Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Liz Watson is Senior Advisor to the Education and Employment Team at the National Women’s Law Center. In her work on the Education and Employment Team, Liz uses legislative advocacy, public education and litigation to promote full and fair opportunities for women and girls in employment and job training. She also works on cross-cutting projects at the Center that advance the interests of women and girls. Before coming to the Center, Liz was Executive Director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy where she led public policy initiatives focused on improving policies and programs that address the needs of low-income workers and marginalized girls and young women. Prior to that, she was legislative counsel for Workplace Flexibility 2010 at Georgetown Law, where much of her work focused on developing policy solutions to work-family conflict and its consequences for low-wage workers. She also practiced employment law at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Liz began her career as a Skadden Public Interest Law Fellow, working with low-wage workers and women receiving public benefits in New York City. She served as a law clerk to the Honorable Susan Y. Illston of the Northern District of California. Liz is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and Carleton College.

My Take

Guess Who? Game Sparks Gender Equality Debate

Posted by

Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

Valarie Hogan, Fellow

| Posted on: November 27, 2012 at 02:38 pm

Photo Credit: Hasbro

With Black Friday gone and Cyber Monday continuing to fuel sales, the holiday season is in full swing. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, or Festivus, department stores and online retailers are fighting hard to sell you things you don’t need. Unfortunately, while companies are careful to avoid insensitivity to cultural or religious differences at this time of year, they are less concerned about whether their games and marketing treat girls and boys fairly.

Last week, a 6-year-old girl took Hasbro to task for its dismal representation of women in its “Guess Who?” game. With her mother’s help, the girl wrote a letter to Hasbro (the self-proclaimed “Greatest Name in Games…Anytime, Anywhere, For Everyone!”) complaining about the inequity and asking for it to be fixed:

Dear Hasbro,

My name is R______. I am six years old. I think it's not fair to only have 5 girls in Guess Who and 19 boys. It is not only boys who are important, girls are important too. If grown ups get into thinking that girls are not important they won't give little girls much care.

Also if girls want to be a girl in Guess Who they'll always lose against a boy, and it will be harder for them to win. I am cross about that and if you don't fix it soon, my mum could throw Guess Who out.

Hasbro side-stepped the criticism, responding that the game is based on numerical equation and there are five characteristics for each character to aid in the process of elimination. In response to Hasbro, the little girl’s mum asked why female gender is considered a characteristic, but male gender is not.

Tags: Gender Equality, Marketing, A Women's Agenda | 2 comments

Worse Treatment for Pregnant Workers: It’s Ironic, Don’t You Think?

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: November 26, 2012 at 06:11 pm

Arjun Sethi and NWLC’s recent article on CNN.com describes pregnant workers’ struggles to hold onto their jobs and have healthy pregnancies, after their requests for minor adjustments to their job duties – adjustments they needed to continue safely working during pregnancy – were denied by their employers. These workers had the audacity to ask for permission to: carry a water bottle, have a stool to sit down, avoid lifting heavy objects, and take bathroom breaks.

For those of us who are lucky enough to work in places that routinely accommodate such requests, or where we don’t have to ask to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, it can be hard to imagine what it’s like to be pregnant and get fired for following doctor’s orders to stay hydrated, off our feet or follow a lifting restriction.

But that’s exactly what’s happening to some pregnant workers in physically demanding and nontraditional jobs. All too often, employers are quite willing to provide an accommodation to a worker who is injured on the job or has a disability, but insist on denying an accommodation to a pregnant worker.

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.

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.

Equality Minus 23%

Posted by Liz Watson, Senior Advisor | Posted on: September 12, 2012 at 12:43 pm

We all want girls to grow up believing they can be whatever they want to be. Girls’ empowerment slogans have found their way into pop songs, onto t-shirts and into girls’ hearts. Girls rock! Girls rule! Girl power!

But there’s some data out today that makes all that seem like magical thinking: the new wage gap numbers.

Equality minus 23%. Don’t try putting that on a t-shirt.

The wage gap for women has barely budged in over a decade, according to new data released today. The typical woman working full time, year round is paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to the typical man. This is unchanged from 2002, ten years ago. For women of color, it’s much worse, with the typical African-American woman paid 64 cents and the typical Latina woman paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man.

Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

My Take

Guess Who? Game Sparks Gender Equality Debate

Worse Treatment for Pregnant Workers: It’s Ironic, Don’t You Think?

Back to the Future for Pregnant Workers

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

Equality Minus 23%

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Liz Watson, Senior Advisor

My Take

Guess Who? Game Sparks Gender Equality Debate

Worse Treatment for Pregnant Workers: It’s Ironic, Don’t You Think?

Back to the Future for Pregnant Workers

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

Equality Minus 23%

How You Can Help

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