Protections for Working Mothers Is the Next Fight in Women’s Sports

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Alysia Montaño became pregnant with her first child in 2014, she was overjoyed. A world champion and Olympic middle-distance runner, Montaño had strategically planned for her maternity to begin during an off-year from championship races. At USA Track & Field’s USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, Montaño ran the 800-meter race while eight months pregnant and drew attention worldwide, both for her career and for her sponsor. “Asics was glorifying the pregnancy and the movement and my comeback,” Montaño recalls now. “I remember thinking that [after my postpartum recovery], I was excited to get back to work for them.”

Two months after she gave birth to her daughter, Linnea, Montaño received a phone call from Asics. Two men at the company were calling to talk to her about the prior year. They would have to dock her pay, they said, as she hadn’t met their performance standards, despite the fact that she had spent most of the year carrying a child. “There was no wording in the contract that protected me in my pregnancy, maternity, or postpartum period,” she explains. In fact, the clause in her contract described her pregnancy as an injury.

Montaño worked tirelessly—taping her separated abs and pushing herself to a “stressful and unnecessary” place—to get back to running immediately after childbirth, and within six months she had won a national title. At 10 months postpartum, she won her second. Her sponsors were now seemingly enthusiastic about her performance again, publicly celebrating her superhuman achievements at her races. But she knew that there was a target on her back if she couldn’t keep it up. When she didn’t qualify for the Olympics in 2016, Asics dropped her. “Even when you prove yourself, you have to work 10 times harder, and you have to achieve 10 times more for it to mean anything,” Montaño says. She couldn’t shake the feeling that her former sponsors saw her child as just a distraction to her career.

Thanks to the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s fight for fair pay, as well as high-profile athletes in tennis, gymnastics, and basketball drawing attention to the discrimination and barriers that female athletes face, the spotlight on equity in women’s sports has been especially bright of late. In 2019, for the first time in eight years, not one woman made Forbes’s annual list of the 100 World’s Highest-Paid Athletes. Professional women’s hockey players can make as little as $2,000 a season, with no health insurance, which has inspired the players to boycott all North American professional leagues until that changes. In a since-deleted tweet last year, professional fast-pitch softball pitcher Delanie Gourley said: “The Yankees bat boy salary is more than my professional softball contract.”

While the overwhelming focus in women’s sports right now is on achieving fair pay, that’s because life events such as pregnancy and motherhood are even more precarious without financial stability. Fair pay may come first, but up next is the fight for equal labor protections for present and future mother athletes—both during the season and off.

In order for women athletes to feel safe starting families during their careers, women’s professional sports leagues need to enshrine key labor protections. Brendan Schwab, executive director of the World Players Association, says the first step is to guarantee that their jobs will be safe if and when female athletes decide to get pregnant. “The second is providing leave—preferably paid,” Schwab says. “Then there’s the ability of the player to continue their career, so that requires important support around child care. The work is mobile, and players have to travel a lot, so they need to be supported with travel accommodations. The other thing is just making sure that the medical issues in and around pregnancy are cared for and addressed.”

The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world without a federal paid parental leave policy. Because non-league sports often operate under statutes that guarantee pay only when athletes are playing, sponsored athletes such as Montaño can miss out on money when they aren’t competing. Pregnancy and parenting can put athletes in extremely vulnerable positions financially, emotionally, and physically. In a survey of 37 professional athletes who became mothers and who were still competing, ESPN found that 41% of them saw their income decrease after giving birth.

Even Serena Williams, who won the 2017 Australian Open while 20 weeks pregnant, saw her pregnancy treated as a handicap. After returning to tennis following the birth of her daughter, her ranking dropped from first in the world to 453rd. After several tennis players spoke out about the perceived punishment at various tournaments, and Williams revealed the difficulties she faced during and after childbirth, the Women’s Tennis Association instituted a new rule that froze players’ special rankings when they are out on leave, whether for injury, illness, or pregnancy.

The perception that motherhood is an impediment to a woman’s athletic ability has long dictated policies in women’s sports. Charlene Weaving, a professor and chair of the human kinetics department at St. Francis Xavier University and author of the paper “Prenatal Paranoia” in the journal Sports, Ethics and Philosophy, says that sexist perceptions of pregnant athletes are partially contributing to stalled progress in affording parental protections. “We continue to think of sport and the institution of sport based on a male model, and struggle to figure out how to fit women in,” Weaving says. “The current scientific research is insufficient to support the conclusion that pregnant women shouldn’t compete or train.”

