For many women, returning to work after having a child is a difficult transition. Recovery overlaps with responsibility. Sleepless nights give way to early mornings. Caregiving collides with schedules, expectations, and economic necessity.
For many Black women, that transition unfolds within a maternal health crisis that remains one of the starkest inequities in the U.S. Black mothers face disproportionately high rates of pregnancy-related complications, postpartum depression and maternal mortality. A central factor in maternal health outcomes that is often underexamined is the role of work.
That gap is the focus of an interdisciplinary research project funded by the Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS). Bringing together researchers from psychology and nursing, the project includes Drs. Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Lucinda Canty and Favorite Iradukunda, and doctoral students Ciara Venter and Diego Barcala-Delgado.
Together, they are examining how workplace conditions shape Black mothers’ mental health during pregnancy, postpartum recovery, and early parenthood—and finding that work is a core social determinant of health.
Maternal Strength and Personal Costs
The team began by analyzing an existing longitudinal dataset of 258 employed Black mothers, examining how three dimensions of work—work structure, policies, and workplace climate—relate to stress and postpartum depression. The dataset included factors such as how many hours the women work, schedule flexibility, benefits, supervisor and coworker support, autonomy, work pressure, and interpersonal stress.
Then, they turned to something the numbers alone could not provide: mothers’ own accounts of what it feels like to return to work while recovering from childbirth, caring for a newborn, and trying to hold everything together.
These focus groups painted a striking picture. The mothers they interviewed resonated strongly with many of the patterns revealed in the quantitative dataset.
“These moms really wanted to tell their stories,” Canty says. “They didn’t sugarcoat.”
Many mothers talked about going back to work while still healing physically and mentally. They talked about pressure from work during what should be a joyful time with their babies. They explained how little control they had over the timing of their return—especially when paid leave was unavailable, recovery was still ongoing, and the bills did not pause for childbirth.
In other words, they were describing a pressure familiar to many Black women: the expectation to be strong, self-sufficient, and always caring for others. Some scholars refer to this as the “Strong Black Woman” schema.
It captures a set of cultural expectations placed on Black women—the pressure to prioritize strength, self-sufficiency, and caregiving over self-care. In the focus groups, mothers brought these pressures uprepeatedly when discussing the need to balance home and work.
“[This schema] has been protective amidst historical oppression, but it’s a double-edged sword,” Venter says. “It may present a lot of protection on the outside, but on the inside, it can have hugely negative health effects.”
The team has already published findings from the quantitative portion of their research. Their study, published in Stress and Health, reinforces the project’s central insight: workplace conditions are not peripheral to maternal wellbeing, but a key factor shaping postpartum mental health for Black mothers.
They are continuing to analyze the focus group data—and they hope to do more. Barcala-Delgado is interested in extending the work to better understand the experiences of Black fathers and how they support postpartum mothers. The team hopes their work will inform future interventions around workplace conditions and support for postpartum workers.
Numbers and Stories
As a clinical psychology doctoral student and research assistant at UMass Amherst’s Work & Family Transitions Project (WFTP), Venter had already been thinking deeply about how mental health, parenthood, and work intersect. But she wanted to push the question further. Too often, she felt, conversations about mental health outcomes focused on individual factors without looking closely enough at the social and economic contexts shaping them.
“It’s not a personal failing if someone has poor mental health outcomes,” Venter says. “There are often system-level issues at play, including in the workplace.”
Venter and Perry-Jenkins—Venter’s advisor and principal investigator at WFTP—assembled a team to explore these issues from multiple angles in their IDS-funded project. Venter and Perry-Jenkins brought expertise in work, family life, and Black women’s mental health. Canty and Iradukunda are faculty in the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing with deep knowledge of Black maternal health, equity, clinical care, and community-engaged research. Graduate student Barcala-Delgado brought experience in quantitative research and an interest in family and childhood development.
“This is a nice melding of different people’s strengths, different kinds of data,” Perry-Jenkins says. “We need the big numbers to make policy cases and the personal stories to understand where change needs to happen.”
Humanizing the Research Process
An IDS research grant helped the team get started on the numbers.
“When Diego Barcala-Delgado and I were doing the quantitative work, IDS funding was critical,” Venter says. “That support is what allowed us, as students, to continue with the project.”
On the qualitative side, too, IDS funding meant the researchers could compensate participants in the focus groups, provide meals, and create a space that felt welcoming and respectful of their time. These mothers were already balancing immense demands—some had to take time off work, others had to bring their babies with them.
“We wanted to equitably compensate them for their time,” Venter says. “Every extra bit of financial support counts.”
Funding helped the team avoid adding to the burden their research was seeking to understand. They wanted a research process grounded in the values that drove them to this project in the first place: compassion, care, and community support.
And they wanted to share that ethos with each other.
“I was working with this team when I had my own baby,” Iradukunda reflects. “The way academia is structured, you always feel like you have to be moving, and you feel bad if you’re not. But this team was all so encouraging, giving me the respect and time to nurture my baby and be in that moment,” she explains.
The project—and the funding that supported it—also mattered for what it signaled.
“We’re in a time where funding for anything that looks at race or racism or history is facing a lot of uncertainty,” Canty says. “IDS didn’t make us change anything or delete any words.
“It sends a message that people still care about this,” she continues. “Regardless of what happens in the world, there are still people committed to improving outcomes for Black women.”