Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel

Emily Martin

Emily Martin is Vice President and General Counsel at the National Women's Law Center, where she undertakes cross-cutting projects addressing women's health, economic security, and education and employment opportunities. She also provides in-house legal advice and representation to the Center. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Martin served as Deputy Director of the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she spearheaded litigation, policy, and public education initiatives to advance the rights of women and girls, with a particular emphasis on the needs of low-income women and women of color. She also served as a law clerk for Senior Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge T.S. Ellis, III, of the Eastern District of Virginia and previously worked for the Center as a recipient of the Georgetown Women's Law and Public Policy Fellowship. She has served as Vice President and President of the Fair Housing Justice Center, a non-profit organization in New York City. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Yale Law School.

Expert in: Issues Before the Courts, Platform for Progress, Treaty on the Rights of Women, Supreme Court, Voter Education, Women & the Constitution, Unemployment, Employment
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My Take

Debate Wrap-up: The Unanswered Questions That Matter to Women Voters

Posted by
Amy Tannenbaum, Program Assistant
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
| Posted on: October 05, 2012 at 12:50 pm

A few themes have dominated the media after Wednesday’s first presidential debate: was the moderator any good, who “won,” and Big Bird’s future employment prospects. But here’s the question that we have been asking: where was the talk of women? In a piece for The Nation that also asks this question, Bryce Covert points out that the economic issues at hand have critical implications for women, but women are still seen as a special interest group. She writes, “’Women’s issues’ often get lumped into ‘social issues’ and then sidelined as not being ‘core issues’ like the deficit or jobs.”

Covert is absolutely right to point out that the impact of these core issues on women deserved specific attention during the debate. As over 50 percent of the U.S. population, women are NOT a special interest group. In fact, according to the Center for American Women in Politics, women actually vote MORE than men: women have turned out to vote in greater numbers — and proportions — than men in every presidential election since 1980 (PDF). The topics of Wednesday’s debate — the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, education, jobs and the economy — all offered the candidates a chance to articulate what their plans would mean for women. Neither took advantage of that chance. Nor was there any discussion whatsoever of a host of other domestic issues critical to women, from the wage gap, to women’s reproductive health, to child care, to protection against discrimination.

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Tags: Child Care & Early Learning, Health Insurance, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Family Planning, Employment, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | 1 comment

Back to the Future for Pregnant Workers

Posted by
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
| Posted on: October 04, 2012 at 03:20 pm

As the Huffington Post highlighted last week, the EEOC has filed a recent spate of pregnancy discrimination lawsuits. One case is against an employer that had a written policy requiring termination of pregnant employees in their third month of pregnancy. In another, an employer required pregnant workers to submit a note from their doctors in order to continue working during pregnancy. These rules seem like a throwback to when pregnant women were expected to quit work as soon as they began to “show.” But this kind of discrimination is still happening today, almost 35 years after the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.

Too many employers still seem to be relying on an outdated personnel manual. In fact, the past 10 years have seen a significant uptick in claims of pregnancy discrimination. Some employers continue to blatantly discriminate by firing pregnant workers, especially those in physically demanding jobs. Others are a bit more subtle in forcing pregnant women out of the workplace: they refuse to make minor adjustments to job duties for those workers who need such accommodations to continue safely working.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, recently introduced in Congress, would make a big difference. The bill would strengthen the protections in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act by requiring employers to make the same sort of reasonable accommodations for pregnancy that they are already required to make for disabilities.

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Tags: EEOC, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | 2 comments

Supreme Court Term Begins Today: Why Women Are Watching

Posted by
Amy K. Matsui, Senior Counsel and Director of Women and the Courts
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
| Posted on: October 01, 2012 at 02:43 pm

Today, the Supreme Court heard the first arguments of the 2012-13 Term. A number of cases that the Court will review this Term could have a significant impact on women’s legal rights.

This Term, the Court’s review of affirmative action policies in state university admissions presents a troubling opportunity to turn back the clock, particularly given that Justice O’Connor, a key vote in the Court’s 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in admissions (and its author), has since left the Court. In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the University of Texas’s undergraduate admissions policy, which uses race as one of multiple factors in making admissions decisions, was constitutional under the Supreme Court’s aforementioned 2003 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger.  Affirmative action policies intended to promote not only racial but also gender diversity are particularly necessary in vocational and higher education—for example, by eliminating barriers to women’s entrance into historically male-dominated fields, such as engineering and computer science. The Center submitted an amicus brief in support of the University of Texas, explaining that an educational experience in a diverse community of learners can dispel both race and gender stereotypes, which are often intertwined, and that this diversity is essential to preparing students to succeed as leaders in communities and businesses. Fisher will be argued next Wednesday.

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Tags: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Issues Before the Courts, Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Judges & the Courts | Add new comment

It Shouldn’t Be A Heavy Lift: Pregnant Workers Fairness Act Introduced in Senate

Posted by
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
Liz Watson, Senior Advisor
| Posted on: September 19, 2012 at 01:41 pm

Heather got fired from Wal-Mart for carrying a water bottle.

Natasha was forced onto unpaid leave and then fired because her district manager at Rent-A-Center found out she needed help with occasional heavy lifting on the sales floor.

Sarah* lost her job at a fast food restaurant for taking bathroom and water breaks.

What do all of these women have in common? They were all pregnant.

All they needed were minor adjustments to continue safely working during pregnancy.  They didn’t get these adjustments.  And they all lost their jobs because of it.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would put an end to this absurdity. Senators Bob Casey and Jeanne Shaheen will introduce the bill in the U.S. Senate today. Representative Jerrold Nadler introduced the PWFA in the U.S. House of Representatives in May, and it now has more than 100 co-sponsors. Public health organizations, business organizations, women’s organizations, worker organizations, and religious groups have lined up in support as well.

The PWFA would make it illegal to fire a pregnant employee who requests a reasonable accommodation – such as a water break, bathroom break, or modification of a lifting requirement. Pregnant workers would have the same rights to temporary accommodations on the job that are available to workers with disabilities.

Why do we need this bill? Stories like the ones above sound like they are from the Dark Ages, right? Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 made it illegal to discriminate against pregnant workers, women were expected to quit their jobs when they became pregnant. Back then, pregnancy was widely regarded as a disabling condition.

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Tags: Employment, Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), Senate, Women in the Workplace, Pregnancy, Parenting, and the Workplace, Employment | 4 comments

Reflections on Title IX on Constitution Day

Posted by
Cortelyou Kenney, Fellow
Emily Martin, Vice President and General Counsel
| Posted on: September 17, 2012 at 05:17 pm

Today, Constitution Day, is a moment to take stock of the document that has served as the bedrock of our country for more than 220 years and the importance of constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court for women. This past Supreme Court term was a constitutional blockbuster, dealing with cases from preemption of immigration laws to the right to lie under the First Amendment. Of particular import to women was the decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Most ACA supporters think of the decision in the health care cases as an unmitigated victory for uninsured Americans. However, on a 7-2 basis, the Court found that the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which required states to expand Medicaid coverage to all adults under 133 percent of the poverty level as a condition of continuing to receive Medicaid funding, was unconstitutionally coercive, because a noncomplying state could lose all of its Medicaid funding. A majority of the Court remedied the violation by holding that the federal government could not condition all of a state’s Medicaid funding on the state’s expansion of eligibility, but only the additional Medicaid funding provided by the ACA. Many Supreme Court watchers posit there will be a wave of follow-up litigation to test the limits of other laws that are, like Medicaid, based on Congress’ authority under the Spending Clause to place conditions on federal funding to states.

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Tags: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Supreme Court, Title IX, Education & Title IX, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | Add new comment