At least from the vantage point of compatibility with family life, a woman is essentially better off working at Walmart than she is as a certain kind of public employee in the city that considers itself among the most enlightened on earth. Famously hostile to unions and other liberal touchstones, Walmart offers store associates who work for hourly wages six to eight weeks of paid maternity leave; at a particular e-fulfillment center in Bethlehem, Pa., mothers can receive 10 weeks.

However much we’d like to believe that the patriarchy is toppling because Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer have been expunged from television, there is still a great distance to go before the many remnants hit the ground. There is a special resonance to the fact that New York City schoolteachers, most of them women, do not receive paid parental leave. They are forced to hoard sick days or rely on the good luck that they will give birth at the end of June. The low regard in which teachers are held has been an expression of collective misogyny for decades. Into the 1960s, teachers hid pregnancies as long as they could because the law mandated that they tell principals as soon as they discovered they were expecting and begin unpaid leave right away.

Jessica Jean-Marie, who teaches at Harvest Collegiate High School, laid out the dilemma. Her second child is due at the end of January. The Department of Education gives teachers 10 sick days a year, and she has accumulated 17, giving her three weeks of hiatus. She can borrow 20 days from the future, but if she or her children get sick and she actually has to use them next year or the year after, she would be in debt to the system. If teachers leave or quit still owing days, their final pay is docked.

“I’ve been to school with strep and the flu, but when my son is sick it’s another story,” Ali Phetteplace, a sixth-grade math teacher in Queens who is having a second child this spring, told me. “You have to choose between your kid and 30 others, and it’s a terrible feeling.” She waited six years between having her two children in part to accrue enough time off for an adequate leave, but health issues left her on the negative side of the ledger, and so she will have only eight days paid for when she delivers her baby.

Many unionized city employees, among them the 125,000 members of DC 37, which is the largest municipal public employee union in the country, can, in certain instances, use disability insurance for maternity leave, which provides partial pay for several weeks. In the case of DC 37, the pay is $200 a week. Beyond that, the continued association of pregnancy with sickness perpetuates the benighted notion of childbearing as a threat to ordinary human experience when many would argue that it is the singular manifestation of it. “We are supposed to be at the forefront of progressive thinking,” another pregnant teacher, Melody Anastasiou, remarked, “and I don’t understand why more politicians, including our mayor, are just not embarrassed.” Another white-collar union worker, I spoke with, not a teacher, said she had chosen the public sector over the private because she believed it would be easier on family life. She now regrets the decision.