Pregnant then Screwed

July 27, 2015 4:45 AM

A website for women who have been discriminated against whilst they were pregnant or after having a baby. 54,000 UK women a year are forced out of their jobs due to pregnancy. This doesn't include the women who are demoted, harassed, aren't put forward for promotion, or those that are self employed. Pregnant Then Screwed is a place for these women to tell their story anonymously.

While women in the UK may seem to have many rights to make them the envy of those elsewhere, accessing them is often far from straightforward and can lead to career destroying repercussions as well as health problems. Proving discrimination can be difficult and the site is also campaigning for some changes to make it a little easier.

posted by biffa (24 comments total)

On the subject of industrial tribunals -- one of the sneakier moves the Tory government made was to go from it being a free service to charging £1200 up front (around $2000) to file a grievance. The stated aim of this change was to reduce the number of malicious/baseless claims for discrimination. (Because everyone knows the first thing you do after a company fires you is lodge a malicious claim against them.) However, after a year in operation the affect has been to cut the number of industrial tribunal submissions by 80%. Might be something to do with the people most in need of the redress process being those least able to afford a £1200 entry ticket to the game ...
posted by cstross at 5:18 AM on July 27, 2015 [21 favorites]

Ugh. My sister was telling me similar stories shared by her new mothers group just this month, I was stunned. I'll share this site with her and maybe she'll pass it on, thanks!
posted by the agents of KAOS at 5:19 AM on July 27, 2015

I fell pregnant with my son in December 2010, I was in my early twenties and unmarried. When I told my employer, she asked me if I had considered an abortion!

Blood boiling right now. One of the side-effects of the recession has been a disappointing trend towards justifying this kind of thing, because if job cuts have to be made then clearly it's not fair to get rid of a hard-working man when some woman is just on basically paid extended leave amirite?! Ugh.
posted by billiebee at 5:25 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

These are all infuriating. I wonder how many of these stories are from American women, because although we have very limited worker protections for new mothers, we also have a highly litgious society willing to give big payouts (especially when it's a behemoth company v. new mother). We also have the right to free speech in the U.S. which would allow this site to name companies and individuals. As it is, it's kind of defanged...
posted by Locobot at 6:20 AM on July 27, 2015

Mod note: As a quick note, the linked site says its purpose is to "raise awareness of pregnancy discrimination in the UK," and in the wake of very many Metatalk discussions about trying to keep threads that are about non-US countries from becoming all about the US, I'll ask that folks make an effort to keep the conversation about the UK issues brought up here. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:36 AM on July 27, 2015 [13 favorites]

In related news:

"The Society said it has collected case studies from solicitors showing what impact the fees would have on ordinary people seeking justice.

One concerned a pensioner with a claim against a financial adviser for the loss of his entire pension fund, for which the fee for applying to begin court proceedings will increase from £910 to £5,000.

Another case study found that a young girl with brain damage due to a failure by doctors to diagnose meningitis as a toddler will now require £10,000 to mount any fight for a secure financial settlement."

The employment tribunals are not the only places where access to justice is basically becoming a luxury good.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:58 AM on July 27, 2015 [10 favorites]

Wow.

Even if you could scrounge up the cash to launch a claim, it also sends a not-so-subtle message about what kind of people the system looks on kindly. (Hint: Not Poor People.)
posted by clawsoon at 7:14 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

There is a solution to this. Unionise.

A colleague of mine got made redundant while on maternity leave, in a manner which I'm not sure was legal. What's frustrating is that there was a union (Unite, in her case) she could have joined which would have fought her case for her, but she never had. A lot of people don't seem to realise that joining a union is like insurance for your employer being a dick to you. I understand not everyone can join one, but it would be great if a load of people read this and went and joined a union like, today.

NB, I am talking about British unions here, I have no insight into the strengths or weaknesses of American or other unions, some of which seem to work a bit more like guilds. But over here, for sure, this is literally why unions exist.
posted by Acheman at 7:40 AM on July 27, 2015 [4 favorites]

Mr Fish and I (unfortunately) have to move to London, and I'm currently interviewing hard. This... hit me right in the gut.

...

Damn.
posted by nerdfish at 7:42 AM on July 27, 2015

Awful. Glad that academia (at least in my experience?) seems to be better at this. Adding this site to the works cited portion of my list "things that anyone who wants legal restrictions to reproductive rights must first find legal solutions for or else are guilty of hypocrisy." Not an either-or proposition of course: my point is we ought to provide taxpayer cash and regulation so that companies have both legal and financial incentive to give full maternity support--and that any conservative who wants to avoid such solutions while still wanting to restrict access to abortion is being obtuse.
posted by TreeRooster at 7:46 AM on July 27, 2015

Came back to add: Mr Fish and I want kids, but we're waiting until I'm in a more secure position, career-wise, because two incomes = more stability.

