The Pregnant Pause

job can hope for. But then imagine one day later you get another very different voicemail from that same person. To be honest with you, UM, I think just right now, I need a couple more days to figure out this position, this job position. UM, So I'm not gonna offer you a job just I just need a couple more days to figure this out. Those voicemails they were left for a woman named Nikki LaPoint In early Nikki was applying

for a new job as an orthodontist assistant. She'd be doing similar work, but the job paid a little better. It was closer to her home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, and that would make it a lot easier for her to make it home to her son after work. She even knew someone that worked there. One day, Nikki had the job, and the very next it was rescinded. So what can happen and one day that would change unemployer's mind. The doctor had gotten one important new piece of information.

After that first voicemail, Nikki called back her future boss and she told her that she was pregnant. I'm not sure exactly how it came up, but I did tell her that I just wanted to let her know that I did recently find out that I am pregnant with my second child. That's Nikki. It didn't feel like I didn't get the job because there was a better candidate. I didn't get the job because I wasn't qualified. Nikki felt that she didn't get the job because of her pregnancy.

The offer was technically on hold, but in reality it was gone. The orthodontist had posted a new ad for the job that same day. Nikki tried to work things out over email, but eventually the orthodontis stopped responding to Nikki. All of this seemed like it might be illegal. Can you not hire someone because they're pregnant? So she got a lawyer and sent him everything she had, the voice mails, some emails, and Steve Smith, the lawyer she found, thought

that she had a strong pregnancy discrimination case. The case was unusual in the sense that you know, I'd say probably, you know, once every five to ten years, someone will walk in your office with direct, undisputed evidence that looks like discrimination. It looked like discrimination to Nikki and her lawyers, but the orthodontist argued that her decision to rescind the

job had nothing to do with pregnant see. She said her real concern was what Nikki would do after she had the baby and how much time she'd want to take off. And it turns out that legally that's not pregnancy discrimination. So Nikki lost. For those who want to keep working at the same level, getting pregnant and having a child often deals them an involuntary setback. Women deserve people. People work object helps to keep women not on a ptaphone. But in the case, you should never say I'm ready

to have a baby. Am I'm ready to leave my job. There's no single industry where women aren't punished for appropriating. When men have children, they experience a pay bump when women have children, the opposite happens. Bloomberg crunch the numbers and found that Wall Street is the worst when it comes to gender pay gas. Gender is no longer the factor creating the greatest wage to discrepancy in this country.

Motherhood is welcome to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. For women like Nikki, the motherhood penalty starts even before the baby comes. Once a woman gets pregnant, the workplace starts to see potential liabilities and inconveniences. Some pregnant women have complications, they might have to take time off from their jobs, especially if they do something particularly physical. But there's also this idea that pregnant women just aren't as productive as

non pregnant workers. And it's not just their productivity while they're pregnant, it's all the things that pregnancy foreshadows. What happens after a woman gives birth, she'll probably need to take some time off. In America, it will probably be unpaid, but even that's costly for employers. They may have to find a replacement or forego that person's work for some time. And then there's this anxiety that pregnant women have, will they be as valuable as before. After all, they'll effectively

be working two jobs. It would be a lot easier for employers if they didn't have to deal with pregnant women at all. In fact, women have told us that they've been asked in job interviews if and when they plan to have kids, because even the hint of pregnancy can scare employers and managers away from promoting or hiring women around an age where they might get pregnant, and

thus the motherhood penalty begins. Women like Nikki lose out on better paying jobs, Others are sidelined from big projects that could lead to raises and promotions, and some are pushed out of work altogether. But there are laws that are supposed to protect pregnant women from this kind of discrimination. I brought in my colleague Claire Stith to tell me about those laws and how they did or didn't work in Nikki's case. High Claire, Hey, Becca, So let's start

with the basics. Isn't it illegal to not hire someone just because they're pregnant. Yes, that is illegal, or rather that's what the law says now, but it didn't always say that. Let me back up a bit. The main law that outlawed sex discrimination at work was the Civil Rights Act, which President Lyndon Johnson passed in We believe that all men have certain unalienable rights, yet many of my Oakans do not enjoy those rights. So the part

of the Act that's relevant here is Title seven. It specifically says employees can't be fired or you can't refuse to hire them, or demote them, or treat them differently just because of their race, religion, color, national origin, and sex. Okay, So if you can't discriminate based on sex, wouldn't pregnancy discrimination fall under that category. It really wasn't clear at the time. As we talked about last season, the Civil

Rights Act was mainly about solving racial discrimination. The words sex got added in at the last minute, and because it was an afterthought, the law didn't really establish what sex discrimination meant, and it certainly didn't address the issue of pregnancy. What legal protections did pregnant women have at the time. Well, the attitude at the time was that when a woman gets pregnant, she's no longer fit to work.

