For three years, Rachel Makkar said, she thrived in her job as a broker and asset manager at J&B Building Co. in Colorado. She excelled at her work — she said her performance reviews noted that — and she thought it was “the best place I’ve ever worked.”
That changed in August. After trying for “a really long time” to conceive a second child, she suffered an early miscarriage at home one weekend. She couldn’t go to work that Monday. “I was really traumatized,” she said. “That entire first week was like a heightened level of emotion that I hadn’t really been through before.” She also had a doctor’s appointment to ensure she wasn’t experiencing an ectopic pregnancy, which would have required immediate surgery.
She had emailed her bosses, informing them of the miscarriage and her need to take Monday off, which she had enough paid leave to cover. Because of the pandemic, she had been working from home several days a week and opted to do that again Tuesday because she was still bleeding and her face was “so puffy from crying,” she said. She returned to the office, as scheduled, on Wednesday, she said, and then, given that her managers were out of the office, worked from home the rest of the week.
