Sacked... for having a baby
Believe it or not, scores of firms are still pushing out female staff just for falling pregnant. So how DO they get away with it? Our Money Mail editor investigates
WHEN Joeli Brearley discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she had the usual concerns. Would the baby be healthy, would her morning sickness subside, and how would her life change?
What she never imagined was being fired by voicemail the morning after telling her employer. ‘I was in shock, shaking and pacing the floor when I heard,’ she says. ‘I called my husband and started Googling — but I didn’t even know the phrase maternity discrimination, so I was just typing things like: “I’m pregnant, lost my job”.’ Joeli, now 40 and a mother of two, was a project manager for a children’s charity that had a female CEO; the last workplace you might expect to treat a mother-to-be unfairly.
But her story is all the more shocking in that it is far from unusual. Every year, around 54,000 women in the UK are illegally pushed out of their jobs because they get pregnant or take maternity leave, an official report found. In many cases their careers never recover, leaving their confidence shattered. Worse, many can’t speak out because their employer has forced them to sign a non-disclosure agreement — so thousands more cases could go unreported. The law could not be clearer. Under the Equality Act 2010, it is illegal to discriminate against women because they are pregnant or take maternity leave.
Last week, top beauty company Liz Earle was ordered to pay more than £17,000 to an employee sacked when she was eight months pregnant.
However, because the justice process is so expensive and drawn-out, it can be incredibly difficult for women to hold their employers to account.
Having just lost their job and about to give birth, these women are uniquely vulnerable. So, often, firms bully them into accepting a bit of money in exchange for their silence.
Others are forced to give up on proceedings to protect their families — which is what happened to Joeli.
We meet in the four-bedroom house in York where she lives with husband Tom, 36, and their children, Theo, six, and Jack, four. Joeli recalls her shock at the message from her boss sacking her. She says: ‘My first thought was, “Well this is really silly of them because of course the law will protect me.” How naive I was!’
AFTEr the initial shock had subsided, she hired a solicitor, who wrote a letter threatening to take the charity to tribunal. But they did not even respond. ‘That alone cost me £300,’ she says. ‘I had no income coming in and didn’t know how I could afford to take it further.’
At a hospital check-up, Joeli was told she was at risk of going into labour early and needed an emergency operation. ‘They said I had to reduce the stress in my life,’ she says. ‘I’d just lost my job, didn’t know how I was going to pay my mortgage and was then told, “Whatever you do, don’t get stressed.” So I had to drop the case. It was a choice between the health of the baby or getting justice — and that wasn’t a choice.’
Fortunately, Joeli found a new job, and then had a healthy boy, Theo.
For many women, finding alternative employment while obviously pregnant proves impossible.
Joeli soon started to hear from women in the same situation, including a university friend who was made redundant from a senior position at a stockbroking firm — when she was six months pregnant. She had been there ten years and was the only person who was let go.
‘I realised we needed a way to expose these stories,’ she says. And so Pregnant Then Screwed was born. Before starting the campaign group, Joeli says she didn’t even consider herself a feminist.
‘I’ve always been outspoken but I’d never experienced any inequality because of my sex until that point,’ she says. ‘I’m white, I’m middle-class, I was doing well career-wise. But when this happened, it felt like the blindfold had been ripped off.’
Her organisation now has 35 unpaid volunteers across the country and two paid members of staff.
She says: ‘Initially, it was just a place for women to tell their stories anonymously but it mushroomed. Women kept asking me if they had a case, so we set up a free legal advice line, then a mentor scheme.’
The tribunal process is often prohibitive. Fewer than one per cent of women who experience maternity discrimination raise a claim.
You have just under three months to raise a tribunal claim after being sacked. So if you are fired while seven months pregnant, you would need to make a claim just before or just after giving birth.
Legal aid for employment disputes was severely restricted in 2013. So if you cannot afford a lawyer — between £5,000 and £10,000 for a simple case and as much as £30,000 for a complicated one — you must almost always represent yourself.
‘It’s David versus Goliath,’ says Joeli. ‘They can spend a fortune on the best lawyers and lots of women go through the process alone.
‘The system is meant to work so that you can represent yourself — but anyone I’ve spoken to says it is just impossible.’
