From all-nighters at the office to insensitive male coworkers, working mothers and mothers-to-be often describe the tech world as hostile to their needs

Sara Mauskopf was nine months pregnant and about to go on maternity leave, when her boss, the Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann, mentioned her by name at an all-hands meeting: staff would no longer be able to use one of the company’s conference rooms, Lehmann said, because Mauskopf would need it pump breast milk when she returned to work.

“I felt very called out and embarrassed,” recalled Mauskopf, who was the delivery startup’s director of product at the time. “It singled me out as the reason for the conversion and made me feel like I was taking something away from everyone.”

Women are already a small minority at most tech companies, so being a mother or getting pregnant can only amplify the sense of not fitting it. And while much of the public debate about increasing gender diversity in tech has focused on issues like sexual harassment and pay discrimination, women returning to work after giving birth face another set of challenges and biases. The startup scene frequently mimics the college lifestyle, with late nights, frequent drinking, and an emphasis on putting in “face time” – all things that become more challenging when your social life involve more nappies than negronis.

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“In tech, there are very few starring roles for women, and almost none for older women,” said the tech industry veteran and Project Include co-founder Susan Wu. “In Hollywood, if you’re a mother, you still have to pretend to be young, to be attractive and have the body of a 20-year-old. At most startups in Silicon Valley, to succeed as a parent, you have to pretend to fit in with the youth culture – don’t talk about your kids, participate in youthful activities, pull all-nighters, go out drinking with the team.”

In interviews with more than a dozen mothers and pregnant women working at tech startups, women described experiences ranging from being “guinea pigs” for companies that don’t yet have maternity leave policies to facing outright hostility to their pregnancies. Several women asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation.

“Being pregnant at a startup is a visual reminder to the team that, to you, something else matters more,” said one woman. “You literally can’t drink the Kool-Aid any more.” The woman said that her CEO was “shocked, then angry” when she told him she was pregnant, to the extent that she felt she needed to apologize.

“We idolize the Travises and the Elons – people who live at the office, who will do anything to succeed,” she added. “No wonder pregnant moms and parents are persona non grata.” (Elon Musk is a father of five, it should be noted, but his fatherhood has not become a defining feature of his public persona in the same way that Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy dominated coverage of her hiring as CEO of Yahoo).

In tech, there are very few starring roles for women, and almost none for older women Susan Wu, co-founder of Project Include

The established tech giants, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, tend to offer generous parental leave and other benefits (on-site childcare, “baby cash”, even subsidized egg-freezing) as part of the arms race to attract and retain talent. But many startups say they cannot afford to provide lengthy paid leaves – and the message that parents don’t belong can be broadcast in subtle ways.

One woman who works at a San Francisco startup said that her employer had been really supportive of her pregnancy “on paper”, but she is still “uneasy” about her boss’s attitude.

At a team event, she said, one of the company’s co-founders expressed his belief that maternity leave is “kind of discriminatory” to people who don’t have or don’t want children and “don’t get to take paid time off from the government”. As the only pregnant person present, the woman said she felt “targeted and embarrassed”. “I didn’t really know what to say.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some say Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a father of five, is applauded for his dedication while mothers are looked down on for prioritizing their families. Photograph: Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP

“Look at our benefits,” said another mother, who works at a highly valued San Francisco-based startup that provides free dinner for employees – but not until 7pm. “That is a benefit that we get by working here, but also one that I’m sure no mothers take advantage of.”

Another woman, a senior software engineer at a large tech firm, said that being a single mother had resulted in her losing “respect and opportunity” at her company.

“They are so impressed at a man being a dad,” she said. “Whereas women [who work] not only don’t care about their jobs, but also must not care about their children.”

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Kim Rohrer, the vice-president of people and culture at Disqus, said she believed the industry was starting to become more mom-friendly. Rohrer helped craft Disqus’ parental leave policy, and took advantage of it herself.

“The generation of young tech founders that started founding companies five years ago are now in their early 30s, so they’re starting to think differently,” she said. “When I started at Disqus six years ago, the competitive advantage was beer and foosball … Now everyone has the same ping-pong, vending machines, and micro-kitchens. What’s going to set you apart is how you treat your employees.”

For Mauskopf, the incident with Lehmann was part of a broader pattern of “inadvertent” but not “malicious” behavior that prevented her from pumping breast milk when she returned to work, something she calls “one of my biggest regrets”. “I personally just wasn’t able to handle all the public scrutiny around the lactation room,” she said.

In a statement, Postmates said: “Inclusivity has been core to our company’s philosophy – and we feel awful that our former Postmates family member felt singled out in any way. Postmates and the tech community have a collective responsibility to build cultures that are mutually supportive of all circumstances, and enable everyone to be who they are.”

Mauskopf ultimately left Postmates to co-found her own startup, Winnie, a Yelp-like app for parents, where she is trying to build a different kind of culture: “We can’t offer six-month maternity leave” as a small startup, she said, “but we can say that we’re not going to require five-day off-site [meetings] and late night drinking events.”