Wednesday, December 21, 2022
Sanders: "On the Basis of Childbirth: How the Federal Clerkship's Lack of Parental Leave Fosters Gender Inequality"
Bailey Sanders recently posted to SSRN her article On the Basis of Childbirth: How the Federal Clerkship's Lack of Parental Leave Fosters Gender Inequality (UCLA Women's Law Journal, Forthcoming). Here is the abstract:
This essay argues that the lack of paid parental leave for federal law clerks enables pregnancy discrimination, restricts women’s reproductive choice, and perpetuates gender inequality within the legal profession writ large. Protections against pregnancy discrimination are hollow when clerks can be fired—or have clerkship offers rescinded—for requiring maternity leave, and the lack of leave disproportionately impacts female clerks by constraining their ability to pursue career and family simultaneously. The lack of leave also restricts (some) pregnant women’s reproductive choice by forcing them to choose between keeping their position or carrying their pregnancy to term. Such a state of affairs was intolerable in the past but has now become unconscionable in the devastating wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Many clerks will be serving in vast abortion deserts, cut off from medical care and facing threats of criminal prosecution should they attempt to end their pregnancies to save their job. For all these reasons, current congressional efforts to provide greater protections to term law clerks from discrimination and workplace misconduct, while an important step forward, must be supplemented to include guaranteed parental leave for term law clerks.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/family_law/2022/12/sanders-on-the-basis-of-childbirth-how-the-federal-clerkships-lack-of-parental-leave-fosters-gender-.html