Entrepreneur to WeWork: What About New Moms?
WeWork offers freelancers and small businesses co-working spaces that are seriously tricked out: they’ve got arcades, foosball tables, and beer kegs in every kitchen. So when Glassbreakers CEO Eileen Carey moved her team into a WeWork space in San Francisco, she was surprised to learn there was no designated room where breastfeeding mothers could pump in private.
After a month of requests that got her nowhere, Carey penned an open letter to WeWork in TechCrunch, asking them to install a lactation room, and pronto. As she pointed out, not only is it a major disadvantage to her ability to hire women if she can’t offer them a lactation room, it’s also against the law in California, where employers are required to give employees “adequate facilities for breastfeeding.”
WeWork responded to Carey’s letter, saying they are “working on plans to build a dedicated room for this purpose at this location.” So Carey used Gloria Feldt’s Power Tool #3, Use What You’ve Got, and got what she needed in return—it seems. We’ll be watching WeWork to see that they make good on their promise, and if they don’t, you can bet Eileen Carey will have something to say about it.
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.