Why don’t parental leave laws protect pregnant elected officials?

Sunnyvale Councilmember Alysa Cisneros needed approval from her colleagues to take a 15-week parental leave.

Like many soon-to-be mothers, the cost of child care, the potential health risks and the impact on her career darted through Sunnyvale City Councilmember Alysa Cisneros’ mind when she considered having a second child.

But serving in public office, she felt an additional weight on her decision — the court of public opinion, and the potential sexism that she might face as a pregnant elected official.

On a recent Tuesday evening, Cisneros and her council colleagues gathered at Sunnyvale City Hall like they do nearly every other week to publicly discuss and vote on city business. But on this particular Tuesday, alongside standard agenda items like road repairs and city contracts, was Cisneros’ 15-week parental leave.

Many elected officials in California aren’t covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, and according to Sunnyvale’s city charter, the council can declare a seat vacant if a council member is absent from meetings for a period of 60 days. If Cisneros wanted to take a leave of absence and keep her seat, she’d have to seek a vote of approval from the other six members on the council. And on June 4, at seven months pregnant, she did.

“I feel really vulnerable, because I know that decisions that are private and based in conversations with my doctor and my individual circumstances are being put up for public scrutiny,” Cisneros said. “I have to relinquish 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 Laura Narefsky, an attorney with the National Women’s Law Center, said “feels too familiar to many women working in this country.” In 2020, the challenges of being a working mom in politics were on full display as Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland) brought her 4-week-old baby to the Capitol after she was told that maternity leave wasn’t an acceptable reason to vote by proxy.

“There is still a real skepticism around women’s ability to engage in the paid workforce and to manage 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 fallen by the wayside in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, that are still plaguing women working in this country today.”

When it comes to a national paid family and medical leave law, Narefsky said that the United States is an outlier compared to similarly developed nations. The FMLA only grants unpaid leave, and even then many workers still fall through the cracks due to exemptions or financial insecurity that prevents them from taking leave in the first place. 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 in the Golden State, paid family leave only provides partial wages.

“That is a real sign of momentum and progress, but unfortunately there are still millions of workers left without guaranteed protections to take paid time off when they are dealing with their own medical needs, dealing with the military deployment of a spouse, or loved one or — as in the case here — welcoming a new child into their family,” Narefsky said.

While Cisneros said she’s received nothing but support from the community and the city, that wasn’t the case for another Sunnyvale council member who came before her.

In 2003, former Sunnyvale Mayor Melinda Hamilton was elected to the council for the first time. A month later, Hamilton learned she and her husband were expecting their first child.

“The council approved it unanimously,” Hamilton said of her parental leave. “Members of the public were less happy about it. People wanted to know who was going to take care of my kid. Ironically, my colleague’s wife got pregnant — she had a baby three or four months after I did — and he never got that question.”

Hamilton said she continued to face scrutiny years later when she ran for re-election — 14 months after her second child was born. While campaigning, she knocked on a man’s door who asked her if she was “the one who got pregnant?” When she responded that she had two kids, he told her that he wouldn’t be voting for her and slammed the door in her face.

The former mayor recognizes how lucky she was to have access to child care after she gave birth, but she knows that’s not the case for all parents, creating yet another barrier for women looking to get into politics.

“The men who dominate politics, they have wives at home who deal with this stuff, or if you’re Sheryl Sandberg and you’re encouraging women to ‘Lean In,’ you have the financial resources to pay somebody else to take care of your kids,” Hamilton said.

Diana Reddy, an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley, said one of the reasons many pregnant women have such few protections is because employment law wasn’t necessarily written with women in mind — especially for women in politics.

“There are so many fields that have been structurally inhospitable to women of childbearing age, and because of that it’s also been difficult for women to even imagine themselves in them,” Reddy said. “We saw this in sports with Serena Williams, we see this 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 part of the reason why Cisneros feels like the issue hasn’t received a lot of attention. In California, 39.7% of local elected offices and 41.7% of state Legislature seats were held by women, according to a recent report from the Center for American Women and Politics.

Cisneros hopes that state and employment laws are “able to catch up and consider the needs of women and men who in every other case have the right to balance family and career.”

In the meantime, Sunnyvale is moving forward with creating change in its enclave of the Bay Area. On Tuesday, the council also voted to have a committee review potential charter amendments that might be brought to the voters in 2026. One of those items is a possible amendment to extend family and medical leave rights to council members.

For the women who will come to hold elected office in Sunnyvale after Cisneros, it could make all the difference.

“We say to elect women,” Cisneros said, “but when it comes to balancing having a family and elected life we must leave it up to others to decide whether we should be able to keep our seats and remain in elected office.”