to keep up with that demand.
Even at the office, pumping milk isn’t always easy. Federal law requires employers to provide break time and a place for nursing moms to pump, but it exempts companies with fewer than 50 employees. In 2018, less than half of U.S. employers have on-site mothers’ rooms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Moms are still pumping in closets and bathrooms,” Torgersen said.
Zillow Group, TripAdvisor, SAP, the Home Depot and others provide breast milk shipping to employees through Milk Stork, which said it has shipped 1 million ounces of breast milk to date. LifeCare introduced MilkShip in August, and the company said this month it is “experienced a significant increase in demand” for its work-life balance services, including benefits targeted at mothers.
IBM, which began offering a breast milk shipping benefit in 2015, said it makes good business sense.
“We have a large population of women who were, as consultants, doing a lot of travel,” said Carrie Altieri, vice president of communications.
Kate Torgersen, CEO
“They asked us for this.”
IBM buys insulated shipping containers for storing breast milk and uses UPS to ship materials to its traveling employees’ hotel rooms.
“It’s not only about attracting them into the workforce, but it’s ensuring that they have a welcoming workplace that keeps them here,” Altieri said.
Of Pinterest’s 1,500 employees in the U.S., only a dozen women have used Milk Stork since the company began offering it in July. Alice Vichaita, head of global benefits, said it’s too early to tell whether the service has had an impact on retention. Pinterest employs significantly more women — they are 45 percent of its workforce — than do similar tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Uber.
More tech firms are competing for talent through perks, though Torgersen, a mother of three, said she prefers to think of Milk Stork as a necessity, not an amenity.
“The reason I chose the name Milk Stork is because it’s like the second delivery you’re doing,” Torgersen said. “Your huge concern going back to work is, one, sleep. But also, how am I going to continue this relationship that I’ve established over the last three months? It’s not just about covering the trip but feeding your child.”