15 Celebs Who Got Real About The Career Implications Of Pregnancy & Motherhood

Building a career is hard. Being a mom is hard. But being a working mother can feel like a whole new level of impossible. In her book "Forget Having It All," Amy Westervelt says it all in a simple sentence: "Women are expected to work like they don't have children and raise children as if they don't work."

Many working moms — celebs and non-celebs alike — are familiar with this pressure. These ridiculously high standards often set women up for failure, no matter what they prioritize. Even more frustrating, cis men usually aren't held to the same standards. Many men have fulfilling careers and family lives without worrying about the balancing act that maintaining both often entails for women. This may be partially because there's often a woman behind them doing all of that dirty work, but it could also be because society tends to expect less of fathers.

One clear example of this is what's known as the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus, where mothers are less likely to get hired or earn as much as male coworkers in similar positions. Fathers, however, are more likely to get hired or get a raise than childless men. This issue impacts the lower and middle classes the hardest, but this gap exists across socioeconomic lines. Even celebrities are not immune from the penalties that sometimes come with motherhood, or how trying to raise a family can impact their career.

Comedian Tina Fey has had an illustrious career. She's won the Mark Twain award for humor, hosted the Emmys with comedic bestie Amy Poehler, and had a hit show, "30 Rock". But while she worked towards these achievements, she also had to shoulder the burden of a very specific type of guilt, working-mom guilt.

In a piece she wrote for The New Yorker called "Confessions of a Juggler," she details the questions and attitudes she gets from some of the people who have the least to do with career or family decisions — strangers — writing "'How do you juggle it all?' people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. 'You're screwing it all up, aren't you?' their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I've poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away."

A comedian, actress, writer, and director, Amy Poehler is probably best known for her time on "Saturday Night Live" and her role as Leslie Knope, the ambitious small-town politician on "Parks and Recreation". What some may not know about her is that she deals with a constant struggle to balance her work with raising her two boys. In her book "Yes, Please", she goes into detail about the practical realities of being a working mom and how she feels about the comment, "I don't know how you do it," especially when it comes from another woman.

"The 'I don't know how you do it' statement used to get my blood boiling ... In my fantasy, I would answer, 'What do you mean how do I do it? Do you really want to know the ins and outs of my nanny schedule? Do you want to know how I balance childcare with my husband and the different ways I manipulate and negotiate work to help me put my kids first when needed?'"

Actress and singer, Jamie Lynn Spears was a Nickelodeon star with her own show, "Zoey 101" when she became pregnant with her first child. Her pregnancy garnered more attention than most celebrity pregnancies do because she was only 16 at the time. Instead of receiving support or understanding for going through such a big life change at a young age, she faced scrutiny and criticism, not just about the kind of role model she was for the kids who watched her show, but also for how pregnancy would affect her career. 

In an Instagram post, she gets into how she was treated when the news broke, "I can remember about 15-16 years ago when every headline around (the) world was telling me that I was a failure, everything I worked my whole life for would be gone, and I had ruined my whole life, bc I was (a) young girl who got pregnant, & decided to keep my baby. I accepted every awful thing they said about me as the truth, my only wish was to be left alone to raise my baby in peace and so I did just that."

Maggie Smith, writer of the New York Times best-selling memoir, "You Could Make This Place Beautiful" and several books of poetry, seemed to see herself more as a mother who wrote poetry sometimes than a career writer. For a while, she managed to make her work as a writer fit around her role as a mother. However, when her viral poem, "Good Bones" was published in 2016, that all began to change.

As her writing gained more attention and her career grew, she began to travel more. Shifting some of the childcare duties to her husband put a noticeable strain on her marriage. In an excerpt of "You Could Make This Place Beautiful" published in The Cut, she wrote, "As I told a reporter from the Columbus Dispatch, my hometown paper, 'I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I'm just Maggie who pushes the stroller.' But my marriage was never the same after that poem."

As a model, actress, entrepreneur, and writer, Emily Ratajkowski has proven she's multitalented. Besides being a well-known model, she's also become the owner of a successful swimsuit line and written a best-selling collection of essays called "My Body" in which she details her experiences as a model and how selling her image has shaped her. However, that doesn't mean that balancing the early days of motherhood with work was an easy task.

In an interview with Elle, she discussed how difficult things were for her not long after giving birth. While taking advantage of the peace and quiet that the pandemic created, she still had to go back to work writing her book, within two weeks after having a baby to meet a deadline, "So I was like writing a book and breastfeeding every two to three hours. And felt totally insane and incapable of doing it. And now I'm here talking about it so I think things have worked out."

A successful comedic actress, filmmaker, and producer, Elizabeth Banks has had memorable roles in comedies like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and mega-hit movie series like "Pitch Perfect" and "Hunger Games." While maintaining a busy acting career, she's also had two children. In an interview with New You, she discussed her approach to being a working mother and finding a balance between healthy family life and career duties that work for her.

She also concedes that men don't face the same push women do to achieve this kind of balance, "I balance it by always putting my children's health and safety first. Then I feel OK to go and do the job I love ... [but] I don't think dads do it as well as moms, quite frankly, as I don't think there's any pressure on them to balance anything in their lives when it comes to parents being at work."

Since starting her acting career in 1986, Naomi Watts has acted in numerous and varied roles, from movies like "Mulholland Drive" to "King Kong." Not only that but she's been nominated for Academy and Golden Globe Awards, as well as winning a SAG award in 2016 for her role in "Birdman." While her skilled acting has gained recognition over the years, Watts acknowledges the struggle of balancing motherhood with work.

In an interview with Blackbook, she also admits that having young children has changed her acting career, making it harder to drive into roles with the abandon she used to, "Every single day, I second-guess myself as a mother. I chose to be a mom. It's something I've always wanted, but I feel torn between two worlds. I am not reaching the same depths and heights that I used to reach in movies because I'm a parent of two small children who desperately need me. It's frustrating because I feel like I'm failing a bit on both ends."