In 2018, Annika moved to a new job at a bank in Germany, to lead a risk management team. Six weeks later, she told the company she was pregnant. She offered to continue working up until she gave birth, even though she was legally entitled to go on paid leave well before then.
She reports her manager quickly switching from pleasant to harsh. She says he started to question her competence, and complained to other colleagues about her pregnancy. “I slowly started to lose my nerve because the atmosphere became rather poisoned, and I really started to question myself.”
When he started talking about firing her, she found a lawyer. This led to a year’s worth of negotiations about a severance package. “The company was hoping I would quit by myself,” Annika, now 34, explains. “During my pregnancy I was pretty scared of the financial impact of getting fired and the impact on my career. I had a pretty bad nervous breakdown and couldn’t stop crying for three months.”
Discrimination due to pregnancy – like Annika experienced – is sadly common around the world. Even though it’s illegal in many nations, employers continue to demote, penalise or fire employees around the period of pregnancy. The discrimination can be overt or subtle, and in many cases structures and frameworks created to help women tackle it end up letting them down. This can have resounding psychological and financial impacts, in addition to the damage inflicted on their professional lives.
Spiralling ‘out of control’
Discrimination based on pregnancy can occur before, during and after pregnancy, including during periods of parental leave (if available). It can take a variety of forms. A currently or recently pregnant employee might be fired (which remains legally permissible in nearly 40 countries), kept from promotion, moved into a lower-paying role or required to work under hazardous conditions. Pregnant workers may not even get a foot in the door; an extreme case is needing to take a pregnancy test before getting hired.
There are also subtler ways employers may be letting down pregnant workers. A company may be excluding pregnant staff from training and other opportunities. Or it might be permitting a culture of disrespect and negativity towards pregnant employees – sometimes with the intent of driving them to quit. Many pregnant or recently pregnant workers suspect that they’re the first ones to be targeted for redundancy, although this can be hard to prove.
Discrimination includes when employers refuse reasonable accommodation for physically demanding jobs (Credit: Getty Images)
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A particular form of pregnancy discrimination is when employers fail to accommodate reasonable needs, particularly in physically demanding jobs. These accommodations could be incredibly simple, explains Elizabeth Gedmark, vice president of A Better Balance, which advocates for worker justice in the US, and operates a helpline for workers experiencing pregnancy discrimination. She highlights one case that involved a pregnant retail worker whose boss refused to allow her to carry a water bottle. “She collapsed on the job because she was so dehydrated,” says Gedmark. “It almost sounds unreal … But in a lot of industries, for example retail, there actually are policies against something like carrying a water bottle on the retail floor.”
Reasonable pregnancy accommodations could extend to white-collar workers as well, such as being allowed to work from home to reduce Covid-19 risks, or being permitted time off to attend antenatal appointments.
Comprehensive statistics are lacking, but estimates that do exist suggest pregnancy discrimination is rampant. In the UK, 11% of mothers surveyed in 2015 reported being dismissed or pushed out of their jobs; many more had received negative comments related to pregnancy. In Japan, a May 2020 survey showed one-quarter of pregnant employees had experienced matahara (short for ‘maternity harassment’, a Japanese term borrowing from English).
Gedmark says that in the US, low-wage working women of colour disproportionately bear the brunt of pregnancy-related ill treatment. And the pandemic has laid bare the plight of expectant and new parents in low-wage work, especially in countries with poor protections for parents. Workers continue to be forced off the job, or required to work under unsafe conditions, when they just need simple accommodations to ensure healthy pregnancies while working.
The consequences of being pushed out of the workforce by pregnancy can be acute. “When a pregnant worker is pushed out because of a denial of reasonable accommodation, the financial impacts can start there and can spiral out of control,” says Gedmark. “We have seen folks become homeless, we have seen folks lose their health benefits… during pregnancy, which is very, very dangerous.”
And, as with other forms of workplace discrimination, the financial consequences can also be long-lasting. “If you have even a period of months or… a year where you’re out of the workforce and are going into debt, then that means you’re not able to obtain seniority and greater benefits.” Among other things, this affects the ability to pay for education or save for retirement.
Legal protections?
Many employers remain unaware or unconcerned with laws protecting pregnant staff. Enforcement of violations is often weak, and employees themselves may not know what their rights are related to pregnancy. Even in countries with relatively strong protections for pregnancy and maternity, very few people who experience this type of discrimination end up going to court – fewer than 1% in the UK, according to charity Pregnant Then Screwed. Many are worried about employer retaliation as well as long-lasting effects on their careers.
