Joeli Brearly knows something about pregnancy discrimination. She experienced it firsthand.
At four months pregnant, the British woman was self-employed as a project manager and working on a huge, exciting project for which she’d secured grant money. It was set to last a year. But when she told the client that she was pregnant, “without any further conversation she sacked me,” Brearly said.
She was totally taken aback. “I was really, really shocked…and really hurt,” she said. And four months into her pregnancy she found herself unemployed and trying to figure out what would come next.
“I couldn’t actually believe that people would, firstly, behave like that, but also that they thought they could get away with it,” she said.
But the surprises kept coming. After her child was born — and other exciting contracts were secured for future work — Brearly started going to playgroups and outings with other mothers. When she told the story of what happened to her, she couldn’t believe how common an experience it was. “I was really appalled by how many of the women had similar stories,” she said. And all except one mother hadn’t taken any action against their employers, either out of fear, inability, or an acceptance that that’s how things are.
So Brearly decided to launch a new website, Pregnant Then Screwed, on International Women’s Day in March of this year. It’s a place for people to anonymously share stories of pregnancy discrimination. And while it was originally launched in the U.K., where Brearly lives, this month she’s expanded it to the U.S. and Spain. “I thought the only way you can get people talking about it is to show them that this is happening,” she said.
The stories have started pouring in on the U.K. site after some helpful publicity. There are now about 450 of them, from multiple women who say they were pressured by their employers to get abortions; others who were fired shortly after disclosing their pregnancies, in the middle of complications with their pregnancies, and right before their maternity leaves; and others whose employers and colleagues assumed that having a baby would simply make them bad employees.
“It’s still an accepted discrimination,” she said. “We just don’t realize how often it’s happening.”
Momentum has only just begun in the U.S., where she has about 15 stories collected. (She is also seven months pregnant with a second child and has full-time work, so this unpaid side project gets updated in batches.) And some of the nuances of discrimination differ between the countries, even if women experience it frequently in both places. In the U.K., women are guaranteed up to 39 weeks of paid maternity leave, plus additional unpaid weeks, with job protection upon their return. For these women, they are often discriminated against before and after leave by employers that don’t want to hold their jobs open, Brearley explained.
In the U.S., where there is no guarantee of paid maternity leave, women face different discrimination, such as refusal to make accommodations that allow them to stay on the job or the assumption — also faced by British women — that pregnancy and motherhood will make them bad at their jobs. “There is this perception that [women] suddenly become completely useless and their brains fall out of their head and all they want to do is bake cakes and fluff pillows,” Brearly said.
She also plans to expand the site into even more countries. “It’s a global problem, there’s no country that’s immune from it,” she said. “I definitely would like to see this in every country.”
The idea is not just to start a conversation and make an often unspoken issue more visible. It’s also to make concrete changes. In the U.K., women have just three months after they experience discrimination to bring a complaint — a very stressful and difficult time for pregnant women and new mothers — and face a high cost to simply start a case they might not win. Both of those factors combine to discourage many women from taking any action, but Brearly wants to see them changed. She also hopes it can help lead to better paid family leave policies. “I want to see structures and systems and laws changed that will assist women better,” she said.
“This is about saying this is happening but we are not talking about it,” she said of the project. “This is having a detrimental impact on women’s confidence, women’s careers, and therefore society and the economy, so we need to address this and we need to do something about it.”