Each year, more than 300,000 babies are born in Australia.
It should be one of the most joyful times in a woman’s life, but it can instead be a period of great anxiety due to discrimination in the workplace, and sometimes even job loss.
Supporting women while they’re pregnant, during parental leave, and when they’re returning to the workforce is an ongoing issue for employers across Australia.
Sadly, our research, Understanding Pregnancy Discrimination, shows women aren’t always being supported, and employers can be unaware of their legal responsibilities, or struggle to navigate complex workplace laws.
We conducted a pilot study into how pregnancy discrimination manifests itself at work. Working with community legal centre JobWatch Inc, we were given access to 42 de-identified case studies of women who contacted JobWatch in the 2018-19 financial year because they’d experienced discrimination at work on the basis of pregnancy or breastfeeding.
We then (anonymously) interviewed four of these women.
Information of this kind is hard to capture, because women who pursue legal claims about discrimination because of pregnancy or breastfeeding usually settle their claim before it’s heard by a court.
It’s very common for women to sign a confidentiality agreement when they settle their claims. These agreements prevent them from speaking about their experiences or the claims they’ve made. They are, in effect, silenced.
Our study not only...
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