The Motherhood Penalty Is Real in Veterinary Medicine. It Is Time to Talk About It.

There is a piece of advice that 76% of working mothers say they have received explicitly at some point in their careers: delay having children until you are more established.

It is practical advice. It is also, depending on how you hear it, a quiet indictment of the work culture that makes it necessary.

A recent survey of 1,000 American working mothers by Zety found that 87% say becoming a mother negatively impacted their careers. Fifty-nine percent say it altered their career path entirely. Eighty-four percent say their pregnancy was seen as an inconvenience at work. Eighty-one percent were asked to return from maternity leave early.

Half chose not to have more than one child because of the work challenges they encountered having their first.

These numbers are not specific to veterinary medicine. But veterinary medicine is a profession where approximately 80% of students and a growing majority of practitioners are women. Which means the motherhood penalty — the well-documented career cost that women pay for having children — lands with particular weight here.

The advice nobody should have to give

“I hate that advice,” says Jasmine Escalera, career expert at Zety, referring to the counsel to delay motherhood for career stability. “We should be living in a world where no matter what you’re doing outside of work, you should be able to achieve your career goals.”

She acknowledges the tension immediately: it is sound advice. It is also advice that people feel they need to give because of the work culture that exists, not the one that should.

In veterinary medicine that tension is particularly visible. The profession is built on a workforce that is increasingly female, and yet the structural accommodations for the realities of women’s lives — pregnancy, maternity leave, return-to-work flexibility, childcare — are inconsistent at best and absent at worst across a fragmented practice landscape made up largely of small independent businesses without HR infrastructure.

The result is that young women entering veterinary medicine are making the same calculations that working women across industries are making: what does a family cost, career-wise, and when can I afford to pay it?

What this looks like for veterinary professionals specifically

The Zety data captures working mothers broadly, but the veterinary context adds specific layers.

Clinical veterinary work is physically demanding in ways that intersect directly with pregnancy. Radiation exposure, chemical handling, physical restraint of patients, irregular hours, and the emotional intensity of emergency medicine all create practical considerations that many veterinary workplaces are underprepared to navigate thoughtfully.

The associate veterinarian model — where the majority of early-career vets work as employees of practices they do not own — means that maternity leave policies vary enormously depending entirely on the practice owner. Some are generous. Some are not. And the asymmetry of power between a new associate and the practice owner makes advocating for adequate leave a genuinely difficult conversation.

For veterinary technicians and nurses, the financial picture is even starker. Median compensation for credentialed veterinary technicians remains low relative to the cost of childcare, which means the return-to-work calculation after a first child is often not about career ambition at all — it is about whether working pays more than the cost of working.

The conversation the profession needs to have

The data from the Zety survey is useful not because it is surprising — most women in veterinary medicine already know this is true — but because it gives numbers to something that has often been discussed only in whispers.

Thirty-seven percent of working mothers delayed having additional children because of work challenges after their first. Fifty percent chose not to have more than one child for the same reason.

These are not personal choices that exist in a vacuum. They are responses to structural conditions. And in a profession that is actively grappling with a workforce shortage, the relationship between those conditions and the decisions women are making about their families deserves explicit attention — not as a personal issue but as a workforce planning one.

The women entering veterinary medicine today are the same women the Zety survey describes: aware of the penalty, making strategic decisions about when to pay it, and often receiving well-meaning advice to delay rather than being offered structural solutions that would make the delay unnecessary.

“The data we saw was incredibly staggering in terms of how women are implicitly — and in many cases explicitly — being told that being a mom is going to negatively impact them in the workplace, and they have to choose one,” Escalera says.

In a profession built on the workforce of women who were told this, the choice to keep telling them the same thing is itself a decision. So is the choice to build something different.

Source: Zety survey of 1,000 American working mothers, 2025. Career expert quotes from Jasmine Escalera, Zety.