I am not on Bloomberg's side. Expecting employees to put work above all else is a recipe for misery for all but workaholics, and an ugly manifestation of corporate greed. But putting children above all else is not the answer for everyone either.
Judges lack the power to force employers to facilitate humane work schedules, and in a free market with more workers than jobs, employees lack the leverage to reach company- or industry-wide bargains for a better balance. At least for now, people who choose to have children will have to make trade-offs to pursue their dreams the same way that people without children do. Under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Judge Preska's ruling, pregnancy and related medical conditions are not a part of that trade-off – they should have no different effect than any other medical condition.
If other "work-family" trade-offs continue to fall more heavily on mothers than fathers, they will have a discriminatory effect. The most immediate and attainable palliative is for fathers to step up and mothers to step back. As more fathers take more parental leave the stereotype of women as children's natural caretakers will begin to erode, and if women take less leave, the stereotype that women are not as committed to their work as men are may begin to erode too. Parents who can afford for mom to take non-medical time off with the kids should not wait for the courts or the legislature to solve their childcare challenges. They should tap underutilized in-house talent instead: dads.
Article comments
1 - Tommy Mack
It won’t be long before the GOP grabs ahold of something like this case to go after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in general because the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act is a Carter Administration law. Not only that, the PDA (P.L. 95-555) amends the sex discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a Johnson Administration law for which the Republican Party has demonstrable enmity.
Tommy
2 - Dr Dreadful
Federal law is clear and unequivocal that you cannot discriminate on the grounds of pregnancy. Whether refraining from doing so has the effect of giving pregnant women an unfair advantage is, frankly, irrelevant to this case.
That said, I don't think the judge had much choice, especially since what exactly it was that Bloomberg was supposed to have done is buried in a morass of anecdotes and hearsay.