It was normal for women to be forced to go on leaves of absences and just not get their jobs back after they had kids. A woman's main role after she got pregnant was to basically be pregnant and then a mom, So women were frequently pushed out of paid jobs they had to rely on someone else for money to live. To be clear, this wasn't the case for every job or every person. Like domestic workers, agricultural workers, jobs often held by black women, they didn't have these restrictions.

They were expected to keep working through their pregnancies and after, but many jobs still viewed working in motherhood is incompatible. Okay, but then the Civil Rights Act comes along and you think employers shouldn't be able to force a woman out of a job just because she's pregnant. Isn't that sex discrimination? Yeah, but the question was, how do you argue that in court.

At the time, feminist legal scholars and attorneys were focused on getting companies to treat women equally, pay them the same, promote them, you know, treat them the same as you would a man. But pregnancy kind of throws a rent in that. Idea to argue for pregnancy rights is to essentially remind the court that, oh wait, women really are different. It's this biological function that's fundamentally what sets women apart

from men. Yeah, and I can see how that would be complicated because, in a way, pointing out how pregnant women are different could play into the idea that women shouldn't work at all. Well, they had this debate. They said, if our main goal is to ensure that women are treated equally to men in all respects, how do we push for things like maternity leave, pregnancy accommodations, etcetera That would require us to argue that sometimes women are different.

The idea that they eventually hit on was essentially to say, yeah, okay, so women are the only ones who get pregnant, but male workers do get sick or hurt or need special accommodations too, and when they do, they're often able to go on temporary disability. So we should treat pregnancy like any other temporary disability and get pregnant women the same

kind of benefits. This argument allowed attorneys to challenge the stereotype that all pregnant women should not work, while allowing some pregnant women who maybe had medical complications to get the accommodations they needed without getting pushed out of their jobs. Here's how Debora Dinner, a llegal historian, and Emery You University explained it to me, analogizing between pregnancy and temporary disability would force employers to conduct an individual evaluation of

any pregnant woman's capacity to do her job. So instead of treating pregnant women a certain way as a class and saying they are or they aren't able to do their job, you'd say can they do their job? In the same way you would evaluate if someone had a sprained ankle whether they could do their job. And the landmark case that used this tactic was a lawsuit filed by women working at General Electric. They weren't included in

the company short term disability coverage plan. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled the Title seven of the Civil Rights Act didn't cover pregnant women. That meant that if you were a woman who worked at GE and you broke your leg, you would get paid time off. But if you got pregnant any time you took if they let you take time, you'd get nothing. Wow. So how did the Supreme Court justify that decision? I asked Debra to explain that to me.

The courts drew this very formalist distinction, And they said that the distinction between pregnant and non pregnant persons is not the same thing as a distinction between males and females, because in the category nonpregnant persons you have both women and men. Here's Justice William Wrinklist and sense respondents did not otherwise show that the exclusion of pregnancy related disabilities had a disproportionate effect on one sex as compared with

the other. We conclude that respondents are not entitled to the relief they see. So the Court said this was okay, because it isn't discriminating against women but just pregnant women. You have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to make that logic work. Yeah, and a lot of people agreed with you, including Congress. Fairly quickly they start holding hearings on the issue, and by they passed the Pregnancy discrimin Nation Act that basically thumbs its knows at the

Supreme Court and says, actually, pregnancy discrimination counts a sex discrimination. Now. All the stuff in the Civil Rights Act about how you can't fire someone or refuse to hire someone just because they're a woman, that now also applies to women who are pregnant. It also says that pregnant women need to be included in any employee benefit plans. So this law didn't solve pregnancy discrimination, right Why not? Well, it just says that a pregnant employee has to be treated

the same as other employees. So it really only works if a company offers temporary disability or other types of accommodations in the first place. Like remember that UPS case that went to the Supreme Court a few years ago. It involved this woman, Peggy Young. If Peggy Young had sought an accommodation for a twenty pound lifting restriction that resulted from any number of conditions, whether required on or

off the job, UPS would have granted that accommodation. But because Peggy Young's twenty pound lifting restriction resulted from pregnancy, UPS rejected her request. She was a UPS employee who was denied disability accommodations when she was pregnant, like not lifting heavy boxes, that sort of thing, even though UPS granted them to workers with other health problems like heart conditions.

