Engineer Says Software Firm Cut Her Maternity Leave Short After Her Baby Died
vice.com
vice.com
Whether leave is paid or unpaid, this should be treated in the same way as any disability or health related leave. IMHO it would be cheap for companies to simply buy infant life insurance for all employees and pay out $25,000 or so if this horrific thing comes to pass. That would help everyone at a reasonable cost since infant deaths and still births are so rare these days.
May peace be unto you.
(Ping me if you want info about an organization called "The Compassionate Friends" specifically for bereaved parents.)
That night his son passed away silently in his sleep - Not even 12 hours since we talked at the viewing about how surreal losing a child would be. Their baby simply stopped breathing. We’re all still in some level of shock.
Hug your little ones and appreciate the time you get with them. You never know when your life can go the other direction.
Please be good to "Paul", and do not expect him to "get over it" anytime soon. It doesn't work like that in my experience.
If he and family are ready for it, perhaps mentioning The Compassionate Friends -- along with its link I've posted elsewhere in this page -- might be gratefully received?
My local chapter is wonderful, and has kept my wife and I as sane as we are after losing our (only) son.
May peace be unto "Paul".
If you don’t mind my asking what part of the world are you in?
She has since had a healthy baby and is usually beaming.
But, from personal experience, I would not assume that she is anything like "over" losing the other child.
My own problems with seasonal / occasional depression have resembled something of a bell curve- not bad at first, then really bad, then not very bad. The threat of depression never really goes away, but the likelihood of having bad days generally dies down over time, especially if the gap from what you were missing (IE child, job, spouse, sibling, family, pets) gets filled by something else.
This shouldn't be limited to losing a newborn child. Losing a child at any stage of life is devastating.
BUT what's the limiting principle behind 'forcing' companies to provide 'a great deal of leave' for this?
I certainly agree that it's reasonable for an employer to offer bereavement time for the loss of a close family member, but why should this be made into law?
Your argument can be turned on just about any labor law. "It may be reasonable for a company to do this, but why should they be forced?" The answer is without reasonable minimum standards, some people will exploit their employees.
When employers provide this social good they will inevitably call some of the shots; why should their voice have influence on this matter?
To me, this is similar to the public coming to the feeling that digital public spaces are worthy, but then the conversation turns to whether Facebook should be the one doing it...
What I have seen for actually grieving is that either people go back to work or they go to a doctor and get diagnosed with acute stress or depression because of the situation. I suspect that if the case in the article had occurred in Sweden then that is what actually would happen and the person would have got a few months to recover.
My preference would be for law makers started with laws that forced companies to give theirs workers a fair days pay for a fair days work.
Because hypothetical employers who are actually benevolent are forced to compete with those who aren't, absent regulation? AKA a "race to the bottom".
When corporations send me stuff in writing every day saying that they can only do the minimum mandated by law in respect to any ethical matter, I have to wonder whose opinion it really represents to say that minimum standards aren't necessary.
Individuals can buy this sort of life insurance for themselves without the help of their employers. Given that it is, as you say, "cheap" there isn't an economic burden either.
Why would we want employers intruding into yet another aspect of individual's lives? We're all well aware of the problems that come from having employers responsible for health insurance.
Also, consider for a moment how you'd feel being given a huge payout for a lost child. The money can't fix anything, but it's kind of nice to have money, and then you start feeling guilty about that, and it's a whole quagmire of badness.
Businesses aren't your parents. They shouldn't be involved in stuff this personal.
No. The society should help you out, the company shouldn't be forced to do that.
https://www.compassionatefriends.org/
"You need not walk alone."
"We are desperately sorry for the reason you are here, but we are glad you found us."
(Edit: typo.)
Jennifer was told that because she couldn't plan for the tragedy, Informatica would renege its promises. Perhaps Informatica should plan a bit more about what happens when you have incoherent policies and treat human beings as disposable resources.
edit: updated for clarity
the whole point of an HR department is to stop anything developing that could cause productivity issues for a company.
Cutting the leave short for because someone's child dies shows a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of wider consequences for staff and company.
If I had found out that my company had pulled shit like that, then there would be hell to pay.
what kind of emotional vacuum do these people live in?
Recently I've really come to fully accept that HR at most companies is not there for the employee (regardless of how they internally brand), vs. it being a compliance department and a risk barrier between general employees and the upper-crust. If something bad enough happens, they'll pin it on the HR employee and fire them vs. taking accountability for the company's actions.
HR is not your friend.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23743735176992... is a good start if you wanna learn more.
I've noticed in myself and others that when you're stressed/inexperienced/otherwise not-at-ease at work, people start behaving defensively. That often turns into this sort of cold-hearted behaviour that people believe is considered professional, even though no competent manager would actually behave that way.
