Punished for parental leave: How generous leave policies can be a trap for working mothers

Mita Mallick was barely a month into her parental leave when she got a call from a friend. “I’m thinking she’s calling to check in on me, and we’re having a nice conversation,” Mallick recounts. Then she asked a question that took Mallick by surprise: So are you not going back to work?Her friend revealed that Mallick’s employer—a large, recognizable public company with a generous five-month leave policy—had posted her job. “I felt like the floor fell out from under me,” Mallick says. “I was just devastated and felt so betrayed.”Before going on leave, Mallick had already lost out on a promotion that failed to materialize once she became pregnant. She started looking for another job—while freshly postpartum—and never ended up returning to that company.A few years later, when Mallick was having another baby, she was more prepared. She was up for a promotion and hid her pregnancy for as long as possible. When she was eventually forced to disclose the pregnancy, she went from being a front-runner to being out of the running. Suddenly she was being asked questions like: Why are you in such a rush to get promoted?When she returned to work after nearly six months of leave, she was given the lowest possible performance rating because the business “fell off a cliff.” She later found out that she wasn’t the only person who had effectively been punished for going on leave.In the years since Mallick’s brushes with pregnancy bias, parental leave policies have only grown more generous, with some major companies such as Starbucks even extending those benefits to hourly employees. The legal landscape, too, has become much more pro-parent.And yet, pregnancy discrimination remains pervasive, even as parental leave has become a crucial recruitment tool across corporate America.Since the beginning of 2026—well before Deloitte and Zoom quietly started cutting back on their leave policies—I’ve been seeking to chronicle how parents, mostly women, are being pun