When Katie Couric went on maternity leave with her first child in 1991, it was a very different world. George H.W. Bush was president. R.E.M. and Nirvana were dominating the charts. Maternity fashion left a lot to be desired.
And while a lot has changed—maternity clothes, thankfully, for one—a lot has stayed the same. Don’t believe us? Just check out the cringe-worthy flashback video the longtime NBC host shared in her Katie Couric Media Wake-Up Call newsletter.
The clip shows Katie and her colleague Bryant Gumbel chatting about her upcoming maternity leave on the Today show. When she tells him she’ll be taking nine weeks of leave, he proceeds to “joke” about how “long” she’ll be gone. Yikes.
"I was about to go on maternity leave and let’s just say, Bryant Gumbel didn’t quite get it … It’s pretty shocking to watch it now, 28 years later!" Katie said in her newsletter.
When Katie tells him she’ll be out for nine weeks, he asks her, “Why so long?”
“It’s a major shock to your body, I hope you realize, when you have a baby. And it takes a while to get back to normal and get on a schedule,” she replied.
“Your ancestors didn’t worry about that shock to your body. They came right back and worked,” Bryant responded. Later he asks, “How many men get nine weeks off?”
The entire clip is jaw-dropping for just how dated Bryant's patronizing teasing feels—especially in light of how little progress women have made in the workforce since the segment aired.
Katie clarified in comments to USA Today she wasn’t trying to call out Bryant specifically, and that the two remain “very friendly.”
"I think that times have changed so much, but I do think there's a lot of implicit bias against moms," Katie told the outlet. "I think it's important to make sure your employer is up on the times and that women aren't penalized, consciously or unconsciously, when they have children."
Sadly, Bryant’s attitude is still pretty common today. Even when it’s not—even in workplaces where bosses and co-workers know better than to pressure moms to return to work quickly after having a baby—working moms still aren’t entirely comfortable taking maternity leave. (That is, if they get any at all.)
Katie, herself, only ended up taking half her maternity leave according to Motherly—a decision no doubt driven by the fact that her predecessor at the Today show, Deborah Norville, never came back after taking maternity leave.
If you think that women anchors today have it better, think again. In 2018, The Atlantic published a piece titled, “It's Almost Impossible to Be a Mom in Television News,” outlining why for female reporters, the decision to have kids “can be a career-ending one.” In 2017, Sara Walsh, a former SportsCenter anchor for ESPN, described enduring a miscarriage while on air. She was afraid she’d lose her job if she left the set. (She was eventually let go.)
Certainly, maternity leave benefits have improved at large companies since 1991. Just in the last five years, the average amount of paid maternity leave offered at Working Mother’s 100 Best Companies shot up from 8 weeks to 11. Tech companies like Google and Facebook are well-known for offering extremely generous paid maternity leave policies (18 and 16 weeks respectively, for birth moms).
But it’s doubtful moms are taking the full amount of leave they’re entitled to—due in part to pressure like the kind Bryant put on Katie in the clip, as well as fear they’ll lose out on valuable career opportunities. In just one example, a survey by Indeed of 1,005 U.S. women working in the tech sector found that 83 percent said they felt pressured to return to their jobs while they were on parental leave.
That’s if moms are offered paid maternity leave at all. The United States is the only developed country that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave for moms. According to the paid leave advocacy group PL+US, only 6 percent of people working low-wage jobs have access to any paid family leave. It almost goes without saying that when leave isn’t paid, it’s simply not an option for most working families to take it. That’s a big reason why one in four moms in the U.S. go back to work within two weeks of giving birth.
The one big improvement since 1991: The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which was passed in 1993, gives many women access to 12 weeks of job-protected leave. But the leave is unpaid, and only about 60 percent of U.S. workers are covered by FMLA.
All in all, it means effectively little has changed for American women in 28 years when it comes to maternity leave. Sure, you probably won’t find men cracking sexist jokes on live TV anymore (Later, Bryant goes on to say, “The guys have the harder part” and “Number one, the guy is always right.”) Or maybe you will.
Until America passes a federal paid family leave program, with job protection for all workers, working moms will always be at the mercy of their (often male) bosses when it comes to the amount of leave they can actually take without financially imperiling their family or sabotaging their career. Here’s hoping we won’t be having the same conversation 28 years from now.