An Interview with Medela EVP, Americas, Melissa Gonzales
We spoke to Melissa Gonzales, executive vice president for the Americas at Medela, about how the company’s focus on supporting breastfeeding families is innately linked to its concern for the well-being of its own employees. The culture at Medela is built on the desire to amplify compassion and access for breastfeeding moms. In the US, this is quite an undertaking, as paid leave is not universal, and only part of the issue.
“We know that breastfeeding alone significantly reduces the incidence of the foremost common and costly childhood problems in the first year of life,” Gonzales says. “But there’s growing evidence and data about the benefits of breastfeeding for maternal health outcomes as well, including both breast and ovarian cancer rates.”
A 12-year veteran of Medela, Gonzales says she’s always had an interest in people’s health and wellbeing. Her career began in nursing before transitioning to medical devices.
When she happened to come across an opportunity at Medela, she was immediately struck by the company’s passionate, mission-driven culture.
“Our employees have this great passion for what they do,” Gonzales says. “Whether on the human milk side or on the healthcare side of our business, we’re here for the mission and that mission is to advance human health and wellbeing through innovation in breast milk feeding and medical vacuum technology.”
Gonzales says putting the customer first is a focus of Medela’s, and it’s founded in listening. Listening, most intently, for the gaps where people may be struggling.
“The breastfeeding journey is complex and really personal,” she says, “As a leader, I’ve committed to fostering a constant quest for learning, and encouraging our teams to apply those learnings to innovations that can make a difference to support the breastfeeding journey of every mother.”
While it’s true that the basic elements of mothering a baby don’t change, Gonzales says that opportunities for new mothers and attitudes towards breastfeeding are constantly shifting in ways that don’t always favor this critical bond between mother and child.
Medela focuses its efforts strongly on three frontiers in the battle for rectifying that inequality to support breastfeeding families:
ADVOCATING FOR POLICIES
It’s common knowledge that gaps exist in the knowledge of many new parents and that those gaps are sometimes fostered by social inequalities.
“We got intensely interested in this in 2010 with the Affordable Care Act. This landmark healthcare legislation offered an opportunity to close some of these gaps for moms,” she says of the opportunities the ACA afforded Medela to help people. “There was a big focus on opening up lactation support, supplies, and services for parents. But there’s no universal approach. There’s no way to monitor or enforce it.”
“So, we started to ask, ‘What can we do through legislative vehicles to create more awareness around the importance of human milk as a kind of a low-cost, high-impact opportunity for health and wellbeing?’ As a result, we have worked to provide education to help to reinforce the opportunity the ACA affords working families.”
PARTNERING WITH EMPLOYERS
Medela leadership soon realized that a major problem for working moms was that employers didn’t know how to support them in the early months of parenting.
According to research, working women today want to balance becoming a new parent and growing their career, but research shows that 43% of women leave the workforce within three months of having a baby.
“Legislation exists that says employers need to provide support for breastfeeding moms and employers wanted to support breastfeeding moms but they often don’t know what to do. And that is why we introduced New Moms’ Healthy Returns with Mamava as a leading partner. Now we can say to organizations, ‘Let us be your solution to help you best support your mom in a way that is simple for you and everything she needs.’”
For Medela, this initiative helps address the gap of supporting new working moms in the workplace, offering a comprehensive solution that includes Medela breastfeeding products and resources, easy-to-place Mamava suites to pump in, 24/7 virtual support from pregnancy through baby’s first year, and breast milk shipping for traveling employees.
“We offer these benefits and more to Medela employees,” says Gonzales. “The data shows that companies that provide lactation support programs see an average retention rate of 94%, and we are able to show how supporting breastfeeding mothers in the workplace has a positive impact on employee retention, engagement, and the bottom line.”
STATE-OF-THE-ART PARENTAL LEAVE
Today, nearly two thirds of moms in the U.S. go back to work, a significant increase over the number that returned in the early 1960s (only 16 percent). But the conflict arises when mothers try to maintain their exclusive breastfeeding goals through six months up to one year and beyond, as recommended by WHO and AAP.
Exclusive breastfeeding, though recommended for better health outcomes,, is often complicated by a myriad of factors. 90% of women go into the hospital ready to breastfeed, but that number drops to 83% by the time they leave the hospital. By six months only 58% of mothers are still breastfeeding, and only 25% of them are exclusively feeding breast milk, despite AAP recommendations. While there will always be certain complications regarding whether or not a child receives breast milk exclusively, it’s clear that workplace attitudes and restrictions regarding feeding have a major impact on the practice’s full adoption.
“Women are an integral, vital part of the workforce,” Gonzales says of the average U.S. working new mother. And yet nearly seventy percent of new moms are back at work during the first six months of their child’s life, and many of them are going back to work in the first weeks after baby is born.
“We recognized that employers can do more to support new moms when they return to work after baby,” explains Gonzales. “As a company committed to helping mom transition back to work successfully, we had to evaluate our own policies. This year, we expanded our parental paid leave policy to 16 weeks, accessible for both parents regardless of what level they are at in the organization. They can take it at any time over a 12-month period. It is a really flexible policy and we’re really proud of it – and the response from our employees has confirmed that it was a good decision.”
A DIVERSE POOL OF TALENT
“Companies often lose sight of the fact that without their people, you really don’t have a business,” Gonzales says.
It’s the people, she says, who are responsible for the continued great ideas, operational efficiency, and an intimate understanding of both the customer and of the gaps in the environment they’re operating in.
As an organization, Medela is committed to diversity and inclusion. “We know that we cannot truly understand our customers’ evolving needs if our employees do not feel like they have a voice,” says Gonzales. “Our employees need to feel understood and supported in sharing ideas that ultimately could drive innovation.”
In all, Medela is powered by empathy. With its major focus on assisting working families in simplifying their lives and getting children the optimal nutrition, Medela is truly a company with a mission anyone could be impassioned about
SOURCES
1. Breastfeed Med. 2015 Apr;10(3):175-82.
doi: 10.1089/bfm.2014.0141. Epub 2015 Mar 18.
Association between breastfeeding and breast cancer risk: evidence from a meta-analysis. PMID: 25785349 DOI: 10.1089/bfm.2014.0141
2. Gynecol Oncol . 2019 Apr;153(1):116-122.doi: 10.1016/j.ygyno.2019.01.017.Epub 2019 Jan 25.
Breastfeeding factors and risk of epithelial ovarian cancer
