The individual was a sales person, not an engineer. A “sales engineer” who is paid on commission is very different than a software engineer.

The article says she was given 6 weeks instead of 8 weeks. It also says that it’s unclear if the maternity policy was even 8 weeks to begin with, and HR didn’t seem to know. Apparently there are multiple policies, depending on role?

I don’t know the “right” amount of time, but it seems like the difference is a lot smaller than the headline and discussion are implying. I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong or evil for a company to give 6 weeks off for a baby that died on the first day. It absolutely does not fit the subtitle which says “experience extreme forms of pregnancy discrimination”. Reasonable people could debate whether it’s the most fair, but nobody can say getting only 6 weeks out of a possible 8 is “extreme forms of pregnancy discrimination”.

The article also says that an outside hire was made to fill a more senior role that this woman hoped would go to her. She suspects that she did not get it because she was pregnant, and the company insists that those are unrelated.

Should we just assume that every pregnant person who doesn’t get promoted is a victim of discrimination? Non-pregnant people also don’t get promotions quite often. While I’m sure that does happen for improper reasons from time to time, and it must be frustrating, there isn’t anything to prove that is what happened here. I’m sure it’s also frustrating that when it does happen due to pregnancy, it’s impossible to prove.

There are some legitimately difficult problems when it comes to pregnancies and employment. It’s illegal to not hire someone because they are pregnant, so what do you do instead? If you’re a small company or a startup, you have nobody performing that function, and you’re still paying a salary and benefits. If it’s an unskilled role, sure you can contract a temp hire, but that isn’t an option for senior roles or roles with specialized skills, even if you could afford the contractor premium on top of the existing salary. I honestly don’t know how I would handle that situation in a fair way.

The other issue she has is compensation. As a sales person, part of her compensation was based on commission. Well, if she’s not at work, she isn’t making sales, and therefore not getting commission on sales that don’t exist. Ok, that sucks, but what’s the solution for people who take commission roles? Someone else has to pay out of their commission? What if she were a realtor? If she stops selling houses for a couple months, she isn’t going to make anything either. But since they are self-employed, there’s nobody else to point at and accuse of discrimination. She can’t demand that other realtors in town chip in and cover the shortfall. Why should this be any different? She feels she should not be “penalized”, but that isn’t a penalty, so this is disingenuous.

The article then says “Discrimination is particularly flagrant in Silicon Valley, where women hold just 5 percent of leadership positions.” But they haven’t established discrimination as the reason for that, so it sounds like the article, like many from Vice (although this author is new, it’s usually that Lorenzo guy trying to spin facts and invent controversies) is more interested in pushing a narrative. To borrow a term from tptacek, collecting rageviews.

They then quote a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits against their employers. Clearly a real source of unbiased facts on the issue at hand.

And a former Google employee filed a lawsuit against Google, who said:
“The memo described disparaging comments made by a manager at Google about pregnant women being “overly emotional and hard to work with.”

This is not a wise comment for a male manager to make. But if the worst thing they did was make a flippant comment like this (there is no allegation that they acted on it, the basis of the complaint was simply that they heard the comment), I would call it a fairly extreme reaction to get HR involved and attack them on internal mailing lists.

The comment isn’t exactly unfounded either, it’s just un-PC, and one of those things that we aren’t allowed to say, even though everybody knows that pregnancy has a non-zero impact on emotions (for good reason!). Show me someone who has either been pregnant or spent a lot of time around a pregnant person who hasn’t thought they had some moments of overly emotional challenges here and there, and I’ll show you a liar. This guy’s crime sounds like a lapse of judgment in vocalizing it during a moment of frustration. Wait, was it a guy? Or did they leave that out and let us assume that? It turns out, it was a woman, who is also a mother, who made the comment. So to reiterate, a woman heard her woman manager make a comment about another woman being difficult to work with when she is pregnant, and decided to report her to HR and rant about this injustice on internal mailing lists. Unsurprisingly, her manager turned cold on her. Since the woman who complained apparently also happened to be pregnant, it’s a little ironic that she went nuclear over another woman’s comment that someone was difficult to work with. You know what other unwise, flippant comments I’ve heard at work? “They can’t touch me, I’m pregnant.”

She likely didn’t do much to improve anyone’s perception by going that route. And considering the players involved, I don’t think this supports the “gender inequality” claim. But hey, at least she is a martyr on twitter now, and she is currently shaking down Google for a large settlement.

I think there is a lot of room for improvement on these issues. I don’t think we get there by using underhanded scorched earth tactics. A paid pregnancy-related leave might be something that the government has to provide for it to work. Something like unemployment insurance.