In the WNBA, the longest-running professional women’s sports league in America, such current and former players as Candace Parker, Bria Hartley, and Skylar Diggins-Smith have all spoken about how limited protections and poor family leave policies are actually the greatest barriers to becoming a mother in the height of their careers. At the end of last year, Diggins-Smith shared that she played the entire 2018 season while pregnant, “not telling a soul,” and chose to sit out of the 2019 season only because of postpartum depression, for which she felt the league did not provide adequate support.

As a result, in 2018, the WNBA players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement with the league, threatening the start of their 2020 season. The previous agreement stated that players could receive as little as half of their yearly salary if they got pregnant. On salaries that could be as low as $42,000, that would be a drastic pay cut. Plus, the women were given no guarantee of nursing facilities, private hotel rooms when traveling, or more spacious family apartments in their home cities once they had the child.

One former player and WNBA champion for the Seattle Storm, Australian center Abby Bishop, was in that position during the 2015-16 season when she brought her 1-year-old daughter to America with her. While she says her teammates and coaching staff were unbelievably welcoming, “I had to pay extra money for a bigger apartment, I had to pay for my nanny’s flight. By the time I paid for her flights, her visas, her apartment, you take home nothing,” she recalls. “I was really just doing it for the love of it.” These out-of-pocket costs were hardly the worst of her experiences as a new mother in professional sports. In 2014, Bishop announced she wouldn’t be playing for the Australian national team at the FIBA World Championships in Turkey because the team’s governing organization made it almost impossible for her to travel with her child.

“Basketball Australia said my daughter wasn’t allowed a seat near the team on the plane, she wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotel, she wasn’t allowed on the team bus,” Bishop recalls now. Bishop had adopted her two-day-old niece, Zala, when she herself was only 25, so she had neither a partner to provide help, nor additional funds to pay for child care. A representative of Basketball Australia told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time, “A child is allowed to attend games or camps, but we want to keep the sanctity of a high-performance environment and make sure kids don’t disrupt training, games, or team accommodation.” For Bishop, that reasoning was bullshit. “I took a stand, and I said I’m not playing. They didn’t care. They just said they’d get another player.” It would take four more years for Basketball Australia to introduce a comprehensive parental and pregnancy care policy.

This year, the WNBA Players Association won one the most significant advancements for parent athletes in history. In January, the league announced it had reached a new agreement: Besides granting its top players the ability to earn up to $500,000—nearly triple the league’s cap in the 2019 season—the contract was celebrated for providing fully paid maternity leave, an annual child-care stipend of $5,000, two-bedroom apartments for athletes with children, and private facilities for nursing mothers. The agreement even provides veteran players who have been with the league eight or more years up to $60,000 in reimbursement costs for such things as adoption and in vitro fertilization. “We wanted to create a league in which it is clearly a viable option to play in the W.N.B.A.,” Nneka Ogwumike, the president of the players union, told the New York Times. “So we’re providing a new starting line for those who come after us.”

Terri Jackson, executive director of the WNBPA and an overseer in the negotiations, said she was shocked that the previous agreement didn’t include language around pregnancy or motherhood. “We needed an agreement that did more than just change the pronouns from ‘he’ to ‘she’ and from ‘him’ to ‘her,’” she says. “I wondered how many players decided that they weren’t coming back [after having kids] because it would be too hard.”

Jackson said that they assembled smaller groups of players, past and present, who detailed their experiences and what they felt needed to change in order for the league to be welcoming to parents. Consistently, women came to the meetings with questions about how they could maintain careers in the WNBA if they were also hoping to become—or already were—mothers. Jackson hopes the contract will have ripple effects in other women’s leagues and teams. “While we may be the gold standard right now, my hope is that we’re the gold standard only for a minute,” she says. “Someone else is going to come up behind us and push us to go even further.”

For such athletes as Montaño, those changes are already happening. She started a campaign on social media called #DreamMaternity in which women from all backgrounds share their stories of what it’s like to be an athlete and a mother. “I want to be able to be celebrated as a full person,” Montaño says. Last month, Altra shoes announced that it had signed Montaño, who is having her third child, and British marathoner Tina Muir, who is also pregnant. Their contract is not contingent on how they do in races and provides financial compensation and running shoes in exchange for press appearances. “There’s way more to us than just performance. We’re more than just athletes,” Montaño says. “So how are we enabling women to have longevity in sports?”

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.