I'm also 32.

My biggest nightmare is being pushed out of the workforce by parenthood. I'm starting to think we should just throw in the towel and get more cats.
posted by nerdfish at 7:48 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

You'd think the management in these cases had never had a mother. They were spawned whole from a pool of shame. I wonder what their mothers would think about their actions?
posted by Brocktoon at 7:51 AM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

Glad that academia (at least in my experience?) seems to be better at this.

I've heard a couple of pretty bad stories from UK academia. Women performing way better than colleagues and getting shit on badly over getting pregnant. I'd share but its too small a world. I think its easy to assume some places are pretty liberal but this can be a big test, especially given the gender breakdown in some areas.
posted by biffa at 8:09 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

Happened to me. In my case it came down to my employment situation: I was employed by organisation A, but my salary at that time was paid out of a grant from organisation B. A offered a fairly decent maternity pay package that I should have qualified for. So when I told my manager I was pregnant, we put in the formal notification to HR that I was requesting maternity leave from date X to date Y, and the reply was "Here is your notice of redundancy, effective from 6 weeks into your planned maternity leave."

Me: "???"

Them: "Well, B won't pay your maternity pay, only your salary, so oh well."

Me: "But I'm your employee. It's an employee benefit that you choose to offer. You pay it."

Them: "No."

My union: "Are you sure about that? Because we're happy to take this to a tribunal."

Them: "Okay, we'll look into it and get back to you."

And then followed about five months of absolute hell. They would tell me one thing by phone, then another thing by email, then another thing again to my boss. They at one point set up an "informal chat" about some work I was doing, only to spring "hey we're making you redundant because of this line in your contract, bye!" on me at a time when they didn't think I'd have a union rep or any paperwork with me. (My contract, which I had brought wth me anyway because I didn't trust them, did not have that line in it.) At one point I got told "you can't just use your maternity leave to extend your time here!"

I was having a really horrendous pregnancy anyway - I was very sick and intermittently having time off work for hospital appointments and illness, which didn't help. I was so, so stressed, and I so badly wanted them to make a decision so I could move forward in whatever direction (can't appeal or go to a tribunal without a decision), and they wouldn't. At one point I actually begged - look, you have had months, could you please just give me an answer? Even if it's a 'no', can you just say that? Please, this is awful, I am under so much stress. And they told me that they still weren't ready to make a decision - but if I'd agree to redundancy, we could get all that paperwork signed and sorted today! (I didn't, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered it.)

Eventually, when I was I think 36 weeks pregnant and my planned leave was almost about to start, they decided to pay me the maternity pay and let me come back to work after my leave after all. But not because they had to, you understand, oh no - just as an act of generosity. There, all sorted out! Wasn't I grateful?

Not particularly grateful, no.

I don't work there any more.
posted by Catseye at 8:16 AM on July 27, 2015 [16 favorites]

(Oh, and that was in academia.)
posted by Catseye at 8:17 AM on July 27, 2015 [1 favorite]

...and that was in academia.

Sorry, should have known that anecdotal evidence was too good to be true across the board. People if given the chance will often make selfish decisions (and frequently shortsightedly so, as in your case!)
posted by TreeRooster at 8:57 AM on July 27, 2015

Just goes to show, sexism is alive and well despite what laws we put in place to override its effects. The right to a year of maternity leave is something that the UK should be rightfully proud of (I'm struggling to think of anything similar in the US), and yet people who want to discriminate against women will still find a way.
posted by chainsofreedom at 10:31 AM on July 27, 2015

In situations where men are able to take paternity leave do they receive similar treatment? I have no idea but I would doubt it, right? There's always this assumption that fertility and motherhood make women somehow weaker/more ineffectual, which even as a non-breeder pisses me the heck off.
posted by Mooseli at 11:27 AM on July 27, 2015

When my previous employer made redundancies, we were told that colleague who was out on maternity leave wouldn't be put "at risk" (i.e. subject to the scoring system and whatnot to decide who kept their job) because it was basically illegal to make someone redundant on maternity leave. This went down a bomb with the people who were "at risk" and not pregnant.

The experiences of the people on the OP's site don't seem to agree with "it's illegal" thing. Does anyone happen to know what the law is in the UK?
posted by pw201 at 12:10 PM on July 27, 2015

pw201, that was likely a company decision, unfortunately being pregnant/on maternity leave is not legal protection from redundancy. Useful info here (PDF).
posted by ellieBOA at 1:03 PM on July 27, 2015

It is not illegal to make a woman redundant while she is on maternity leave so long as you can show that she was part of a general redundacy and not chosen because she was on maternity leave. Your company was probably not confident enough in the impartiality of their scoring system to think it would hold up as evidence. It is very illegal when, eg, a woman on maternity leave is the only person made redundant and a new, substantially similar position is created and offered to someone else, which is an extreme but real example of the kind of thing the law is aimed at.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:26 PM on July 27, 2015 [2 favorites]

I would often have managers actually saying to me how ‘inconvenient’ it was when one of their team went on Maternity Leave and asking if there was any way of recruiting someone new and ‘removing’ her from their team to avoid any disruption to business as usual.

