Eight years, five promotions, four awards — then a 30-minute interview and the door
A Black senior manager at Charles Schwab says she was fired after pushing back on a directive aimed at a breastfeeding employee.
Dr. Shika L. Mahdavi spent nearly eight years inside Schwab Charitable, climbing through five promotions, collecting four Charitable Excellence Awards and a place in the firm's Aspiring Leadership Program. She earned somewhere between $147,000 and $150,000 a year, says she had no formal discipline on her record and, by her own account, was in the middle of running performance reviews when the call came on August 11, 2025. The reason given, she says, was a "policy violation" that no one would explain.
That, in essence, is the story laid out in a lawsuit she filed on May 22, 2026 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Mahdavi v. Charles Schwab & Co., Inc., No. 4:26-cv-00555. She is pursuing claims of race and color discrimination and retaliation under federal law.
The trigger, according to her filing, came in early 2025. A subordinate had returned from maternity leave and was attending virtual and hybrid meetings while caring for her infant. At an offsite, Mahdavi says, a Schwab Managing Director complained about it. The filing recounts him saying he had "never seen someone have their baby on camera during meetings and then leave early to breastfeed," and telling Mahdavi and another manager to "address it."
Mahdavi says she read that...
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