What the ever-loving hell does a company or specific boss have to do to a woman to lose a pregnancy discrimination case? A federal jury
has decided for the pharmaceutical company Merck in this case, Bryce Covert reports:
[Kerry] Colicchio, who had been at the company for 22 years and was a senior director in the company’s global operations excellence department, had claimed that she was told she would be passed over for a promotion to vice president that she sought because she was pregnant and about to take six months of maternity leave. She then says that her boss tried to discourage her from coming back to work by saying that “babies need their mamas.” She claimed that she was harassed when she returned to work and her previous duties were diminished. She was fired in 2007.
The vice president role eventually went to a woman hired from outside the company who Colicchio claimed as less qualified, given that she had an MBA while the new employee had just a bachelor’s. And while the new employee is a mother, the lawsuit claimed that she was hired because she hadn’t taken any maternity leave for her two children.
Merck says it had good reasons to hire someone else and totally didn't discriminate against Colicchio, and a jury bought those excuses. It's worth noting that a judge previously disagreed, saying Merck did discriminate.
As with other kinds of discrimination, employers typically come up with all kinds of claims about women's job performance mysteriously suffering right around the time they get pregnant (or start to organize a union, or whatever other undesirable activity), supposedly justifying firing or discipline. And it's nauseating how often they get away with it.