This kind of behaviour annoys me so much. My partner manages a small team that is mostly women. The work is specialised and requires a very particular skill set. For most of her team it's their first professional job, and one of the consequences is that it is utterly typical for her to have multiple team members on maternity leave at any given time. I guess this is the sort of situation that causes some managers to complain about the "inconvenience" of employing young women, but I've never once heard my partner talk that way. Instead, she takes the approach of expecting that women in their mid-20s might want to have kids, and plans accordingly by introducing overlap in task assignments. If one or two staff members become pregnant, someone else can step in and take over. When staff return, there's never a shortage of projects that they can slot back into, and because there are other people involved there's always someone to help smooth the transition.

What I find remarkable is that not one of her corporate clients have ever complained about this. In fact, they are happy knowing that there's a pool of relevant expertise on hand and they trust that my partner is in the best position to manage her own damn staff. University clients on the other hand, have gotten surprisingly angry about it. They expect that if they pay for one FTE worth of work (and they don't: universities never pay market rates) then they will get the same person assigned to them for the whole job. The expect this regardless of whether their job provides a nice stable flow of work that exactly matches a constant 1 FTE load (it never does), and without any consideration that the staff member in question might need to make their own life choices. And when the facts of life are explained to them ("so there's this thing called a uterus...") they get grumpy and act like it's my partner's fault for deliberately introducing a rotating roster just to annoy them, or like she's making her staff get pregnant just to piss them off. This kind of grief only ever comes from the university clients, never the corporates. It's weird.

Anyway the thing that's truly striking to me is that so many people seem unable to grasp the basic point that dealing with maternity leave IS business as usual. Just like managing accounts and paying taxes is business as usual. If you can't do it then you shouldn't be running a business.
posted by langtonsant at 3:25 PM on July 27, 2015 [10 favorites]

My employer was obviously deeply shocked and unhappy when I called to arrange my return to work after six months maternity leave, despite previously being his golden girl and telling him when I got pregnant that I would definitely be returning. He seemed to think once I had my baby the joy of motherhood would take over and I wouldn't need money any more, so he immediately hired two middle aged women to replace me. He had to take me back and on the same salary, that being the law, but my position here has never been the same. If he could have gotten rid of me, he absolutely would have. I've kept this email he sent me at the time but I try not to think about it because it makes me so, so angry:

"Talk to you tomorrow. FGS think about it, this is not smart. Sometimes the small extra cash is not worth tying yourself in knots for. Being a working mother is not easy and you haven’t done it yet, so you really don’t know. I mean this in your best interests."

(He is a 60+ man with an ex-housewife so not sure how he is an expert on being a working mother).
posted by Wantok at 8:48 PM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]

Wantok: "Talk to you tomorrow. FGS think about it, this is not smart. Sometimes the small extra cash is not worth tying yourself in knots for. Being a working mother is not easy and you haven’t done it yet, so you really don’t know. I mean this in your best interests."

FFS that is infuriating. I have so many questions now:

1. Why didn't he ASK you what your plans were before hiring replacements? How is that good staff management?
2. Even if your job wasn't highly paid, why is it a good idea to refer to the pay check as "the small extra cash"?
3. How could he possibly have an opinion about your ability to be a working mum? If you haven't done it yet, how can he know?
4. If he's genuinely concerned about your work-life balance like he says he is, why didn't he ask a completely different question about what you need in order to make the working mum thing work out?
5. Why does he think it is even CLOSE to appropriate to send an email framed that way?
6. How is ANY OF THIS HIS BLOODY BUSINESS?

I'm sorry. I know it's not my business either, but my blood pressure just shot through the roof on reading that email. I'm a guy and I get that I tend to miss stuff and be a jerk sometimes, but that's a level of shitty obliviousness that doesn't even make sense to me. I just don't understand how anyone can live in the real world and think the way your boss obviously does. It's just baffling to me. I'm reading that email and I feel like I've just met an adult human who doesn't know what a "triangle" is. How did this happen? Is it some weirdly specific agnosia? Did this low level concept somehow never appear in his experience? I just don't understand. Is there any way we can study your boss? It's for SCIENCE, I promise. SCIENCE needs to know.

(Sigh. I guess I know what the answer is)
posted by langtonsant at 10:30 PM on July 27, 2015 [5 favorites]