Minefields and maternity leave: why I fight a system that shuts out women and caregivers 

My father crossed a minefield to flee Soviet oppression. My mother, a child refugee, escaped Nazi-occupied Guernsey during the Second World War. Both were driven by the belief that there was a better place — somewhere on the other side of fear — where freedom wasn’t just a dream but a daily reality. That place was the United States. They came here chasing the same promise many refugees and immigrants carry in their hearts: that hard work, sacrifice, and integrity would be met with dignity and opportunity.

I inherited that belief like a birthright.

It shaped how I approached school, career, and citizenship. I played by the rules. I believed that if I excelled, I would be rewarded. I believed the system would catch me, value me, and protect me because that’s what it was designed to do. Or so I thought.

Then I became a breadwinner mom.

The wage gap, the leadership gap, the opportunity gap — they all point to the same structural flaw: we’ve optimized our institutions for exclusion and called it excellence.

I returned from maternity leave to a job I loved and found myself handed three times the workload with none of the additional compensation. The added responsibility was framed as a growth opportunity, a vote of confidence, but the subtext was unmistakable. Before maternity leave, I’d been trusted, respected, and rewarded for my contributions. But afterward, I was treated as though my gratitude for continued employment should be limitless. This was a test of my loyalty, a test of how far I could be stretched — a test no one seemed to apply to new fathers. 

The numbers confirm my experience: working mothers see their wages cut by about 4% for every child they have, while working fathers enjoy a roughly 6% wage premium per child. Before maternity leave, I was measured by my results. After maternity leave, I was measured by my willingness to absorb more work for the same pay. It was then that I saw things clearly: the system my parents fled toward was still not designed to value people like me. And that was the moment I stopped waiting for it to work as promised.

A personal reckoning with a public system

Mothers are now the primary breadwinners in 40% of U.S. households with children under 18. Yet my research shows they earn only 66 cents on the dollar compared to breadwinner fathers. The disparity is even starker for Black breadwinner moms, who have been the primary earners in over half of Black households with children for more than 40 years, and earn just 44 cents on the dollar compared to white breadwinner dads.

It’s within this context that my company could so easily ask a breadwinner mother to triple her output without tripling her pay and still call it meritocracy.

That reckoning didn’t make me cynical. It made me a gender economist.

I began to ask the questions I was never taught to ask: who is the system designed for? Who benefits from its default settings? And, most importantly, who doesn’t?

The deeper I went into the data, the clearer the pattern became. The gaps aren’t bugs. They’re features. The wage gap, the leadership gap, the opportunity gap — they all point to the same structural flaw: we’ve optimized our institutions for exclusion and called it excellence.

It’s comforting to believe that talent alone determines success. But that myth collapses under scrutiny. If success were simply a matter of effort or intelligence, we wouldn’t see such predictable disparities by gender, race, and caregiver status. 

We wouldn’t see occupational segregation where women make up almost 80% of workers in the lowest-paying jobs, despite comprising just 47% of the workforce. We wouldn’t see economic recovery plans that allocate only 23% of high-paying jobs to women, even though they suffered 58% of pandemic-related job losses. And we certainly wouldn’t leave $699 billion on the table annually due to occupational segregation’s drag on the economy.

But there’s another path. A better one. And it starts with a shift in mindset. 

From fixing women to fixing the system

For too long, workplaces have expected women to adapt: to lean in, to upskill faster, to negotiate harder, to overcome structural headwinds through personal effort. Yet the inequities women face are rooted in system design, not personal deficiency. 

Since the pandemic began, more than 912,000 women — including nearly 518,000 Black women — have not returned to the labor market. Meanwhile, there is a 785,000-person gap between available jobs and those looking for work. Compounding this challenge, more than one million foreign-born workers have exited the U.S. labor force since March 2025, further distorting labor-market signals and complicating how the Federal Reserve interprets employment data for inflation decisions. If we brought back the 912,000 missing women, we would close the openings-to-worker ratio completely and offset approximately 13% of the foreign-born worker shortfall, giving policymakers clearer insight into job-market stability.

We need to redesign processes — hiring, promotion, performance reviews — to remove bias from their foundations. That means implementing structured evaluation frameworks, evidence-based performance metrics, and audit trails that expose inequitable patterns before they become systemic. When we change the architecture of opportunity itself, women no longer have to fight for the equity that should have been there from the start. 

Designing for the future we deserve

For years, I kept my maternity leave story to myself. I didn’t want to sound like I was complaining. I didn’t want to appear ungrateful. I had internalized the very culture I now critique, one that conditions us to accept bias as the cost of belonging.

But silence doesn’t create change. Design does.

And that is why, all these years later, I’m still fighting — not just as a gender economist, but as a daughter, a breadwinner mother, and a citizen of a nation my family chose in hope.

My father crossed a minefield believing in the promise of America. My mother crossed an ocean with nothing but her faith in a freer future. I owe it to them — and to the generation after me — not to accept the system as it is, but to imagine what it could become.