Because of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, she won. So it sounds like the law is really useful for pregnant women who need accommodations and want to keep their jobs. It is, and a lot of women who would otherwise lose their jobs or their income, it keeps them employed and earning money. But it's an imperfect solution because when you get down to it, pregnancy is different from these other kinds of

disabilities we're talking about. Like, when you're quote unquote done with being pregnant, your physical experience isn't just, you know, miraculously back to what it was before. And the reality is that a lot of pregnancy discrimination why women don't get hired or would they do get pushed out or even treated differently at work. It isn't about women actually being physically pregnant. It's often about what companies think will happen after they have that baby. Right, Like, Nikki wasn't

asking for accommodations while she was pregnant. Right, her case is different from what we've been talking about. Nikki is not being treated differently from men at the orthodontist office who have temporary health conditions because hiring someone and having them take time off work it's inconvenient. It would be easier for the orthodontist if they hired someone who didn't have to do that, okay, but you still can't discriminate against a pregnant person just because it costs you more money.

Like there's no special clause saying if this is going to be expensive for you, yeah, Like, okay, go ahead discriminate, right, I mean, in fact, Justice Stephen Brier said exactly that in his opinion in the UPS case, the employer can try to justify its refusal by relying on a legitimate, non discriminatory reason for not accommodating her. But those reasons cannot or nearly consist of acclaim it's more expensive or less convened need to add pregnant women to the categories

of those accommodated. That isn't good enough. Proving that, especially in a hiring decision, when a company can cite any number of reasons that you weren't a good fit, is really hard. Nikki's case is the perfect example of that. She had evidence that seemed to show that the doctor, in making her hiring decision, was focused on the fact that she was pregnant. I mean, the voicemails. I'm wondering why you didn't tell me when I interviewed you and

you were pregnant. You just can't figure that piece out. Why you wouldn't tell me that if you didn't hear that. The doctor asked Nikki why she didn't mention her pregnancy during the job interview. To me, that does make it seem like she wanted that information to base her hiring decision off of the fact that Nikki was pregnant, which the courts say you can't do. But in court, the doctor said she actually had a different reason for not hiring Nikki. After Nikki got that first voicemail with the

job offer, she called back and accepted. That's when she told the doctor she was pregnant, and in that conversation they talked about maternity leave. The doctor asked how much time she'd want to take. Nikki said she'd taken twelve weeks at her last job, unpaid. The doctor said she'd typically only given six weeks, also unpaid. Nikki said she'd be open to taking less time, and they ended the call without making a real decision on how much maternity

leaves she would take. But Nikky thought she had a job, which is why in that second voicemail where the doctor took back the job, it surprised her there was no time in any point where I was toldly, this is what my office does, this is what I can offer, and you know, if that's something that you can do, we'd still love to have you or no. Ultimately, the court said that even though it wasn't a clear cut take it or leave it discussion, the fact that the

doctor mentioned six weeks and Nikki said she wanted twelve but could maybe take ten, that was enough to decide the job was rescinded because NICKI wanted more leave. At this point, I think we need to say that none of this leave would have been paid or government mandated, because the US has no paid leave laws on the books right as a new employee working for a small company. What unpaid leave laws do exist, they wouldn't even apply to Nikki, or for that matter, anyone who needed medical leave.

The Family Medical Leave Act, for example, only applies to companies with more than fifty employees, and it doesn't even kick in until after you've worked full time for a year. So basically, offering her any amount of unpaid leave was

a benefit. So she was able to frame the discussion about leave as a disagreement over benefits rather than something that was inherently tied up to Nikki's pregnancy, and if you think about it, this is the problem with treating pregnancy like a short term disability and not what it is the beginning of motherhood. This discussion about leave only happened because Nikki was pregnant. The employer's anxieties about hiring her were because of her pregnancy and what would happen

after she had the baby. So Nikki's out of a job because she was pregnant. Nikki's story is about what happens to pregnant women's careers and earnings when companies don't want to accommodate their needs because it will be expensive inconvenient. But what about pregnant women who don't need accommodations, who just want to show up and work. Those women can face a different type of discrimination. Employers often have these preconceptions about the kind of worker a pregnant woman is

or will be. Can someone who is pregnant really handle the big project? Why give a pregnant woman a promotion or more responsibilities if she's just going to go on leave soon. Maybe someone without kids is better suited for the job. These lights they can be subconscious and subtle, or they can be overt, but attitudes like these sideline women's careers and stunt their earnings even before they have kids.

Brittany Noble Jones was working as a TV anchor until she was fired in I was really trying to prove myself in the newsroom. That's a part of the story that you know, I forget. You know, you're learning how to balance your professional life. When she got pregnant, she had no plans to slow down at work at all, but her employer had a different idea. Jordan Holman reports when Brittany Noble Jones got pregnant with her first child, she had recently landed her dream job as a TV anchor.

