Learn what pregnancy discrimination is, the legal protections available to employees, the evidence that may support a claim, and important deadlines for taking action.
According to the most recent available federal data, over 60% of pregnant women in the US worked throughout their pregnancies. Aside from having to deal with their sensitive condition, pregnant employees may also face subtle discriminatory acts in the workplace.
Pregnant women who are employed can legally file some legal proceedings regarding discriminatory acts they experienced. The aspect of law that guarantees the implementation of these measures has increased in strength. In the year 2024, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has registered 88,531 discrimination cases. Included in those figures are cases of pregnancy discrimination.
The commission has also taken some employers to court for breach of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act in the termination of pregnant workers. This includes failure to provide accommodations and the use of unapproved punitive attendance control policies that treat pregnancy-related absences as unexcused.
As it is, not everyone’s legal claim will have the potential of becoming a legal action in a court. According to Denver pregnancy discrimination lawyer Diane King, proving pregnancy discrimination is straightforward when the facts support your case and you have the backing of an experienced attorney.
Let’s discuss the exact steps you need to take to file a lawsuit for pregnancy discrimination.
What You Have to Prove
Employees must clarify and provide detailed reasons to substantiate their pregnancy discrimination complaint. These reasons can be termination, demotion, and non-recruitment. The victim must be able to demonstrate that a worker’s pregnancy, childbirth, or some related medical condition was a motivating factor for an employer’s discriminatory actions.
The employer doesn’t have to come out and say something directly about pregnancy. A lot of discrimination cases rely on circumstantial evidence. You look at the timing of the adverse action after the pregnancy announcement to see if your treatment changed. Compare how an employer treats a pregnant worker versus other non-pregnant workers who are in similar circumstances. Track whether the employer keeps changing its story about the reason for the decision. Highlight how an employer’s own written policies say one thing but in practice apply them differently.
Under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, the comparison lies in whether similarly situated non-pregnant employees were treated more favorably. An example would be getting fired for too many absences due to pregnancy-related reasons as opposed to excusing another non-pregnant employee due to non-pregnancy-related medical conditions.
A comparison is not required under the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The employer’s duty to accommodate exists on its own, even without showing how a non-pregnant employee was treated in the same situation.
For more information about these laws and other employment-related policies, visit https://www.canlaslaw.com/
The Deadline That Cannot Be Extended
Before you can file a pregnancy discrimination lawsuit in federal court, you are legally required to file a charge with the EEOC first. A federal Title VII case cannot proceed without an EEOC charge and the resulting right-to-sue letter.
You’ve got 180 calendar days from the most recent act of discrimination to get the charge in. And that timing can stretch to 300 days if your state also has its own employment discrimination agency that handles a similar law. If you fail to meet either of these two time windows, it will be impossible to bring any claim no matter how strong the case’s underlying facts sound.
After the EEOC issues a right-to-sue letter, you have a limited time of 90 days in which to commence an action in court. You cannot make any claims under the umbrella of age discrimination or any other overt discrimination laws after that 90-day period has expired.
A claim can be genuinely strong on the merits and still get thrown out if the deadline was missed. The most common reason that pregnancy discrimination claims fail is when victims wait for a lot of time after the discriminatory event before doing anything.
What Evidence Actually Moves Cases
Evidence that helps pregnancy discrimination claims succeed is usually concrete and up-to-date. What someone recalls six months later often counts way less than what they wrote down, saved, or recorded right when it happened.
Written Communications
Correspondences, texts, appraisals, and other written information have a higher capacity to prove discrimination-related arguments. These documents can be tracked over a specific period and target specific people. These pieces of proof are also hard to disprove. Some examples include communication from a superior who is worried about covering during pregnancy leave, a woman who asks when the employee is expected to be back at work, or a female manager whose competency is negatively evaluated after becoming pregnant. Such records almost always determine the outcome of a given matter.
Temporal Proximity
Courts consistently recognize that timing has a lot of evidentiary weight. A termination that happens two weeks after a pregnancy announcement, a demotion that occurs right after a request for accommodation, or a denial of a promotion that the employee was on a steady path to receive before she disclosed her pregnancy are some examples of adverse actions occurring close in time to the pregnancy-related event. These instances can serve as evidence of a discriminatory motive.
Comparator Evidence
Documentation showing how nonpregnant employees in comparable circumstances were treated adds weight to the comparison that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) calls for. For example, if a male coworker with a medical restriction received modified duties while a pregnant worker who made the same request was placed on unpaid leave, then that kind of comparison counts as material for both a PDA case and a PWFA case.
The Employer’s Shifting Explanation Is Evidence
One of the most consistently useful bits of evidence in pregnancy discrimination cases is when an employer changes its stated reason for the adverse action over time. An explanation may start out one way and then change to something else.
An employer that first tells a pregnant employee her position is being eliminated and then later tells the EEOC that she was terminated for performance reasons has basically made a mess for itself. Courts tend to view these shifting explanations as proof of pretext, which is really an indication the reason they gave is not the real one.
Documenting the reason that is given for any adverse action at the moment it happens matters greatly. If a manager tells an employee, verbally, that she is being let go for business reasons, the employee must immediately send a quick follow-up email asking for written confirmation of that reason. The employer’s response or even their non-response will be part of the record. If the reason changes again later, that mismatch can be used as evidence.
What Compensation Is Available
If the allegation of pregnancy bias is demonstrated beyond doubt, the affected individual has a right to be compensated for the loss of pay and benefits. They should also receive remuneration for the loss of the chance of obtaining a position, particularly when there is no opportunity for reinstatement. Compensatory damages for the corresponding mental anguish will be brought up too. In cases where the discrimination suffered was deliberate and with an intent to hurt, punitive damages apply.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sets out a case-by-case test for the imposition of compensatory and punitive damages against the respondents, which is subject to certain threshold amounts of damages ranging from $50,000 to $300,000 depending on the number of employees. In successful cases, you can recover attorney fees and related costs.
The EEOC has pregnancy discrimination resources that lay out the remedies clearly. There is no standard for the settlement figures since the size, the resources of the two parties, the quality of the evidence, and some other factors can be different.
In the majority of cases, the 2024 and 2025 EEOC settlements for pregnancy discrimination relief ranged from $30,000 to $400,000 for particular cases. Settlements that involved class action cases achieved far greater amounts.
The Case Is Built Before You File It
The viability of a pregnancy discrimination claim depends a lot on how the record looks at the moment the charge is filed. Evidence that wasn’t preserved, deadlines that have already passed, and reasons for adverse action that were never recorded limit the options available before the legal process begins.
Acting promptly after discriminatory conduct, preserving written communications, noting conversations in writing, tracking timing of events in relation to pregnancy disclosure, and getting the EEOC charge filed by the right deadline are some of the ways that can increase the likelihood of success for a claim. Engaging an experienced employment attorney early on gives you someone who can assess the strength of the claim and recommend the best course of action.
