Office Owners Coming Around Slowly On Accommodating New Mothers, But Not Kids

Two days before Christmas in 2022, tucked into a $1.7T appropriations bill, Congress passed a law that requires large employers to provide a dedicated space for new mothers to nurse and pump breast milk at the office. President Joe Biden signed the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers Act, or PUMP Act, into law just before New Year's.

Many owners of office space across the country missed the memo. Nearly two years later, adoption has been slow, even as more studies suggest providing resources to working mothers boosts employee retention and productivity.

Despite many office landlords spending recent years running a race to outdo the amenities of their competitors, that competition hasn't led to a hoped-for boom in childcare amenities, and even legally mandated nursing spaces are often an afterthought.

Jodi Pulice, the founder and CEO of New York-based real estate advisory firm JRT Realty, said touring office spaces with her corporate clients has drilled that reality home. 

“Every space we saw, there was a golf simulator and a rooftop bar and restaurants that are run by top-level chefs, and I'm saying to myself, ‘What happened here? Am I the only one that sees that 4.5 million women left the workplace?’” Pulice said. “I'm sure there are a lot of women that golf, but these women are not coming back to the workplace because of a golf simulator.”

Lactation rooms and childcare are key components of the tug of war between employers who want their workers spending more time in the office and employees who are demanding more flexibility.

At the height of the pandemic, 5.1 million women left the paid workforce to do unpaid care work, including childcare. A year later, 1.3 million women were still locked out of the workforce due to the demands and costs of childcare.

Today, female participation in the labor force is at an all-time high of 78%, The New York Times reported, but those numbers have plateaued among women with children under 5 years old, according to research from think tank The Hamilton Project. 

Access to childcare has been part of the national conversation around the return to the office since 2020, although it remains largely unaddressed to date. In New York, childcare was an obstacle to in-person work for almost three-quarters of respondents in a recent office worker survey from the Downtown Alliance. In response to a lack of options, working parents have cut their hours or left New York — costing $23B in lost economic output in 2022 alone, according to the New York City Economic Development Corp.

Office tenants are telling landlords that amenities related to childcare — whether that’s a nearby daycare facility or on-site pumping suites — are important to their workforce, Real Estate Board of New York Senior Vice President for Policy Maya Kurien told Bisnow.

“Tenants consistently relay to landlords, brokers and others in the industry that inadequate childcare options in proximity to their workers’ workplace or home poses a major challenge for worker productivity, commute times and overall cost of living,” Kurien wrote in an email. “Unfortunately, building and opening childcare centers is more expensive, complicated and onerous than it should be.” 

The PUMP Act mandates that all companies with 50 or more employees provide a space beyond a bathroom where nursing employees can pump at work, as well as adequate break time to do so. The law allows women to sue their employers if they don't have adequate facilities.

While workplaces are beginning to think about how to provide private pumping spaces for new mothers, many office landlords appear to be unaware of the new law — until their tenants run into problems.

“We got a call from an employer who was panicking because they had a multipurpose wellness room and a mom who was trying to pump, and she'd been walked in on three separate times,” said Jules Lairson, chief operating officer at pump suite provider Work & Mother. “After the third time, lawyers were involved. We get calls like that all of the time.”

The federal law follows local legislation in cities like New York and Chicago, which have their own additional requirements. 

The Feil Organization, which owns and operates more than 26M SF of office properties, started putting in private spaces in its prebuilt offices that can be used for pumping following the passage of the PUMP Act, the firm’s head of leasing, Andrew Wiener, told Bisnow.

Some tenants are building out their own spaces, but Feil is also in conversations with service providers like MilkMate and Work & Mother about installing top-of-the-line rooms, as opposed to multipurpose wellness spaces, he said.

“We found that it's more advantageous to have it in the tenant space so that they can access the room quickly, conveniently and on their schedule,” Wiener said.

But other landlords preferred to avoid specifically designating a space as a pumping room, despite the appeal of potentially helping a tenant comply with federal law.

“We don’t get involved on how a tenant uses a space,” Brandon Avedikian, founder of Aspire Commercial, a boutique firm specializing in office and retail, told Bisnow. “We deal with where the walls are going.”

