Reportedly culling from thousands of pages of court documents from discrimination lawsuits and complaints from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and dozens of interviews, the Times reports stories of women from department stores to corporate offices which outright fire, demote, and belittle women for being pregnant. One Walmart employee reportedly suffered this nightmare:
She was five months pregnant, and the smell of the cleaning fluids nauseated her. She complained several times to a manager, who refused to permanently reassign her to another position. So she kept cleaning bathrooms, often pausing to vomit.
After her doctor warned that the chemicals were harmful to her and her baby, she was reassigned to clean the doors which still entailed working with chemicals. Eventually, she tells the Times, she was fired because of missed shifts eight months into her pregnancy.
There are more: a trader was told that pregnancy changes women’s brains, a pharmaceutical salesperson that she should “consider an abortion,” and another was demoted for taking maternity leave–and these are just a few examples of stories detailed in class-action gender discrimination lawsuits such as one including around 3,900 women against the pharmaceutical company Merck and 5,600 against Novartis, as well as a class-action suit by pregnant workers against Walmart (the latest in Walmart’s rich history of class action gender discrimination litigation).
So til parity, if you can just plan your baby around the “10-Year Baby Window”–have one before or after ages 25-35–you might catch up to the father’s wages. To crunch those numbers, just chop four percent off hourly wages per baby and add six percent to the father’s wages and subtract lost wages from maternity leave and factor in the cost of childcare and then weigh the true value of what really matters in life, and aim for that.