It's similar to middle management wearing nicer clothes in the typical signalling theory example.
As you say, the entire point of HR is risk management. I hear loads of time on HN about how you can never trust HR because they are only there to protect the company, and while that's true, a lot of the time good HR people realize that the employees' needs and the long-term needs of company are aligned, so they should be working to improve your situation.
In this case, they asked a woman whose baby just died to come back to work over 2 weeks of leave. Did they honestly believe this inhumane act, which would basically guarantee them lots of deservedly shitty press, was worth it over a measly 2 weeks of leave?
Any decent HR person (and, honestly, any decent person in general) would have immediately realized this was an idiotic decision.
Why? They changed the policy over a year ago to 16 weeks of paid leave, and included pregnancy recovery in that. Is that not good enough?
But the point still stands that my response had really nothing to do with whether 8 weeks or 6 weeks or 16 weeks is "good enough". When someone has a baby, and that baby dies, it doesn't take much to realize you don't nickel and dime that employee over a couple of weeks of leave. You send flowers and a heartfelt letter.
The job of HR is specifically to lower employee related risk for a company, and is should be obvious that sending an email to the effect of "well, since your baby died, you'll be ready to come back to work sooner!" would in fact raise multiple risks for the company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_...
This, while the total _paid_ leave available to mothers among OECD nations is ~54 weeks, including 18 weeks average paid maternity leave plus another long period of paid parental leave following it:
http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/PF2_1_Parental_leave_systems.pdf
https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes...
"Since 2014...34.3 percent worked at small companies."
And this is for "small" defined as <= 100. The percentage will be even smaller for <= 50.
It's also important to note that it's wrong to say that employees of small businesses "don't get the leave." Many small businesses will ofter leave to their employees without a federal mandate.
By "don't get the leave" I meant "aren't guaranteed the leave", of course.
curious, whats world nations ? never heard of that term before.
I think the old adage applies here, "make sure everything is in writing". She was promised a promotion, but she did not sign a contract and nothing was set in stone.
I learned to put everything in writing the hard way. If something is in writing, even if it is an email, then it is hard for the company to go back on their words. Having an actual contract is better, but having just about anything written down is better than just about anything verbal.
I hope Jennifer recovers, and I hope that the company she has transferred to treats her better.
Some things you want to get in writing, other things you don't want to plan for unless it's in writing.
That aside, unemployment payments are funded as a completely separate system to every other kind of welfare in the US and so they demonstrate nothing at all about how other payments could be afforded.
I was comparing US unemployment benefits to the UK
American health insurance is usually tied to your job. If you lose your job, you can continue it, temporarily, through a provision called COBRA, but it is often outrageously expensive.
In the UK, I believe you’re able to access the NHS regardless of your employment status (right?). Equivalent insurance would cost you hundreds of dollars a month in the US, if not more, and would have to be paid from your benefits. An apples-to-apples comparison between the two system ought to include that fact.
Wtf? How can that possibly be a thing?
I don't know the specifics of this case, but maternity leave is absolutely something that has been abused. My spouse worked with a woman who got hired while she was pregnant, had the baby and took advantage of the company's extremely generous paid maternity leave, and then came back in and quit on her first day back. From the company's standpoint, this hire was simply a cash giveaway and a huge loss.
The key word is here "already earned". Denying that doesn't make any sense, any which way we look at it.
Still, punish the 95% (or whatever very high number) for the shitty behavior of other 5% of people? I understand it is business and companies need to protect their profits, but this is ridiculous.
Yeah, I agree. Just pointing out that this stuff rarely comes from mustache-twirling villains and more often is just a misguided attempt to solve some other related problem. Cutting off commission that has already been earned sounds pretty bad.
Yes, they literally do (or hire consultants to do it).
I went to school with lots of people who ended up in management consulting. One in particular worked at Deloitte and specialized in "human capital".
Most of their projects were to figure out how an organization could drastically reduce pension/retirement benefits for existing workers legally, while also offering much worse plans for new hires that looked good on paper.
They were paid around $1,800/day/consultant for all of these cost-cutting projects.
(This is not at all an uncommon story in the enterprise consulting world, by the way.)
I bet if most companies simply got rid of the HR departments altogether, not only would inhumane and repulsive policies like the above not exist, I bet most employees would be happier and more productive.
It was their way of making themselves feel important, and most of the staff feared the upper HR people.
I think a better solution is to have stronger laws that favor workers. HR will enforce them because they don’t want their company in legal trouble, and employees gain the benefit the laws provide. Everyone wins, more or less.