Avedikian hadn’t heard of the PUMP Act and said he hadn’t been asked by employers about designated pumping spaces in any of the 110 deals closed so far this year. Still, he said, it’s possible that office tenants are just using rooms within the space for pumping purposes without calling it out by name. 

“It’s really not a consideration in the market,” he said. “You really could designate any room with privacy for mothers that need to do that, so it may not be necessary to call that out as that in a listing.”

Heather Lamb, a senior vice president and the Atlanta market leader at Highwoods Properties, also hadn’t heard of the PUMP Act, adding that she has fewer interactions with tenant brokers since she was promoted from her prior role as a leasing broker. She said that while the publicly traded REIT, with a 27.4M SF portfolio, isn’t creating designated pumping spaces, many of its tenants are. 

“Landlords are not putting them in their amenity spaces of buildings, but tenants are building them out as part of their company work environment,” she said. “Most of the time, they're called wellness rooms.”

JLL Senior Vice President of Workplace Strategy Lauren Hasson said companies will often place nursing stations inside wellness rooms, and as long as women inside those spaces can’t be walked in on, that satisfies federal legal compliance.

But fighting co-workers for time in multipurpose wellness rooms is unlikely to help new mothers acclimate to returning to work, Hasson said. Pumping is a time-sensitive issue that often needs to be squeezed in between meetings, and having to compete for access to the space undermines attempts to provide it, she said.

“I think that if you don't have to do that, you shouldn't do that,” she said. “You have to be able to schedule that space and know that it's going to be available.”

While places to nurse are legally mandated and fairly straightforward for employers to provide, childcare is a far more daunting issue.

Sarah McCann, real estate strategy associate with architecture, interior design and workplace strategy consulting firm Vocon, told Bisnow that many owners look into leasing retail space to childcare businesses, but not into offering it as a potential amenity.

“I don't see a lot of landlords going into the business of childcare,” she said. 

Nicholas Bloom, an economist and professor at Stanford University who studies the effects of remote work, said nursing rooms aren't enough to draw women back to the office in larger numbers, but daycare could be.

“These types of amenities are certainly important, but for most employees they will not make or break the decision to come to work,” Bloom said in an email. “Daycare is perhaps the one exception, although it’s also extremely expensive so I don’t see this very often.”

But Vocon has found itself on the receiving end of an increasing number of requests for private, in-office spaces that can be used as places for new mothers to pump in private, with a cottage industry of service providers slowly beginning to appear in office buildings.

“There's a heightened awareness around a lot of the trends in back to work — how do we make this business more inviting and make it more user-friendly, especially for working moms?” McCann said.

Lairson’s company, Houston-based startup Work & Mother, is one such company. It builds out dedicated pumping rooms in office buildings across the country and has found that its spaces have been a differentiating factor for tenants seeking space.

“We're seeing a dramatic effect in contributing to the leasing success and the landlord's ROI,” Lairson told Bisnow. “HR is usually part of the leasing tour, since they are the ones that are overseeing all of their people's needs, and it makes a lasting impression.”

Access to the suites — which cost around $50K to build out and contain hospital-grade breast pumps, lockers for moms to store attachment kits, vending machines for mothers who are missing parts of their kits, as well as teas and snacks like lactation cookies — helped one Austin office landlord close two separate deals spanning 39K SF in a 200K SF building, Lairson said.

Pump rooms can be less sophisticated than suites, from an interior office with a door that locks to spaces with a sink, a refrigerator and a counter, McCann said.

Although brokerages don’t typically track mothering rooms as amenities, anecdotal evidence suggests that the spaces are popular and well utilized. In one space it built out in NYC’s Plaza District, Vocon found the room was “booked out all day.” 

“I would liken it to a higher-end, personal shower room,” McCann said. “They get the same amount of utilization. It's almost a necessity at this point.”

Pumping rooms are essential for employers who are interested in retaining talent, said Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of advocacy group Moms First.

“By providing real solutions like remote work, dedicated spaces for pumping and affordable childcare, we not only keep women in the workforce but allow them to thrive,” she said. “Supporting moms in the workplace isn't just a nice-to-have — it’s essential for creating an inclusive and productive workforce.”