Even if you win, the average award in sex discrimination cases is less than £9,000, according to official figures, which leaves very little after legal costs. These obstacles make it easier for employers to buy silence.
Hannah Martin says she was bullied into signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) when she was sacked from her job in advertising after having a baby.
Now 47, she lives in Sussex with her husband Max and their children, Ollie, 16, and Mimi, ten. She says: ‘The moment my boss looked me in the eye and lied to my face, falsely claiming I’d had several verbal warnings for shoddy work, I knew this was a fight I couldn’t win.’
Hannah, founder of online training programme Talented Ladies Club, had been called into a meeting with three men.
‘To say it felt like an ambush is an understatement,’ she says. ‘I was devastated, bewildered and in no doubt they’d make my life hell if I tried to brave it out. It made no sense: I’d won several awards and
been told my work was perfect at an appraisal months earlier. But that was before I had my baby.’
Determined to prove becoming a mother wouldn’t hold her back, Hannah only went on maternity leave two days before giving birth. ‘I was back at my desk four months later,’ she says.
‘While pregnant, my manager had told me I’d be able to work a day a week from home but he reneged on it on my return. And so, to have some semblance of work/life balance, I started leaving the office on time at 5.30pm.
‘“Perception is everything,” my boss told me. Soon after, he began to freeze me out by not giving me any work. Then came that meeting. It was swift and aggressive. I could either go quietly, my boss told me, or they’d make it difficult for me to work anywhere else. I was told the official line would be I’d resigned because I could not cope. I had to sign an NDA barring me from revealing the truth.’
A tribunal would take the time, money and energy that Hannah did not feel she could muster.
‘Thankfully, I got a new job almost immediately, on £10,000 a year more, which felt like a kind of justice,’ she says. ‘I can only talk about what happened now because the company has shut. I was blackmailed and bullied out of a job I loved and that will always feel like a terrible injustice.’
Such gagging orders have become a powerful weapon for the rich. Last year, the Government launched an inquiry after it emerged employers were abusing NDAs to silence victims of sexual harassment.
Joeli says their use in maternity discrimination is a major concern. She adds: ‘We know of household name firms that win awards for how brilliant they are to women, when behind closed doors women are announcing their pregnancy and then being kicked out.’
Jane van Zyl, chief executive of Working Families, the UK’s worklife balance charity, says: ‘We receive calls about this on a daily basis. And the more vulnerable women are — for example, if they are on a low income or in a lowskilled job — the easier it is for the employer to flout the law.’
Being sacked is far from the only form of discrimination pregnant women and new mothers face.
Joeli tells me of a company where the boss forced women to do a shot of vodka at the start of each day to prove they weren’t pregnant. Then there was the woman who had hyperemesis gravidarum (severe morning sickness) and was forced to vomit in a wastepaper bin in an open-plan office because her boss didn’t like her running to the bathroom all the time. Or another who was told by her boss to stop ‘bringing the office down’ after a miscarriage.
Devastatingly, none of these women ever did anything about it. Joeli says: ‘Employers know sacking women because they are pregnant is illegal, so they use other methods to push them out. It’s bullying, harassment, like a drip-drip effect. In the end you feel weak, like you can’t cope. So often, women blame themselves.’
Joeli doesn’t believe a change in the law is the answer, however. She says: ‘The law is clear: it is illegal to discriminate on the grounds of pregnancy and maternity. The problem is that employers are flouting the law.’
SHE adds that banning NDAs outright might make things worse — since it would stop many getting the small payouts they are currently offered for their silence.
So campaigners are calling for an independent body to monitor what goes on behind closed doors. Then, if they spot employers using NDAs regularly to mask abhorrent behaviour, they could step in.
Jane van Zyl says: ‘A good start would be increasing time limits for tribunal claims, and extending protections from redundancy to all new parents for six months when they come back to work.
‘But what’s really key is workplace culture — with better, more widespread flexible working, along with more new fathers taking leave. If this becomes the norm, then mothers are less likely to be seen as a liability.’
It is still all too common for employers to worry that women will have different priorities after having children. Joeli’s dedication to her new-found cause proves just how false that assumption is.
Her husband Tom says proudly: ‘She’s found her calling. She knows that this is what she is supposed to be doing and never switches off.’ pregnantthenscrewed.com