I had to do a double take there, I read it as months first time. How can a woman give birth and be back at work in eight weeks? Six weeks seems impossible baby or not, the recovery time for pregnancy and birth can be many months.
If I were a woman living in a society like that I think I’d either not have children or not work at all.
Women receive 26 weeks, instead of 16, from their third child. They can choose to return to work sooner, but must take a minimum of eight weeks, including six after the birth, to receive pay.
The leave is paid at 100 per cent of salary, capped at €540 net per week. This is the equivalent of a €2,885 gross monthly salary."
2855 Euro gross is fairly normal in France for the bulk of the people who would need this assistance. The $650 is net take home, not gross. You also have to take into account that in France lots of things that are very costly in the USA are free and so you can't directly compare the compensation for paid maternity leave with the income of the median woman in America, that's apples and oranges. You should compare it with either the median pay in France or with the average paid leave compensation in the USA.
Finally, there is the duration of the leave to take into account 16 weeks is going on three months, which compared to the 6 weeks (or less) of maternity leave in the United States is pretty generous.
Is it costly for mothers? Well, that depends on the income of the mother before the maternity leave. But France has figure out - rightly - that if you earn lots of money that you need this assistance likely a lot less than if you do not. And so there is a cap.
https://twitter.com/markpopham/status/1189253197841350661?s=...
This is one of the many reasons why multigenerational households can be a benefit to the individuals within.
When there's a will, there's a way.
What is the answer? I don't know. As I recently read "Most people can more easily imagine the end of the world than a change in capitalism."
Countries who have done this, while still being market-based economies (capitalist), have been successful in increasing their birth rate to sustainable levels! Maybe we should try it?
Through exhaustion with unaccountable corruption and reckless, ineffective public spending by all parties on the political spectrum, our societies won't support any social move (more taxes, better laws) in the name of the former, whilst being by-and-large in opposition of the latter.
Neither of the above will help in themselves though without a drastic change in the pressures requiring dual income families for mere survival, convergence in the metropolis for work, stagnant income growth coupled with soaring costs, especially around child rearing and education, and the modern narrative toward women (largely by other women) that they're nothing unless they're building a meaningful career for themselves.
While the rest of the Western World is by no means perfect and is still suffering declining birth rates due to some of the factors listed above, America's approach and policies toward social well-being - financial and moral support for maternity leave, general time off work and compassion for the sick - is utterly reprehensible. It is the most prosperous, wealthy nation on the planet and seems to be content to resign itself to a society benefiting a very small handful of people at a massive social, financial, economical and physical cost to everyone else.
A mere 8 weeks leave for going through pregnancy and bringing a child - that which we depend on for future taxes, productivity, volunteer work, philanthropy, innovation and social policy - into the world and then 2 weeks being cut in the name of money because that child died? How can anyone who supports or justifies this look at themselves in the mirror in the morning?
If you deem your country / nation / peoples to be important and worthwhile, its future to be crucial and investment in that future to be a necessity but support these policies then you're either a monster or an utter moron.
don't we also have far more pressing carbon emissions issues though ? Isn't population decline such a bad thing. Do we really need billions and billions of people because its 'good for the economy'
Also how dare they not pay her commissions earned by her team while she was away.
I think the tone is all wrong here. Economically, it makes sense to "discriminate" against pregnant women, so the discussion should be more "Here's why you shouldn't do it" and less "How dare you do it!".
Just my $0.02 as a woman.
In most circumstances I agree with this viewpoint, but what happened in this case is something that less-policed societies would see business owners killed for.
The "Here's why you shouldn't do it" is both morally and economically obvious, and any corporation or C-level who can't see that is completely without morals and common sense, along with basic human emotion, seemingly.
"How dare you be so inhumane to your employees that most European countries would see you fined or imprisoned, and that every religion would see you in the worst possible afterlife!"
The press you'd receive alone is reason enough, and anyone with any intelligence whatsoever would see that this would be more broadly controversial than more or less any other possible evil action.
There are things you don't do, whether it makes fiscal sense or not. You think very carefully about accepting it as a possibility, because doing so drops the standard for everyone else around you.
If for some reason you do, you especially don't do it unilaterally without getting buy-in from the other party out of respect. It's like people have completely lost any sense of civility around actually finding out what people are okay with.
I vehemently disagree with the economic argument being given primacy over some level of social decency and civil decorum.
It's one of those "honor" things. We do it not because it's the easiest, but because it's what makes us human. Shouldering some extra burden when someone else is suffering from a much greater one foisted through no fault of their own is just how it should work.
Of course no one in business likes that type of sentiment because it doesn't fit on a balance sheet.
