She has five films coming out, two of them (The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey) among the biggest releases on the calendar, and she is promoting all of them while visibly pregnant. Watch the press run and you see something we rarely get from a movie star: a working mother in her 40s, hopping from one international city to the next, doing a job that someone as rich and famous as Hathaway does not have to do. And what does that model for everyone watching?
The simplest answer is also the least glamorous. She is doing what millions of women do every day. She wants to work, so she does.
Hathaway is far from alone in that. Among women who had their first child in 2021 or 2022, 78 percent worked during the pregnancy leading up to the birth, according to the Census Bureau's 2022 Survey of Income and Program Participation. Eighty-five percent of them returned to work after.
The difference is that most of them never had a choice. Ninety-five percent of the lowest-wage workers have no access to paid family leave and 90 percent lack short-term disability, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.
So when women watch Hathaway grind through a global press tour at this stage of pregnancy, plenty of them recognize the assignment (minus the glam team, stylist and car service). But it is not just that she is working. It is that she is working with her belly out.
At an event for The End of Oak Street, she hit the rope line in a look that left the underside of her bump exposed, which sent social media into its usual spiral over whether she is doing too much. Hathaway has a gift for that. Whatever she does, someone decides it is too much.
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