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Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

nytimes.com

451–460 of 494 posts

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

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you want people to do when they are job searching while pregnant? Are you just wishing you'd been told on her first day on the job?

Let me answer this with a counter-question. If you're pregnant and somehow hiding it really well, do you think it makes sense for you to job-hunting six weeks before you're due to give birth?

My wife been searching for a job for quite some time (about a 2-3 years), during that time we've been trying to conceive a baby, but no luck, went through few eco sessions, still no dice. We decided to give up on idea of having a baby and just relax and live our lives. Then suddenly she gets a job offer she was dreaming about and one week later, guess what? She is pregnant. Now what would you tell your wife? Give up job you've been dreaming about?

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

#452
In the age of companies wanting to expand on an exponential pace and globalization. I get the feeling that there is no longer any compassion for things that are normal. It is normal for women to have children and have parental leave. It is good for a countries GDP that women have equal opportunity to take part of the work force. If women would not participate working the economy GDP of the country would be half of what it could be. Is is also good for dads to take equal long parental leave as women.

Thus it is short sighted by companies and the economy as general only to see the very short term.

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

#453

I know many cases where small employers were left paying 100k's after taking on a woman for a position, and just a few months later 'she got pregnant'. - employer had to fork over 12 months of pay - employer had to disrupt their business and hire another person The employer struggled to eek out their own profit to feed their own family and meet their obligations. This is a common scam that some women will get a job,…

Do you have the employers names and any documents or court records to show that this is what was uncovered? Why were your friends not able to determine the quality of employees during the interview and on-boarding process? Have you actually read the FMLA? They would have had to work their for quite a bit of time before requesting leave, and even then there are additional requirements:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

I was denied FMLA when I got full-time custody of my kids. Not saying that you are, but you come across as a biased person trying to stereotype and generalize women. FMLA does not only apply to women either.

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

#454
post #75
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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#455

Because it's not legal to even ask about pregnancy or desire for children during an interview, there's an unfortunate side-effect the market has adapted to: under-the-hood discrimination against young woman candidates. All other factors being equal, an employer knows a young woman could get pregnant and will probably quit to take care of the kids (going by statistics alone). So since they can't explicitly ask those t…

Don't forget the FMLA requirements that also protect employers in these types of situations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...

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

#456
post #75
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…

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.

That is insane that they asked this during an interview. Wow. Either HR has no sway over things or they are complicit.

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

#457

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.

you will be blacklisted in many circles

One revelation of the Damore affair was that Google managers a) participate in blacklisting and b) are utterly brazen about it

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

#458
post #55

This area is really tough. I feel terrible for women who experience this bias, but the solution is not nearly as obvious as with race/gender/age/religious/etc discrimination. In those cases the answer is: stop being biased. Let's say you're a small company and you can really only afford to have Even if they both plan to have 2 kids in the next 4 years, it's a biological reality that it will take the woman away from w…

One major issue in this scenario: you don’t know who wants/can/will have kids. Discriminating against women because they have a uterus and might get pregnant and might have a problematic pregnancy and might carry to term and might give birth and might take parental leave is incredibly short-sighted - even in your scenario you’ve just missed out on 4+ years of work because you’re worried about a few (potential) months…

The point is that unlike things like race discrimination, when all other things are equal, there IS a real difference, no matter how small, in term of risk (and in practice, it's really not that small). I worked at a large company where most employees were women in the 20-35 yo rangeny for a while on HR project and saw some of the data. It was not pretty.

As a society though, we shouldn't let that be ground for discrimination. As you mentioned, not all women want or will have kids. Of those who do, many will have supportive significant others, and the difference in productivity will be negligible. Even if it wasn't, I don't want to live in a world where people have trouble getting a job because they might end up doing something a very significant portion of the population will do.

But it's still a fact that, given 2 exactly equivalent candidate, both in their mid twenties, one is a guy, one's a woman, there is a well known, significant short to medium term risk in the later, if only looking at it from a local maximum perspective. We as a society need to find a way to artificially make up for it.

My personal favorite solution is to give both men and women equal (mandatory?) parental leaves, and no difference if its an adoption, same sex partners, or anything like that. Yes, women have an actual medical need, yes it might not be quite representative of reality, but that equalizes the risk from an employer perspective. No difference between the man and the woman (bonus point, it will help even out parental contribution and responsabilities at home).

That still leaves the age discrimination, but considering ageism is often against older people, that might really just even things out a little.

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

#459
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that well meaning attempts to rig the system that way would just backfire. Big companies have the resources, lawyers and incentives to manipulate and exploit regulations like that to their advantage. I think the simplest approach, which is just regulating against discrimination, may not be perfect but trying to come up with a perfect system will just impose so much regulation and costs and exploitable looph…

I think we agree that companies shouldn't be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, reproductive status, or family plans. However, I would contend that a simple blanket rule doesn't address the incentives to discriminate. I would also argue that burden to compensate companies for employees taking time off for personal or family matters (regardless of sex, reproductive plan or status) should be shouldered at the…

I don't think companies like Google discriminate because of funding. They discriminate because they want their engineers doing tons of overtime and focusing on their assigned projects at the expense of personal time and private lives. No amount of funding is going to change that culture.

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

#460
post #145
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the only reason to tell a prospective employer about your pregnancy status is to enable them to unlawfully discriminate against you based on that status.

You are, obviously, completely correct on the point that you raise. However, I am sold on those sort of laws on the basis that employers are discriminating on irrelevant dimensions, like race and gender. An employee expecting, or indeed planning , to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US han…

"Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring."

But they are - that's the law. The same legal system that allows the corporation to exist at all and earn money in this environment requires them to ignore the fact that someone may be going on maternal leave and not discriminate based on it.

We the voters have decided that this is more important than the profits of any company, and in the end the voters (i.e. mostly employees) get to decide the rules of society, not the companies.

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