At 20 weeks pregnant while on her babymoon, Erin McGoff, a 30-year-old career advice content creator, punctuated her typically educational posts with a rare personal update. She was pregnant. “Within 24 hours, I’d lost 6,000 followers”, she says. “I posted a picture, and it was like, lights out for me”.
Initially, Erin hadn’t planned to announce her pregnancy at all. “I'm an educational creator, I'm not a lifestyle creator, so no one would really notice because I only film my videos from the chest up”, she says. But she began to feel as though she were keeping a part of herself hidden, both mentally and physically, and her manager assured her that pregnancy announcements were typically “very good for engagement”. Instead, the opposite happened.
