Exclusive: Many Women On Maternity Leave Laid Off By Meta, Says New Mother Anneka Patel Who Got The Pink Slip

Anneka Patel who was laid off along with 11,000 others at Meta told ABP Live that the company will give her promised severance.

Severance is provided to anyone impacted by the November 9 layoffs: Anneka Patel. Image taken from Patel's LinkedIn page.

"My heart sank", Anneka Patel, one of the women directly affected by the mass layoffs at Facebook-parent Meta, wrote in a lengthy LinkedIn note as she confirmed that she was fired by the social networking giant that went on a massive layoff spree. Patel was a employed as a communications manager at Facebook and her stint with the company ended with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's email that confirmed she was one of the over 11,000 employees impacted by the layoffs at Meta. Patel's maternity leave ends in February 2023, and Meta will give her promised severance, she told ABP Live.

"Yes, severance is provided to anyone impacted by the November 9 layoffs," said the former communications manager at Facebook.

According to Meta's maternity benefits, pregnant women who are full-time, short-term or part-time employees working at least 20 hours per week become automatically eligible for maternity leave starting from their hire date. From the date of birth, maternity leave at meta typically allows 6 weeks to recover from a vaginal delivery and 8 weeks from the date of birth for a C-section delivery.

Pregnant women can start their maternity leave up to 4 weeks before their due date with the disability reason of pregnancy. Any maternity time needed earlier than that requires doctor certification, read Meta's maternity benefits and paid paternal leave page.

'Will Begin Job Search In The New Year'

Sharing her future plans, Patel said, "I’m going to continue to see out my maternity leave and dedicate my time to my daughter over the next few months, and will begin my job search in the New Year."

She also said there were several other women out on maternity leave who were laid off by the social networking giant. However, she said she wasn't sure how many employees were laid off from the communications department at Meta. She also stressed that the company was not overstaffed at any point.

"I was born and raised in London and have worked in communications since 2009. I moved out to San Francisco in 2013 and started working at Facebook (now Meta) in May 2020 on the Facebook Groups communications team," Patel said, explaining her role at Meta.

"My role involved working with the millions of community leaders running Facebook Groups to tell their stories, amplify their communities and provide media relations support."

To recall, last week, Zuckerberg, in an email to employees shared the company has decided to reduce the size of its team by about 13 per cent and let more than 11,000 of its employees go. Zuckerberg highlighted the need to become capital efficient as the reason for the massive layoff.

"At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth. Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected. Not only has online commerce returned to prior trends, but the macroeconomic downturn, increased competition, and ads signal loss have caused our revenue to be much lower than I’d expected. I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that," Zuckerberg wrote.