Like many expectant moms, Sunnyvale City Councilwoman Alysa Cisneros considered the associated fee of kid care, potential health risks and the impact on her profession when considering having a second child.
But because she held public office, she felt an extra burden to her decision: public opinion and the potential sexism she might face as a pregnant elected official.
On a recent Tuesday night, Cisneros and her fellow council members gathered at Sunnyvale City Hall, as they do almost every other week, to publicly discuss and vote on city matters. But on this Tuesday, along with the standard agenda items like street repairs and city contracts, Cisneros' 15-week maternity leave was also on the agenda.
Many elected officials in California usually are not covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, and Sunnyvale's city charter allows the council to declare a seat vacant if a council member is absent from meetings for 60 days. If Cisneros desired to take a leave of absence and keep her seat, she would have needed to get the approval of the opposite six council members. And on June 4, seven months pregnant, she did.
“I feel really vulnerable knowing that decisions that are private and based on conversations with my doctor and my individual circumstances are subject to public scrutiny,” Cisneros said. “I have to give up a lot of control over a very personal matter that has nothing to do with me being an elected official.”
It's a situation that, in accordance with Laura Narefsky, an attorney with the National Women's Law Center, “sounds all too familiar to many working women in this country.” In 2020, the challenges of being a working mother in politics were highlighted when Rep. Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) brought her four-week-old baby to the Capitol after being told that maternity leave was not a suitable reason to vote by proxy.
“There is still real skepticism about women's ability to hold paid employment and fulfill their caregiving responsibilities at home,” Narefsky said. “We see this kind of persistent and latent discrimination against caregivers, largely stereotypes that we think should have gone away in the '30s, '40s and '50s, that still plague working women in this country today.”
When it involves a national paid family and medical leave law, Narefsky says the U.S. is an outlier in comparison with similarly developed countries. The FMLA only provides unpaid leave, and even then many employees fall through the cracks because they’ll't take leave in any respect because of exemptions or financial insecurity. Only 13 states — including California — and Washington, D.C., have passed paid family and medical leave laws that try to fill the gaps left by the federal government. And within the Golden State, paid family leave only provides a portion of pay.
“This is a real sign of momentum and progress, but unfortunately there are still millions of workers without guaranteed protections to take paid leave when they need to care for their own medical needs, cope with the military deployment of their spouse or loved one, or – as in this case – welcome a new child into their family,” Narefsky said.
While Cisneros said she has received nothing but support from the community and the town, that was not the case for her predecessor, one other Sunnyvale council member.
In 2003, former Sunnyvale Mayor Melinda Hamilton was elected to the town council for the primary time. A month later, Hamilton learned that she and her husband were expecting their first child.
“The council approved it unanimously,” Hamilton said of her parental leave. “The public was less happy about it. People wanted to know who was going to take care of my child. Ironically, my colleague's wife got pregnant – she had a baby three or four months after me – and he never got that question.”
Hamilton said she was still under scrutiny years later when she ran for re-election – 14 months after giving birth to her second child. During her campaign, she knocked on the door of a person who asked her if she was “the one who got pregnant.” When she replied that she had two children, he told her he wouldn’t vote for her and slammed the door in her face.
The former mayor knows she is lucky to have access to childcare after the birth of her child, but she also knows that this is just not the case for all parents and that this represents one other hurdle for girls who need to enter politics.
“The men who dominate politics have women at home who take care of these things. Or if you're Sheryl Sandberg and you encourage women to get involved, you have the financial means to pay someone else to take care of your children,” Hamilton said.
Diana Reddy, an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley, said considered one of the explanations many pregnant women have so few protections is because labor laws weren’t necessarily written for girls – especially women in politics.
“There are so many fields that are structurally inhospitable to women of childbearing age, and that's why it's difficult for women to even imagine working in them,” Reddy said. “We saw that in sport with Serena Williams, we see it here with the question of public service and whether you can do that with the biological or social reality of women having children.”
The lack of young women in public office is one reason Cisneros feels the problem doesn't get much attention. In California, 39.7% of local elected offices and 41.7% of seats within the state legislature were held by women. According to a recent report from the Center for American Women and Politics.
Cisneros hopes that state and labor laws “will be able to keep pace and take into account the needs of women and men who otherwise have a right to reconcile family and work.”
For the ladies who will hold elected office in Sunnyvale after Cisneros, this might make all of the difference.
“We say we should vote for women,” Cisneros said, “but when it comes to balancing family and life among the electorate, we have to let others decide whether we can keep our seats and remain in elected office.”
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