Good Morning, Welcome to w j t D twelve. I am Brittany Noble Jones. After years of working her way up in newsrooms, first as an overnight studio camera operator and then as a reporter in the field, she was now one of the faces of the local CBS affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi. She had taken the job as an anchor know when she had wanted a family, because working as an anchor had more predictable hours, a rare thing in TV news. I always imagined being a mom on TV.

But I did not want to be a reporter in the field. I didn't want to be, you know, doing the five pm news and the six pm news live anywhere and you don't know what time you're gonna get back home. I really just wanted to be an anchor, and I thought that would provide me the opportunity, you know that to balance it all. From the beginning, being pregnant on the job was rough. Brittany had to sit for hours without a bathroom break, and she felt ill

from morning sickness. She didn't let any of that stop her, though. She used the commercial breaks to throw up and then went right back on air. All right, did you know I have a Hawkeye fans when to start a new tradition at the football game at their seasons. But then things changed. Brittany started getting bigger. Eventually her pregnancy was obvious to anyone watching. She says that around that time

her boss began to treat her differently. Brittany started to feel like she was getting pushed out of opportunities at work. She was planning to record a promotional clip for the station, then she found out a coworker would do it instead. And when she was asked to speak out of breast cancer awareness of it, she said one of her managers told her not to respond. Then one day that manager pulled her aside and set out loud the thing that she had been worried about, that she no longer looked

the way she should for the newscast. I'm the morning anchor, so there's this look that they're looking for, right, he said. Viewers want to see a beauty queen. Right. So I'm pregnant now, I've gained like forty pounds on TV. It's all in my face, like I'm it's a struggle to just sit there like I'm supposed to be sitting for doing a half Plus, our TV news has a pretty old fashioned beauty standard and being thin as part of

the expectation for female anchors. Still, we have seen pregnant women on TV news, like Katie tur and Kelly Rippa. Katie tur even announced her pregnancy on air. I have a baby in my belly officially, Um, I'm tired of the tweets asking, so I'm going to announce it. So being pregnant on air is a thing into Brittany. Becoming a mom should have been an asset to her career. Her audience, after all, include lots of moms. She tried to make that case to her manager, saying she should

be doing more public appearances, not fewer. It was about thirty four weeks pregnant, and the conversation was like do you not notice that I'm not in any of the promos? Like do you not know this that I'm not representing the station at events? And he's like, oh no, I don't notice that. It's it's not a problem. He's like, why why should I promote you? I'm like, I'm the target demographic, Like, I'm a female, I'm between the ages of already for you know, whatever the target demographic you have,

I'm a mom. When Britney said viewers just see more moms like her on TV, her manager told her she wasn't a mom yet. What do you mean I'm thirty or four weeks pregnant? Like, what do you mean? I am not a mom? Prittney felt like this whole argument with her boss about whether or not mom should want to watch her on TV was about more than just her pregnancy. She felt there was something he wasn't saying. Brittney is black and she felt like her boss didn't

see her as someone white viewers would relate to. I think it really comes down to who they wanted the viewers to be, and I don't think that they saw me a black woman. You know, that's a mom. That's their target demographic. Even though I'm the morning anchor, I don't know that I really was the target demographic for for their viewership, of who they wanted their viewership to be. And it was clear every day when we would pitch

stories about race. Jack's, Mississippi's population is more than eight black, and more women than men watched local TV news in the US, So Brittany did reflect the potential viewers in Jackson, even if, as she says, her boss didn't agree. This tension wasn't new to Brittany. Brittany thinks her boss viewed her as a problem even before she got pregnant, because she wanted to cover the black community. She had arrived

in Jackson with the track record of covering race. She was a reporter in St. Louis, and she made her name by being one of the first reporters on the scene covering the shooting of Michael Brown and Ferguson Missouri just went on camera. He just said that the officer involved in the shooting was not aware that Mike Brown was a potential suft FORCEIX AM. This morning, we're learning that police departments across the nation are bracing for a large Pinmont forty. We just found out just minutes ago.

