Pregnancy Discrimination Charges Surge

Sue Shellenbarger writes in this morning's Wall Street Journal that

[p]regnancy-bias complaints recorded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission surged 14% last year to 5,587, up 40% from a decade ago and the biggest annual increase in 13 years.  And that "may be only the tip of the iceberg," an EEOC spokesman says. The agency also received 20,400 pregnancy-bias inquiries at its call center last year, the center's first full year of operation; that doesn't include thousands more walk-ins asking about the same topic at fair-employment offices. An advocacy group, 9to5, National Association of Working Women, also is seeing an increase in pregnancy-bias calls on its hotline.

The groundswell reflects both changing demographics and a new activism among mothers. It also shows that even now, 30 years after passage of the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act, there is still confusion about what protections it provides.

See More Women Pursue Claims of Pregnancy Discrimination (subscription required).

rb