ALSO AVAILABLE FROM THE FEMINIST PRESS
FOREWORD
Cynthia Thomas Calvert and Joan C. Williams
As pioneers in the fight to eliminate family responsibilities discrimination, we hear a lot of stories from women who were successful at work until they became pregnant. We hear from women who announced their pregnancies and were soon reassigned to dead-end jobs, disciplined for made-up infractions, harassed, demoted, and terminated. We hear from women with young children who have been passed over for promotions, given unfairly negative performance evaluations, punished for things other employees are not, and pushed to the sidelines. These stories confirm what our research shows: the strongest form of sex discrimination in the workplace today is discrimination against women who are mothers or are pregnant.
We have come to the conclusion that employers may know that it is illegal to discriminate against women because they are women, but many do not know that it is illegal to discriminate against women because they are or soon will be mothers. We’re working to change that, but in the meantime, women need to arm themselves with as much information about their legal rights as possible. Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the Workplace is an enormously useful tool to help women learn what protections they have under the law and how to address maternal wall discrimination with their employers. It provides essential information about federal and state laws in plain English, covering everything from pregnancy and nursing to parenthood and flextime. The legal discussion is complemented by practical tips and tools, ensuring that readers will know what to expect and will be prepared to meet challenges at work. The authors provide real-life examples of other women’s experiences throughout, making this book inspirational as well as instructive.
The authors’ goal, and ours, is to eliminate the legal obstacles and biases that hold women, particularly mothers and pregnant women, back from achieving full equality in the workplace. Babygate is an important contribution toward making this goal a reality. As women implement its lessons in the workplace, the experiences and attitudes of employees and employers will begin to change. Supervisors and colleagues will see that mothers who are treated fairly become loyal and committed, flexible schedules work and can benefit the company, and whole human beings with robust family lives are better and more productive workers. Men gain alongside the women, not only from having a more profitable employer but from being freed to have more well-rounded lives themselves.
Women are poised to break through the glass ceiling: we are 50 percent of the workforce, more than 50 percent of college graduates, and we earn more advanced degrees. That is what makes this book so timely and necessary. By pointing out ways around, over, and through the maternal wall, Babygate can help women survive at work while the wall is being torn down. And as more women get through the wall, the wall will come down faster.
PREFACE
Dina Bakst,