Amy Tannenbaum, Program Assistant

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was introduced in the Senate last week. To help you learn more about the legislation and why it’s critically important to pregnant workers, here are five fast facts about pregnancy and the workplace.

1) Neither the Pregnancy Discrimination Act nor the Americans with Disabilities Act explicitly require employers to provide minor workplace accommodations if pregnant employees need them.

While the Pregnancy Discrimination Act extends Title VII employment discrimination protections to pregnant employees, all too often courts have held that it does not protect women who need minor adjustments on the job during pregnancy, such as being permitted to carry a water bottle, take more frequent bathroom breaks, or get a temporary reprieve from heavy lifting — unless the pregnant woman can point to someone else doing exactly the same work who needed and received exactly the same job adjustments but who wasn't pregnant. It will often be impossible to find this nonpregnant identical twin. The Americans with Disabilities Act also doesn't apply, because pregnancy itself is not a disability (although pregnancy complications, like preeclampsia or gestational diabetes, can be).

2) The United States does not have a federal law requiring paid medical or parental leave.

Although the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides twelve weeks of unpaid leave during which your employer, if large enough to be covered by the law, will save your job, most employers don't provide paid medical or family leave, and very few workers in low-wage jobs have access to more than a few days of paid leave for medical needs.

I will never forget the mnemonic from my seventh grade history class: “Amendment 19, in 1919, gave women the right to vote.” It is not totally accurate (although the House and Senate passed the amendment in 1919, it did not get ratified until 1920). But it did work. I still remember how it felt when I first learned that if I had been born 100 years earlier, I would not have been able to vote: I simply couldn’t believe that such backward ideas about women were persuasive in recent history.

It wasn’t until August 26, 1920 that a woman’s right to vote became law in the U.S. Yesterday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment and recognizing women’s ongoing fight for equal rights. It is a day both to remember the tremendous work of women like Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells, and Alice Paul to win the right to vote, and a day to redouble our efforts to combat modern-day attempts to take the right to vote away from us.