Court Opinion

ID: 9496234
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 16:21:13.216034+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:57:26.717711
License: Public Domain

TERENCE T. EVANS, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
When evaluating cases under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, we must determine whether an employer treated a pregnant employee as it would have treated a “similarly affected but nonpregnant employee[ ].” Troupe v. May Dep’t Stores Co., 20 F.3d 734, 738 (7th Cir.1994). But pregnancy is unique, often making that seemingly simple task a difficult one. This case demonstrates why it doesn’t always work just to ask whether an employer would treat a similarly affected but nonpregnant employee any differently.
According to Celena Venturelli’s story (which, at the summary judgment stage, *619we must accept as true), she told Michael Collins in January that she wanted the job. Collins didn’t hide the fact that her pregnancy — specifically the question of whether she would return to work after having her baby — was the major cause of ARC’s hesitation. “We want to wait,” he told her, because “we want to see how this pregnancy thing turns out.... I know how you women are. Once you have that baby, you’re not going to want to return.”
My colleagues consider Collins’ belief that Venturelli would not want to come back to work to be “a valid concern,” and certainly an employer who is not sure when or if an employee will return to work has a valid concern and can act accordingly — to paraphrase our example in Troupe (comparing the pregnant plaintiff there to a hypothetical black employee in need of a kidney transplant), a baseball team can cut a black second baseman with a bum knee without giving rise to a claim of racial discrimination if it is not sure when or if the knee will recover. What makes our case different, however, is that Collins never worried that Venturelli would be physically unable to return to work, just that she would be unwilling to do so. And Collins’ concern arose not from anything Venturelli said, but from general notions about pregnant women and new mothers.
If an employer is allowed to take action based solely on the stereotype that new mothers are unlikely to return to work, it requires only a small step for companies to avoid hiring women of childbearing age altogether out of a fear that the women will some day become pregnant, take a substantial amount of time off, and perhaps never want to return to work at all. “I know how you women are,” an employer might tell a newly married applicant. “You decide it’s time to have a child, then once you have that baby, you’re not going to want to return.” Employers cannot refuse to hire a woman because they fear that she will have children and choose not to return to work — that’s precisely the type of discrimination the PDA was designed to prevent. See Maldonado v. U.S. Bank, 186 F.3d 759, 763 (7th Cir.1999) (“[Congress] designed the PDA specifically to address the stereotype that “women are less desirable employees because they are liable to become pregnant.’ ” (quoting Sheehan v. Donlen Corp., 173 F.3d 1039, 1045 (7th Cir.1999))).
As my colleagues point out, Trowpe, in which we found that an employer did not violate the PDA in terminating an employee because it “did not expect her to return to work after her maternity leave was up” seems to offer protection to ARC. 20 F.3d at 737. But the effect of Collins’ uncorroborated belief that Venturelli would not want to return to work makes Maldonado a more appropriate comparison. Because of her pregnancy, the plaintiff in Troupe was habitually late, and we assumed that the employer was reluctant to pay the plaintiff during her maternity leave. With those concerns, we were able to compare the plaintiffs situation to that of a similarly situated nonpregnant employee.
We must imagine a hypothetical Mr. Troupe, who is as tardy as Ms. Troupe was, also because of health problems, and who is about to take a protracted sick leave growing out of those problems at an expense to Lord & Taylor equal to that of Ms. Troupe’s maternity leave. If Lord & Taylor would have fired our hypothetical Mr. Troupe, this implies that it fired Ms. Troupe not because she was pregnant but because she cost the company more than she was worth to it.
20 F.3d at 738. As a result, Troupe asked but never had to answer the question of whether an employer could fire an employee solely because of his general belief that *620women will not return to work after their children are born.
Maldonado, on the other hand, did not differ from Troupe simply because the employer there “admitted liability,” as my colleagues contend. In fact, Maldonado raised a different issue — the employee there was fired simply because the employer assumed that she would be absent from work in the future. As a result, we reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the employer.
There might be some limited circumstances in which an employer could be justified in taking anticipatory adverse action against a pregnant employee. Although the PDA was designed to allow individual women to make independent choices about whether to continue to work while pregnant, it was not designed to handcuff employers by forcing them to wait until an employee’s pregnancy causes a special economic disadvantage .... But an employer cannot take anticipatory action unless it has a good faith basis, supported by sufficiently strong evidence, that the normal inconveniences of an employee’s pregnancy will require special treatment.
186 F.3d at 767. Similarly, ARC cannot take the anticipatory action of refusing to hire a pregnant woman because it is not sure she will return to work unless that assumption is supported by more than a stereotypical belief that new mothers will not leave their infants. If Venturelli had told Collins that she wasn’t sure if she would return to work after giving birth, ARC would have been justified in searching for another employee. In that case, the comparison to a different medical condition works, and ARC only would have had to have hired Venturelli if it would have hired a nonpregnant worker who wanted to take an indefinite and potentially permanent leave soon after being hired. But that is not the justification ARC has made at this point, instead claiming only that it didn’t treat Venturelli any differently because she was pregnant. Collins’ statements provide Venturelli with enough evidence to let a jury decide whether that is true. I would reverse the grant of summary judgment and remand this case for trial.