Fifth of women harassed at work over pregnancy or flexible hours, report finds | UK news | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016 ... port-finds

I can totally see why employers wouldn't be happy, but tough sh1t.

It's not just pregnant women. Women of childbearing age are usually treated with suspicion.


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That may be your experience and I wouldn't question it, but where I work there are more women between say 20 and 40 (because tbh 'child bearing age' is a pretty wide range these days) than there have ever been before and none of the men I for with would dream of giving them a hard time, mainly because most of them have young families of their own.

Admittedly the place I work isn't incredibly cut-throat or competitive.

Harassment is not just bullying, it's not giving important projects to women " just in case", not promoting to senior roles " just in case", or advancing men faster " because they are the family breadwinner " ( all true examples for the construction industry)


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That is interesting. Working in IT, it seemed women of "child bearing" age were promoted faster. In the UK, I had more female managers than male managers over the years. Maybe it was a case of, "if they can manage a family, they can manage this bunch of kids, we call programmers."

The problem with harassment is it's hard to quantify or prove. Unless someone actually tells you you haven't been given a promotion or new project 'just in case you get pregnant' you're working with perception and assumption. And if someone actually IS dumb enough to tell you that, you should happily sue them into oblivion.

I don't have statistics on specific industries but it seems generally accepted as true that women under 40 actually earn slightly more than their male counterparts on average. That suggests there's no general prejudice against women who might have children. However at that point things flip and men on average earn more from then on. One of the suggested explanations for this is that women are much more likely to take career breaks because they've had children, this affects their earning potential and possibly also that employers consider women with current parental responsibilities to be more 'risky'.

So there does appear to be a disadvantage on average to being a women who has had children. Whether that's a due to prejudice or just a consequence is again hard to prove, as nobody in their right mind is going to admit to a prejudice that could cost them a ton of money.