Women at work: accommodations for pregnant women

In my last article of the "women at work”series, I looked at the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which is a law that said, essentially, you cannot fire a woman for being pregnant. However, it was an anti-discrimination law, not an accommodation law. It told employers what they couldn’t do. It never told them what they had to do. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), signed in December 2022 and effective June 27, 2023, finally closed that gap.

What the PWFA actually does

Under the PWFA, any covered employee or applicant may simply request reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition without needing to identify a similarly situated employee who received an accommodation in order to obtain one of their own.

The EEOC’s final rule includes breaks, access to water, seating, parking adjustments, light duty, time off for appointments, temporary reassignment, and telework, and it specifically identifies a set of accommodations so routine that denying them is presumptively unlawful. Letting a pregnant employee keep water at her desk. Letting her sit when her job normally requires standing. The bar for “reasonable” is low on purpose.

First, a woman’s pregnancy-related restrictions no longer need to rise to the level of a disability to warrant accommodation. Second, employers are prohibited from requiring qualified employees to take leave if another reasonable accommodation can be provided. Leave is the accommodation of last resort, not the default offer.

What the early cases tell us

In fiscal year 2024, the EEOC filed its first five lawsuits under the PWFA. In the first-ever PWFA lawsuit, against Wabash National Corporation, the EEOC alleged a Kentucky manufacturing employer refused to consider light duty or task modifications for a pregnant assembly line worker, instead forcing her onto unpaid leave and demanding unnecessary medical documentation. In another case, a medical assistant in her final trimester of a high-risk pregnancy was denied permission to sit, take short breaks, or work part-time and was placed on unpaid leave instead. That case settled for $90,000.

The pattern across these early cases is consistent: employers defaulting to unpaid leave rather than engaging with what accommodation was actually possible. The PWFA says that is now a legal violation.

In fiscal year 2024, the EEOC received 2,729 charges under the PWFA. For a law less than two years old, that’s substantial volume and reflects both the scale of the underlying problem and the fact that workers are starting to learn they have new rights to assert.

What it still doesn’t fix

The law applies only to employers with 15 or more employees. Workers at small businesses remain unprotected at the federal level. And while the PWFA creates a right to accommodation, it does not guarantee paid leave, salary protection, or job security beyond the accommodation period. The law keeps you at work, it doesn’t ensure your finances survive the pregnancy.

The bottom line

The PWFA made employers active participants in accommodating pregnant workers, not passive bystanders who could comply with the law simply by not actively discriminating. A pregnant worker can now walk into her manager’s office and say she needs to sit more, attend prenatal appointments, or reduce her lifting, and her employer is legally obligated to engage with that request in good faith.

That worker still needs to know her rights to exercise them. She still needs an employer with 15+ employees. She still needs an enforcement apparatus willing to act if those rights are violated. And she still has no federal right to paid leave when the pregnancy is over.