Facebook fails its families, moms say
Working parents struggle to balance demands
SAN FRANCISCO – When it comes to benefits for parents, working at Facebook is about as family-friendly as you get. Parking for expectant mothers. “Baby cash” of $4,000 to cover expenses. Subsidized day care costs. And the four months of paid leave at the social media giant is among the longest offered in the USA.
Even with all this corporate help, some working moms at Facebook say they can’t balance the demands of their jobs and grueling commutes with raising a family – and they blame Facebook’s failure to extend more leave to parents or to grant a perk that’s becoming increasingly common in corporate America: allowing employees to work part time or from home.
These grievances, which simmered internally at Facebook before becoming public last week, reveal a side of Facebook that contrasts with its family-forward messaging and the leadership of Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who exhorted generations of women to “lean in” to their careers. Even at America’s wealthiest companies, where policies cater to working parents, moms say they still can’t get the time and flexibility they need.
Data scientist Eliza Khuner, 38, says she quit her job at Facebook in July after being told she could not work from home nor work part-time. Her request
to take additional unpaid leave to care for her infant daughter was rejected. Facebook declined to comment. In sharing her regrets about leaving Facebook, first with Facebook employees, then more widely in a column for Wired magazine (“Why It’s So Hard to Be a Working Mom. Even at Facebook”), the mother of three sparked a growing debate over Facebook’s internal policies and the state of paid parental leave in the USA.
Khuner says she knows Facebook employees have it far better than most. In the USA, the only developed nation that does not require paid leave for new parents, millions of Americans – 85 percent of workers – don’t get a single paid day off work after the birth or adoption of a child.
Ninety-four percent of low-income working people have no access to paid family leave. As a result, women work late into their pregnancies, and a quarter of women return to work within 10 days of giving birth.
White-collar workers in the USA are most likely to get paid leave, and hourly workers are the least likely. In recent years, technology companies have led the charge in giving parents more time off, but even the most generous U.S. companies such as Facebook fall far short of Europe and Canada.
Pressure is mounting for the federal government to step in as more cities and states pass family leave legislation requiring employers to give staffers a minimum number of paid days off to care for family members, including a new baby.
“We say Facebook is this great company and that it’s so great for parents, all knowing that it’s a four-month leave, which just indicates that, in our culture, we think a four-month leave is generous and it’s just not, and somebody had to say it,” Khuner says.
“I thought there might be other people like me who don’t feel like it’s the right time to leave their baby and feel that it’s wrong to say you are supposed to come back to work full-time, no mat- ter what, when your baby is that young.”
Reaction poured in from current and former Facebook employees who said they, too, have struggled or been sidelined.
Women, drawn to Facebook by high salaries and cushy perks, challenging assignments and the camaraderie with peers, shared stories of crying at their desks or dreading returning to work. Others said they left the company to join another or switched to part-time or contract work.
“I loved Facebook but just couldn’t figure out how to be a good, present mom while also doing great in my job,” one former Facebook employee wrote in a private Facebook group for moms working in tech with thousands of members.
Such comments delivered a public relations blow to Facebook’s familyfriendly reputation and to Sandberg. Ever since her best-seller “Lean In” stirred a global debate about women in the workplace, Facebook’s chief operating officer has championed policies to level the playing field.
As arguably the most prominent woman in tech, Sandberg has worked to close the gender gap at Facebook where, as at most major tech companies, men significantly outnumber women in the U.S. workforce, technical roles and senior leadership.
Amid heated competition for top talent, she has positioned Facebook at the forefront of a growing movement among tech companies to promote policies that help parents.
The Menlo Park, California, company helped set a standard for paid leave in the tech industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg led by example, taking a couple of months off after the birth of each of his two daughters.
Katie Bethell, founder and executive director of the Paid Leave US campaign, says Facebook and Sandberg deserve credit for taking the lead on paid leave but are missing an important opportunity to do so again by extending the amount of leave parents get and by helping parents ease back into the workforce with more flexibility in how they work and from where.
Thirty-nine percent of employees worked remotely in 2012, according to Gallup data. By 2016, that number hit
43 percent. Employees spent more work time out of the office. Nearly a third spent 80 percent or more time working remotely in 2016, up from 24 percent in
2012.
The tech industry is tops in paid leave for parents, though Facebook no longer leads the pack.
Salaried employees of any gender at Netflix can take up to one year off at full pay after the birth or adoption of a child. At Salesforce, employees get 26 weeks of paid time off for primary caregivers and 12 weeks for secondary caregivers to bond with a new baby or adopted child. Microsoft announced last month that it would require its contractors with at least 50 employees in the USA to offer at least 12 weeks of leave to workers with substantial assignments at the tech giant.
It’s not just the demanding hours. Soaring housing prices near Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters force employees into lengthy commutes that extend their workday by as much as four hours.
The 40-mile trek from Berkeley to Menlo Park ran one hour and 40 minutes each way for Khuner and was one critical factor in making what she says was the hardest decision of her life: choosing between her dream job and her child.
Khuner, who was pregnant when Facebook hired her and read “Lean In” while on leave, told fellow employees about her decision to walk away from Facebook on an internal message board. “I wrote: ‘I love this place and I know that we can do things that people never thought possible and this is a problem we can solve,’ ” she says.
In the ensuing discussion, Sandberg explained that Facebook management could not give working parents more flexibility without putting too much strain on other employees. Khuner, her baby sleeping on her chest, attended a weekly Q&A with Facebook staffers, where she says Zuckerberg told her he would like to offer more options for working parents but couldn’t yet.
Some Facebook moms agreed. “I am here to hustle, and so are the people around me,” one wrote in the Facebook group for moms in tech. “Given that’s where the culture is coming from, I’m not surprised it’s hard for them to add in part-time jobs. ... I think the problem is not the lack of Facebook workplace policies but the lack of longer leave in the U.S. for all parents.”