Entrepreneur Anna Fuller recently described the acronym of ‘FWP’ that she said has become well-known in female founder circles. It stands for “Fundraising While Pregnant”, a special category requiring advice in startup land.
If you thought that in 2023 the idea of approaching investors while pregnant wouldn’t inspire bias or be an issue, you’re sadly mistaken.
Just as you might be mistaken for believing a CEO could breastfeed her baby while running a team meeting and sharing an image about it, without receiving a barrage of misogynistic comments. Maybe it’s time for another acronym: ‘LMB’, Leading While breastfeeding.
Despite a massive revolution in how we work that should have made things much easier for pregnant women and new mothers to continue their work – where they can and have the support available – these same mothers still face vitriolic feedback that is as exhausting as dealing with a newborn.
The CEO who posted the photo is Lisa Conn, who leads the venture-backed tech startup Gatheround, helping organisations to build better team culture.
Conn left to take parental leave in December 2022, when she was CFO of the startup, and returned to work in March 2023 as a new mother and fresh CEO of the company.
She announced the new role on LinkedIn – which is often standard on starting a new role. But then she did something a little different: posted a photo of herself at her desk, breastfeeding her 12-week-old baby while leading a team meeting online.
Why? Because she had never come across a breastfeeding, postpartum CEO before, and she knew what seeing such representation could have done for her career earlier.
The post went viral, with millions of impressions and thousands of comments and reactions.
And the vast majority of the response was positive. The inbound requests for demos of Gatherhound’s platform tripled in response, and the volume of unprompted job applications skyrocketed overnight.
But while Conn said most responses were “extraordinary,” she unfortunately experienced plenty of detractors, many of whom showed “deep and chilling misogyny” veiled as concern for the baby. “If I were a male CEO, no one would ask who was taking care of the baby while I worked,” Conn wrote about the feedback the post received, last week for Fortune.
Anna Fuller, who wrote about how she closed her latest fundraising round for Halo, two weeks before she was to give birth, described how there are very few tips out there on “how to fundraise while pregnant,” despite the deluge of freely available material on pretty much every other aspect of approaching investors. She then went through each of the four main areas that founders have about Fundraising While Pregnant (FWP) including timing, disclosure, bias and logistics. The guide is comprehensive and worth a read for anyone who is FWP or may potentially be doing so in the future. But it also highlights the challenges so many pregnant founders still face, likely contributing then to the tiny numbers of such women founders receiving investment.
It’s disappointing in 2023 that any woman should have to feel concerned about investor reactions to pregnancy. For years on Women’s Agenda, we’ve heard the stories of female founders coming across investors asking more questions about how the founder would manage a baby than they were asking about the actual startup.
Instead of raising concerns, a new mother who is building a business or taking on a new leadership position should be seen as an opportunity. She’s a founder taking on a new challenge and set to experience a change that will grow her experience, skills and expertise. She’s a founder set to find a new drive and engine following the birth of a child. New fathers are so often celebrated in this way – evident in the data that shows how promotions and pay rises come to new fathers.
And she’s a leader who could very well inspire others into engaging with the business, including as potential talent or customs.
As CEO Fuller noted in her post – the positive reaction to her post should be a “wake up” call to employers, especially given how inbound business inquiries as well as job applications went significantly up after seeing the post. Jobseekers, clients and customers want to see leaders highlighting their family values and actively demonstrating where they are working flexibly, where they are seeking help, and how they are combing work and family life – in whatever form that is.
Conn conceded she is in a privileged position in the United States, in being able to balance motherhood and the CEO role, given her race, socioeconomic background, access to education and a husband who shares the load at home as all contributing. But overall, she says it’s the very ability to work flexibly – for both herself and her husband – that is an essential condition in enabling her to make it work. Flexibility won’t solve everything for women at work, but Conn does urge leaders to “embrace this opportunity to get flexible work right”.
Part of getting it right means actively demonstrating it. If leaders want their teams to get the most out of remote work and flexibility, they need to showcase how they themselves are working in such ways. Conn has done that brilliantly here.
On acquiring Women’s Agenda six weeks after having my second child, I recall taking a call from a journalist to share more about my plans for the publication. I never once mentioned while speaking with her that I was carrying a newborn in a baby carrier and pacing the neighbourhood in the hope of keeping him quiet during the interview. That was day one of my life as a business owner. For the months that followed during that initial period I would continually find ways to avoid the conversation of having a newborn baby and the odd hours I was working to make it happen. My default was to immediately cover up the things I had going on outside of my life.
In 2023, I would approach those early months very differently, largely thanks to the massive shift to remote work, as well as the rise in founders and leaders publicly sharing what they are managing at home. Representation matters.
Anna Fuller, keep sharing those tips. And Lisa Conn, keep posting those photos demonstrating the power of flexibility and the talent and potential clients that come to an organisation that takes flexibility seriously.