If I am voluntarily bearing the burden I would like bear it for someone who is suffering the most in the world. Bearing it for someone who happened to apply for job at the same company doesn't make any sense. If you have food on your plate and live in a first world country on a 6 week paid bereavment leave then you aren't even in the vicinity of suffering, like not even close.
Only framing I can think of is that I would like to have privileges applied to me if same thing happens to me. This is much more selfish and sensible way to look at it.
I've heard this repeated a lot but I don't get it (I'm an employer). I mean I can't think of many things that would hurt team morale and hiring reputation more than treating a young female employee like shit just because she got pregnant (let alone went through something as horrific as losing a child). What kind of short-sighted psychopath boss would look at this any other way?
I mean, even when looking at it with dry unemotional money glasses, high employee turn-over is a much more costly than the occasional paid pregnancy leave.
I just don't get it.
But yeah I guess that's what your point is :-) it just makes no sense to discriminate against any of this stuff.
Anecdote time based on my experience in SV and tech, and second-hand anecdotes from friends in NYC finance:
Curiousgal's viewpoint isn't uncommon. The harshest judgment in these situations comes from other women. Men are generally more sympathetic, and if they're not, they're too scared to say anything.
Women in competitive & high-paying fields like tech and finance can be brutal, especially if they feel like holding off on having children was a sacrifice that they had to make in order to establish themselves in their career.
I would not be surprised if this decision came all the way down from a female manager, with men lower on the chain voicing opposition and being overruled.
That's very speculative and likely not true.
The SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer at Informatica when this incident happened was Maureen Brennan. She’s also a former VP and BoD Trustee of the Women's Health and Counseling Center in New Jersey, which focuses on reproductive healthcare services.
It all looks highly speculative to me.
But yes, of course it’s speculation :)
It is obviously speculation since I don't work there or know anyone who does, but it is based on what I've personally seen and heard. It's kind of funny that you find it so hard to believe, though. I don't expect to get an actual answer from you in regards to why that is, but I'd still like to ask you why you think it's unlikely.
This was a decision made by an HR manager. If you are not familiar with the gender imbalance for HR in the United States, it is overwhelmingly women (both in and out of tech).
You can form a rough and incomplete org chart by glancing through LinkedIn, if you want some actual data that will assist you in forming an educated guess in regards to who was potentially involved with this decision.
If we are assuming that all of the people involved were acting rationally and in their best interests (and there is no reason not to), then I think it is naive to think that this did not make it all the way to the CHRO.
When you’re a contractor you see these true colors come out more often. Clients who are more than happy to manipulate a situation to avoid paying you. Ethical lapses that they can rationalize to themselves as good business.
I think someone's simply looking at the first-order consequences and calling the analysis done, rather than taking into account the sort of company that enacting the policy will result in.
Well, she _did_ work in sales...
Not sure what century you're living in but here in the 21st the "how dare you" branch is the hair-trigger one. So simple logic dictates to short circuit on "how dare you" and only test "here's why" in the unlikely chance that the first test fails.
Please give me the economic argument for putting the cold branch test in the hot path.
Asking someone to return to knowledge work after one of the most traumatic events of their life is tantamount to firing them. They're not going in, if they do go in they're going to be an emotional wreck.
The idea that six to eight weeks is enough for maternity leave in even the best situation is pretty awful too.
Why in 2017 (the date of this occurence) does management still suck at stuff like this?
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.
If a big deal closes that you worked on for the last year while you're on leave, you wouldn't get commission. That's not right
What there was to take maybe was a bereavement leave.
Maternity: the period during pregnancy and shortly after childbirth
She birthed a child. This cuts a little close to denying that.
it took me 5-6 weeks after giving birth to be able to drive again for short distances. won’t even go into the other indignities and needs in that period.
Not that I have either, but having seen it a few times I don't think I'd recover quickly even without the bereavement. The blood being mopped up - literally with a mop - after my wife's episiotomy was like something from a horror movie.
I don't think they let you drive for 6 weeks after a caesarian in the UK.
I wish rules like this were simply baked in at the societal level. Having companies manage maternity leave creates misaligned incentives, which are so often the root of abuses.
I'm saying this while also thinking that what the company did (according to the article) is despicable and insensitive.
She needs to make name of the company known, and was the person who made this decision. The internet will do the rest.
What I can get from this is an awareness of the issues women face, and to sensitive to these topics if I'm ever in a position to influence policy about them, or to assist someone in that situation.
Also, this woman was a commissioned sales representative. I have little knowledge how these people generally are compensated, but I do know it's different from how other employees get paid and rewarded. They usually have employment contracts and terms that are different from other staff.
This is particularly inflammatory. Just because women hold 5% of leadership positions, it doesn’t mean discrimination is the cause (or sole cause).