As most of us are already keenly aware, women, on average, are worse-off in the workplace than men. For example, full-time working women make an average of 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, and there are many stereotypes and discriminatory activities targeted at female workers. There’s also the glass ceiling effect, the invisible barriers that often prevent women from reaching the highest levels of employment.

While women are already an oppressed group, further layers of disadvantages exist when gender intersects with various other categories. One such intersectional group is pregnant women and mothers.

As such, we find it beneficial, but also long overdue, that Gov. Pat Quinn signed House Bill 8 into law to combat discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace on Aug. 26. The bill says that pregnant women are to receive certain workplace accommodations from their employers upon request. As stated in The Daily Illini, these accommodations include providing sitting areas, avoiding heavy lifting and recovery time post-birth.

While we would like to think that, in this day and age, these accommodations would already be provided without question or problem, that simply hasn’t been the case.

And although these are all reasonable and necessary steps to combating the issues pregnant women face on the job, it is also important that people begin to acknowledge and understand the other stigmas that pregnant women and mothers face in the workplace.

A 2007 article from the American Journal of Sociology contains an in-depth discussion regarding a phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty,” which describes the issues mothers and pregnant women face in the workplace. Shockingly, between mothers and non-mothers under the age of 35, there is a larger pay gap than between men and women, which demonstrates that this truly is an issue. 

The article also indicates a very covert form of discrimination going on in which mothers in the work environment are judged by evaluators to be less competent and less committed to their jobs. In addition, visibly pregnant managers are seen as less authoritative, but warmer, more emotional and more irrational than other female managers.

It seems that, oftentimes, many employers force mothers and pregnant women into having to choose between devotion to their families and commitment to their work, when each inevitably affects the other.

We are in absolute support of this new legislation that protects pregnant women in the workplace for the very reasons discussed above. The issues women face in the workplace are evident and highly problematic, and the issues that specific, intersectional groups of women face in the workplace are sometimes even more problematic. In the future, we hope to see more legislation that protects women from various discriminations in an effort to work toward gender equality.