Firing someone because they’re pregnant is sex discrimination. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was signed into law on October 31, 1978. It amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to explicitly prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. It covers hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, and benefits.
The case that made the law necessary
In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert (1976), a group of female employees sued GE because its disability benefits plan covered virtually every nonoccupational illness and accident except pregnancy. The Court held that pregnancy could reasonably be excluded from an employer’s disability benefits plan. The reasoning was that excluding pregnancy wasn’t sex discrimination because both men and women could be non-pregnant. Only pregnant people were excluded, not women as a class.
Justice William Brennan dissented, pointing out the obvious fact that only women become pregnant, and GE did not exclude other “voluntarily undertaken” conditions, such as sports injuries, attempted suicides, elective cosmetic surgery, and vasectomies. Congress agreed with Brennan, so two years later, the PDA was the direct legislative rebuttal to Gilbert.
By 1977, women made up more than 45 percent of the labor force, but only one-quarter had insurance plans that allowed sick leave for pregnancy-related illness. The coalition that pushed the PDA through included labor unions, women’s rights groups, and civil rights organizations. The law passed. And no longer could a woman legally be shown the door or denied disability coverage, or demoted, or passed over for a promotion simply because she was pregnant.
What the law did and didn’t do
The PDA is built on a comparative framework. It gives pregnant workers equal treatment, so employers must treat pregnancy the same way they treat any other temporary disability. If you accommodate a worker recovering from a back surgery, you have to accommodate a worker in her third trimester asking for the same thing.
However, the PDA only applies to employers with 15 or more employees, meaning millions of workers at small businesses have no federal protection at all. The law also has no affirmative accommodation requirement. It doesn’t require employers to do anything for pregnant workers, only to treat them the same as similarly situated non-pregnant workers. If your employer doesn’t accommodate anyone with a temporary disability, congratulations, you’re being treated equally. You’re equally out of luck.
This gap produced decades of cases like Arizanovska v. Wal-Mart (2012), where a shelf stocker was put on unpaid leave and eventually fired after her doctor restricted her from lifting more than 20 pounds. Wal-Mart claimed it simply had no light-duty assignments available. She lost her case in both district and appeals court. The logic was Wal-Mart wasn’t treating her worse than others. It just wasn’t helping her at all.
The Supreme Court tried to close this loop in Young v. UPS (2015), ruling that a pregnant employee can make a case for discrimination by showing that she belongs to a protected class, sought accommodation, was not accommodated, and that the employer accommodates a large percentage of non-pregnant workers with similar limitations while failing to accommodate a large percentage of pregnant workers. This was progress. But requiring workers to build that kind of comparative case, i.e. documenting patterns across a workforce is a high bar for someone who is tired, nauseous, and worried about her job.
On paper versus in practice
When discriminating employers learn that an employee is pregnant, she is often fired the same day. The discrimination is fast, and proving intent is slow. Because the PDA is an anti-discrimination law, the burden falls on the worker to show that her pregnancy was the reason for the adverse action. Employers rarely admit this. Instead, a woman gets a vague explanation about “restructuring” or “performance concerns” that conveniently coincide with the week she announced her pregnancy. She then has to reconstruct the discriminatory motive through circumstantial evidence, and 74% of pregnancy discrimination charges filed with the EEOC result in no monetary benefit or required workplace change. For those who do receive something, the average benefit is only $17,976 and the median is $8,000. These numbers don’t begin to account for lost wages, derailed careers, or the cost of fighting the case in the first place.
In 2024 alone, the EEOC received 2,729 formal complaints about pregnancy discrimination and that figure almost certainly understates the actual scope. Most women don’t file. One in 5 mothers say they’ve personally experienced pregnancy-related workplace discrimination. Fear of retaliation is real. So is the knowledge that the system is slow, expensive, and most often resolves in the employer’s favor.
Who bears this most
The burden is not equally distributed. Black women and women in low-wage jobs have filed a disproportionate share of pregnancy discrimination claims. Black women lead all racial groups in labor force participation at 61% . They are the most likely to be pregnant while working, and, according to research and EEOC data, among the most likely to face discrimination when they are. A 2023 Lean In/McKinsey report found that Black and Latina women are already among the least likely to be promoted to management and the most likely to experience disrespect and microaggressive behavior at work, with pregnancy worsening conditions.
A sequel to the Pregnancy Discrimation Act
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act mandated that employers proactively provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy-related limitations: not just treat pregnant workers the same, but actually help them. In my next article, I will break down the PWFA.
Pregnancy Discrimination Act is nearly five decades old. Women are still being fired the day they announce their pregnancies. The law said that’s illegal. The gap between what the law says and what actually happens is where most women still live.