Yet strong laws against pregnancy discrimination are clearly necessary.
For a decade now, A Better Balance and other organisations have been campaigning for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, to fill the gap in protections for pregnant workers. The US already has the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, but under this the legal bar for determining pregnancy discrimination is set very high. Essentially, according to A Better Balance, pregnant employees have to prove that someone in a comparable situation has already been accommodated similarly. Roughly 2/3 of workers who file cases for accommodation under the existing act ultimately lose their cases. Gedmark says the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which is now waiting for a vote in the US Senate, is about “providing the affirmative treatment that pregnant workers would need”.
In Japan, Matahara Net, which supports victims of pregnancy discrimination, is one of the organisations that successfully campaigned for an amendment to the Childcare and Nursing Care Leave Law, which expanded the range of situations where workers could obtain childcare leave. “As a result, the numbers of cases that employers clearly violate the law is decreasing, and the number of women who continue to work after childbirth is gradually increasing,” explains Matahara Net vice president Naoko Sasaki. Sasaki herself was fired after childbirth and felt let down by the Labour Bureau when she sought its support with dispute resolution. “However, harassment of people with work-style restrictions continues.”
Some pregnant employees report being left out of conversations or opportunities for advancement (Credit: Getty Images)
The legal situation continues to evolve in other middle- and high-income countries. In South Africa, a court opined in 2000 that pregnancy discrimination might be justifiable for a “rapidly expanding economy”, yet subsequent cases have tackled the right of pregnant employees to be temporarily assigned to non-hazardous jobs of roughly similar stature.
It can be especially difficult to challenge unfair practices when workers are informally employed, working in industries with few women or working across countries.
Megumi, a Japanese national, knows this all too well. When she got pregnant in 2021, she was optimistic. Employed by a Japanese company overseas, she hoped that her good relationship with her manager, as well as local legal protections around pregnancy, would stand her in good stead.
That ended up being far from the case. Megumi, now 33, obtained permission from her company to temporarily move back to Japan to give birth. The company asked her to continue doing some work during her maternity leave, both before and after giving birth, even though it was technically illegal under local law, as is the termination of a pregnant employee’s contract. Then, a month and a half after her old contract expired, the firm told Megumi they were restructuring, and her contract wouldn’t be renewed. Her manager abruptly changed from polite to aggressive. Aspects of the cross-border legal situation remain difficult to disentangle.
Megumi and the company are continuing to negotiate. Megumi has email and other records of higher-ups committing to her continued employment, but she’s worried that if she exerts too much pressure, she’ll be blacklisted from the small industry. She feels vulnerable as an international employee dependent on employers for work permits. And her family is struggling with going from two salaries down to one. “I feel betrayed that the company took advantage of my situation,” Megumi says.
The emotional toll
Clearly, experiencing unfair treatment due to pregnancy can be very draining. But it can also be exhausting trying to prove this discrimination, whether to an employer, a labour board or loved ones.
In Annika’s case, she was relatively fortunate in that she could pay her lawyer from her severance package. Yet despite being a professional with means and knowledge of her rights, who was living in a country with stronger parental protections than most, she still had to endure a year of legal struggles for fair treatment. And even though she’s now back at a company where she used to work, receiving pay rises and bonuses, the mental impact has lingered. “It took some time to really believe that I was subjected to pregnancy discrimination and not just bad at my job.”
Megumi, who is unsure of her next steps as she continues to negotiate with the company that cut her loose, can’t afford to think too far ahead. On hearing her story, friends and family have shared similar stories of being pushed out of jobs and companies due to becoming mothers. They tell her that she should just let it go.
On the other hand, the fact that around the world, there’s more discussion about the phenomenon of pregnancy discrimination may be cause for cautious optimism. Megumi believes that in Japan, gendered workplace harassment, including pregnancy discrimination, has reduced considerably in the last decade. “I’m in the middle of the change,” she feels.
For the millions of workers about to bring new life into the world during an uncertain time, the change can’t come soon enough.
January 14, 2022 at 03:00PM
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220114-why-ending-illegal-pregnancy-discrimination-is-so-hard
Why ending illegal pregnancy discrimination is so hard - BBC News
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