Hopefully there will be new details in Mike Brown case. I will keep you updated. She followed the story for Moms and One Awards for her coverage. Brittany wanted to keep covering those stories about race in the black community at her new job. That kind of coverage was part of the reason she was hired, but she had trouble getting those stories made. She pitched a story about black fraternities and sororities in the community, but it was rejected. She wanted to do a story on the lack of

state support for historically black colleges and universities. That also didn't get the green light. So Brittany was already at odds with her bosses, and then she got pregnant was led to more friction. She got to do some pieces she cared about, but a lot of her other stories sounded more like typical local news fair sounds like a good time. Ye'd be a lot of whiskey there. Get a pair of ticket lawmakers in Washington, d C. Decided to have a snowball fight after a fourth no easter

hits whole Mississippi weather. That's gonna be a great weekend. Credentials really, you know, was one of the reasons why considered me for the job. But I don't think they took into account the type of reporter that I had become. Now the way that I'm reporting has changed. I'm digging deeper into topics. I'm investigating things that people really aren't talking about yet. And we're in Mississippi. Mississippi is a

black and white state. Still, all of this caused a lot of stress for Brittany, arguments with management, getting pushed aside for opportunities, being anxious about how she looked, not being able to investigate the story she felt were important. She blames the stress in part for what happened next. A week after a blow up with one of her bosses, she went into labor five weeks early. Her newborn son's lungs were underdeveloped, and he was whisked to the intensive

care unit. She didn't get to hold him right away, so that initial bond that the mom gets with her baby and just like you're finely here and like to hold them and have them into lovelm. I didn't get that when Brittany went into labor prematurely as a black woman in Mississippi. Here's what she was up against. Black women have worst maternal health outcomes than white women, and research has found that stress and racism are linked to

those outcomes. Black babies have the highest infant mortality rates among any racial group in the US. On top of that, Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate. It's not only the baby that faces danger. African American women are also three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy related causes than white women. Brittany went back to work seven weeks after her son was born. Even with her new reality at home, she made herself TV ready. She

lost a lot of weight quickly. She says, she felt the need to starve herself to fit in. One thing she wanted to do differently, however, was her hair. As a black woman, it takes at least two hours to achieve the straight hair that standard for TV newscasters. At night, she would wash deep condition, blow dry, and wrap it before going to work. Then came the hot comb and flat iron. She had to be at work at two

thirty am. Doing all of that had always been a lot, but now she had a tiny infant to take care of on top of that, so she started to wear her hair naturally on air to save time. Her look was tidy and feminine. She wore her hair in plaits like a crown around her head. Soon though, a manager said her hair was unprofessional and it was becoming a problem for viewers. When black women wear their hair naturally, they're often told it's just not right for the office.

There were other issues that made life hard. As a new mom. She need a place to pump breast milk. She was told she could use a storage closet, but the storage closet was only unlocked during normal business hours. But her shift basically started in the middle of the night and she needed to pump every two hours. She began to feel like she was losing her fight for

equal treatment. Eventually, she filed an internal complaint for discrimination and later filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under Title seven against her employer, Next Star Broadcasting, Inc. Her station's parent company. A month later, Brittany was fired. The company said it was for excessive absentee is um She had used her sick time to take care of her ailing grandfather, but she thinks it was because of her complaint, so she filed the second e o C

complaint for retaliation. The e o C is investigating her claim, but hasn't suited Next Star, and an investigation doesn't necessarily mean they will. Next Star declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but in January, w JTV and Next Star released a statement after Brittany went public with her story and set her in. Employment was terminated because she didn't fulfill her contractual responsibilities after exhausting all available leave time.

As for Britney's allegations of discrimination, they said, we stand by our decision to terminate miss Jones employment and vehemently deny all other allegations. What Brittney says happened to her is what so many pregnant women are afraid of. That they'll be marginalized, seen as irrelevant, or even pushed out of their jobs as soon as their colleagues find out that they're pregnant. In all kinds of ways. Pregnant women are regularly set messages that they don't belong in the workforce.

They're either too frail, too fat, or too expensive. And all of this widens the pay gap, because if you're given fewer hours to work, or taken off the promotion track, or if you're just seen as less capable, your wages take a hit. And this is all before a baby even enters the picture. Because all of this anxiety about pregnant women is an anticipation for what happens next when women no longer have just one job. We're going to take a look at how the unpaid work of child

raising eats into women's earnings and careers. The challenge of finding reliable, affordable child care is a huge boulder which firmly between women and a million opportunities out there. Thanks for listening to the Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to our show to rate, review, and subscribe. This episode was reported and hosted by me Rebecca Greenfield and recorded by Jordan Holman and Claire Setteth. This episode was

edited by Francesca Levy and produced by Samantha Gatzick. We also had production help from Jillian Goodman, Janet Paskin, and Liz Smith. Our original music is by Leo Sidgen. Pamela guests did the illustrations on our show page, which you can find at bloomberg dot com. Slash the Paycheck. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts h