After spending nearly three long years entrenched in a legal battle with Google, fighting pregnancy discrimination I both witnessed and experienced, I never thought I’d be sitting where I am today with the perspective that I’m one of the lucky ones. But, as my LinkedIn feed is again saturated with heartbreaking stories of expecting and new moms losing their tech jobs in yet another wave of layoffs, that’s where I find myself today.
According to 2022 research conducted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, 20% of working moms in the U.S. report having experienced pregnancy discrimination, which, based on multiple federal laws, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines as, “treating women differently, or less favorably, because of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions.”
The tech industry was still thriving when I was pushed out of Google during maternity leave, pre-pandemic, and I easily landed another job at Facebook. Although the arduous path of suing Google came with many challenges, I prevailed and received a settlement that allowed me to go back to school and pursue an entirely new career as an employment attorney. That’s not a typical happy ending for the steadily increasing number of moms who have shared their stories of being laid off unexpectedly while pregnant or on maternity leave, amid a multi-year tech industry recession marked by mass layoffs.
For some moms, being laid off meant losing their maternity leave benefits or using precious time during their maternity leave interviewing for jobs in a depressed tech job market—time that should have been focused on recovering from childbirth and caring for their newborn. Others have had to navigate pregnancy complications with gaps in health insurance coverage, resulting in inadequate healthcare and unanticipated medical bills. Many have shared how they believe the stress of being laid off while pregnant has impacted the health of their pregnancies and babies. Due to losing their work visas, some have even had to depart the country, baby in hand, leaving their support networks behind.
There’s been discussion about how tech companies laying off expecting and new moms isn’t illegal because of an assumption that such layoffs likely aren’t happening because women are pregnant or on maternity leave. The assumption is that because so many others are also getting laid off—that it’s not solely moms losing their jobs—it can’t be true that they are being illegally targeted. But do we have data to back up such an assertion? Can we definitively say that tech workers who are pregnant or on maternity leave aren’t being laid off at more accelerated rates than others? No, we can’t.
As a former manager at Google and elsewhere, I know people almost always inform layoff decisions, such as who gets laid off and who does not. And when people are involved, there’s a high likelihood that conscious and subconscious bias will inform such choices if left unchecked. Research suggests that companies lay off women and people of color at higher rates, due to unconscious bias, combined with inadequate processes for deliberation among layoff decision-makers.
In addition to human involvement in layoff decisions, companies are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence to inform decisions such as workforce reductions. In a January 2023 survey of 300 human resources leaders at U.S. companies, 98% of respondents said software and algorithms would help them make labor cost reductions that year.
While some might view AI as less error-prone than humans, that’s not always true. As Hilke Schellmann points out in her new book, The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now, even for companies with the best intentions, AI can unintentionally discriminate against protected groups, including pregnant workers. This can include, for example, AI systems flagging expecting and new moms as less productive or being a flight risk, given how accommodations, maternity leave, or other unique data characteristics of pregnant workers might be interpreted by AI systems.
What’s missing from the current public narrative, as the fragile state of the tech industry remains under a magnifying glass, is more discussion about how tech companies are deciding who stays and who goes, and what mechanisms are in place to catch human biases and imperfect algorithms that might be (intentionally or not) resulting in tech worker moms losing their jobs at heightened rates.
What are the specific criteria and processes involved? I have yet to see any tech company volunteer this information, perhaps because there hasn’t been enough pressure to do so by government organizations, such as the EEOC, or political figures. I hope this article helps change that.
Receiving a settlement offer from Google just two weeks before trial was a substantial part of my healing process—emotionally and financially—in recovering from workplace discrimination. So, before assumptions are made, let’s review the appropriate data so that expecting and new parents—and other historically marginalized populations, too—have the option to pursue legal accountability if discrimination is at play.