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Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

nytimes.com

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Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#241

Post by Spooky23 »

kurthr wrote: post #216
tptacek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife interviewed at Google and was asked how she'd be able to meet the requirements of the job while taking care of young children; the discrimination persists even after pregnancy.

And there's... "hey Joe's got young kids and needs to be 9-5 now, you're single so can't you pick up the slack?" Or "you're not married, can't you be on the pager during Xmas/Turkey-day/weekend". They are two abusive sides of the same coin.

The abuse is the compulsory, unpaid pager, and the expectation that you’re working 7a-9p. “Joe” with the young kids pushes back because he has to. You’re the sucker saying yes.

The fix for this is easy. You pay for on-call, and have a understood system for assigning it. My brother in law is a fireman... he misses many holidays, but can plan around it because there is such a system.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#242

Post by InclinedPlane »

tinbad wrote: post #14

Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take seve…

What's funny about big corporations is they will always always always ask employees to pitch in, help out, make sacrifices, etc. for the betterment of the corporation: to get work done, to survive lean times, etc. And yet when the shoe is on the other foot they are always the most incredibly reluctant to make any sacrifice, even small ones, to help their employees. And this isn't just a matter of finances, financially it makes sense to retain good employees at almost any cost, because it costs a ton of money to hire and train new employees (sometimes upwards of a year's worth of salary for the position in equivalent costs), and that's aside from the ancillary benefits of retaining employees longer (better work environment, higher skill level workers, more able to reliably execute on challenging projects, etc.) So much of it just comes down to power dynamics.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#243

Post by MattLaroche »

skizm wrote: post #144

Thought experiment: a scrappy startup is struggling to stay profitable, they literally (and not figuratively) can't afford their developers leaving for extended amounts of time and they are very upfront about this in interviews. Are they legally allowed to discriminate against candidates that are pregnant or expressed a desire to have children in the near future since it has the potential to kill their business if th…

What they should do is say "These are our parental leave policies" (which will be at least legal minimum) and go from there. (Ideally, these should be reasonable leave time government policies and paid by the government, but let's assume we're not going to fix that soon)

It's then up to the candidate to accept it or not.

It'd be entirely shitty of a company to say "here are our policies" and then reject a candidate who would exercise those policies.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#244

Post by lhorie »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #227
lhorie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to suggest that you should hire if you had 1M/yr revenue and 9 employees making 100k each, go ahead and try doing the accounting math for a new hire and see how that goes, vs if you were making 2M/yr.

I'm suggesting that your blanket statement about the triviality of hiring or not hiring a 10th employee is patently absurd on multiple levels. Even the dichotomy you posed in your reply is nonsensical - why is your assumption that the 2 options for revenue are 1M vs 2M? What if it's 1.3M, and your 9 employees are barely able to handle the workload?

> What if it's 1.3M

Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach. At 1M/yr, the risk is you hire a salesperson who gets you no new accounts after a year, existing revenue drops for other reasons and then you are forced to fire someone productive to make ends meet because you're 100k in the hole. At 1.3M/yr, maybe it'll be extremely stressful, but there's a least a fighting chance that you won't be in the red at the end of the year. At 2M/yr, the worst case will still suck, but it won't put your business anywhere near danger of extinction because you have a rainy day bank.

Revenue is often not directly tied to headcount. Even if your 9 employees can barely keep up, your revenue should still be rising over time until a time you can financially support another hire. If your revenue is not increasing, then increasing your headcount is likely going to make things worse, and more importantly, you should be questioning the viability of the business.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#245

Post by Phlarp »

Spooky23 wrote: post #236
metiscus wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is free to file a discrimination complaint with the EEOC if you are in the US. They will investigate your claims and attempt to settle them with your employer. If your employer is unwilling to settle they can and do often sue on your behalf to ensure an equitable outcome. Additionally the Department of Labor will investigate your claims and can bring enforcement actions on your behalf. Additionally pregnancy is co…

If you work in an incestuous industry like tech, you will be blacklisted in many circles for going down this path.

And as always, even worse-- You won't ever know if you just aren't up to snuff as an engineer / interviewer or if one or more of your interviewers, recruiters or hiring agents knows of and/or participates in such "blacklisting"

Which is also illegal, but companies openly get away with it every day.

The worst that ever happens is a slap on the wrist when all the major companies have non recruitment ("no poaching") agreements with each other, suppress wages, get caught, and have to pay a token fine.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#246

Post by Cofike »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #242
tinbad wrote: post #14

Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take seve…

What's funny about big corporations is they will always always always ask employees to pitch in, help out, make sacrifices, etc. for the betterment of the corporation: to get work done, to survive lean times, etc. And yet when the shoe is on the other foot they are always the most incredibly reluctant to make any sacrifice, even small ones, to help their employees. And this isn't just a matter of finances, financiall…

You see this at small companies and start ups as well. I've seen it first hand myself.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#247

Post by Mirioron »

sunir wrote: post #222
existencebox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something that has always nagged at me in these discussions, and I've always been somewhat afraid to bring it up lest I misconstrue, but I want to try and figure this out. What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against…

The economy exists to serve the people not the other way around. The purpose of life is to preserve and develop life. If the economy is making it hard to live and reproduce the economy is maladaptive and will fail.

The problem is that the people refers to a group as a collective. The economy deals with individuals that make up a group. Individuals always triumph in the long run, which means that if you set rules where you discriminate against individuals that want to be different for the benefit of the group then you end up with a system that will eventually collapse.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#248

Post by erik_seaberg »

ubernostrum wrote: post #230
erik_seaberg wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If society agrees your employee is doing something more important than work, fine, but then society should compensate you rather than demanding you take it in the shorts (and all the ugly incentives that creates).

If you disagree that this is a useful thing, you can move to a society which shares your views. If your attitude is purely one of "don't use any of my money to do this", well, a government-run compensation system would be tax-funded and would use... some of your money. In fact, it would probably just be implemented similarly to employer payroll taxes, so it would mean you'd get to pay into it even if you somehow mana…

That's what I'm arguing for, the burden should fall fairly across all taxpayers rather than solely upon the hapless employers who ignored the massive incentives to discriminate against soldiers and parents.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#249

Post by Consultant32452 »

MattLaroche wrote: post #214
Consultant32452 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand you were totally in the right and should have sued if they persisted. At the same time I have a hard time being emotionally upset at a company/manager behaving rationally. The fact that your wife didn't go back to work will subconsciously reinforce the idea to not hire birthing age women. This is also a huge problem in the UK if anecdotes from my friends are any indicatio…

A good argument for parental leave not being tied to employer, and instead being tied paid by the state. I've heard of moms before who would rather tell the truth that they're not coming back after leave, but there's little upside and a lot of risk.

I'm not sure the paid leave and severance is really the primary issue. Sure, money is money, but it's very expensive to find a good employee. When someone goes on leave like that you can't fill the position. Since they can't fill your position your team is stuck having to work extra to pick up the slack, and then if 90% of women don't wind up coming back it's just that much longer before you can find someone decent to fill the position.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#250

Post by syrrim »

pertymcpert wrote: post #121

I'm really surprised by the number of comments here that support this kind of discrimination. I thought we were better than this.

Ah yes, because this problem is easy, and the only reason it hasn't been solved is because of neanderthals running businesses.
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