Word: pregnants
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...That opinion, apparently, is not universally shared. October 31 marks the 30th anniversary of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), which outlawed employment discrimination against women who are Poehler-ized. But the news that pregnant women need to be treated as would any employee with a broken leg or other temporary disability - i.e., not get fired or demoted - seems to have not quite sunk in. Complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) are on a decade-long rise, up 65% from 1992 to 2007. And the number of cases the EEOC has decided to take on has quadrupled...
...more than half of the complaints came not from the more traditionally chauvinistic mining or building trades but from five female-heavy industries: retail, services, finance, real estate and insurance. "One of the most ironic cases was that of a maternity store that had a policy of not hiring pregnant employees," says Jocelyn Frye, General Counsel for the Partnership...
...What then lies behind the rise? "There seems to be an underlying assumption that a woman will not be as interested in her work or as committed to her work once she's pregnant or has had a baby," says Frye. This remains true even though studies show more women, including governors of Alaska and TV stars, are working later into their 40 weeks. What goes unspoken, of course, is that while pregnancy is a temporary disability, motherhood could be considered a permanent one, dividing women's attention for at least the next 18 years...
...Obviously, there are financial reasons why a firm might not want to hire a pregnant woman: her health insurance will be more expensive and she'll have to take some leave in the foreseeable future. Even so, if it can be proved that that's the only reason she wasn't hired, that firm could be facing the EEOC. "You can imagine the slippery slope," says Frye. "First it's, 'Don't hire a pregnant woman.' Then it becomes, 'Don't hire a woman at all, because she could get pregnant and is likely to be the primary caregiver...
...Then there are the studies that suggest that pregnant women just plain gross some people out. In one, people who viewed videotapes of non-pregnant women and visibly pregnant women doing the same task judged the pregnant women more negatively (and no, the activity was not smoking...