Hot+Brave
Hosted by birth worker and activist Bianca Sprague from bebo mia Inc (https://bebomia.com/), Hot + Brave is like a hilarious conversation with your feisty friend who doesn’t give a f*ck. Brave stories, business support, hot topics and #truthbombs that will either balm your soul or light fire to your rage.
Hot+Brave
S4 E03 - Fighting for Fairness: Workplace Rights from Pregnancy to Menopause
Join Bianca as she chats with Jack and Catherine, lawyers fighting for working women at all stages of their reproductive life cycle, from pregnancy through menopause. Jack's practice focuses on combating sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, illegal gender pay disparity, sex discrimination, maternity leave matters, unlawful retaliation, and wrongful termination.
Catherine is a lawyer who is also a practicing doula which made this conversation even better because she is in the field seeing what we see.
See Jack's firm here: https://womensrightsny.com/
⭐️ We have some links for you which are mentioned in the episode!! ⭐️
NEW BIRTH DOULA COURSE - www.bebomia.com/birthdoula
Book Club: www.bebomia.com/bookclub
FREE Facebook group for doula business here
FREE Ultimate Ebook all about becoming a doula - get it here!
www.bebomia.com/doulaclub 💥 Get your free access to the Doula Business School in our club membership!
www.bebomia.com/freewebinar Free doula workshop and discount code 👍🏽
www.Instagram.com/bebomiainc Follow for more goodies!
bebomia.com/bizshop/ 😎 Grow your business fast!
www.bebomia.com/shop New Doula swag!!
7 Simple Steps to Double your Client Base 👈🏽 new course alert this week 💥 Use code SEVEN for 75% off
Our links page with lots of goodies bebomia.com/links ❤️
Grab your doula training spot here (heyyy there's payment plans) 📚
How to Pay for Your Doula Training <-- check it out!
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You are listening to the Hot and Brave Podcast with Bianca Sprague from Bebo Mia, where you will hear brave stories, hot topics, and truth bombs that will either light fire to your rage or be the balm you need for your soul.
SPEAKER_02:Hello everyone and welcome back to the Hot and Brave podcast. I am your host Bianca Sprague and I am feeling full of love. Kelly arrived on the weekend and it has been so delightful having her here in Nova Scotia. Cold, sunny, I get to see her every morning. I get to say goodnight to her before I go to bed. It's my favorite. We have lots happening also in our community. Man, I just had such a nice weekend. I'm going to hang out here for a Because it was my birthday last week, as you all know if you listened to my birthday episode. But I had so many people here from all my activities and hobbies. Friends from St. FX, from Derby, powerlifting, dance class. And it was so cool to have such a huge group at my house for my party when I just moved here a year ago. And it made me feel just, you know, really full of love. Although I missed my... my chosen family and some of my friends back home in Ontario. But it was pretty cool to see so many people come out and celebrate me on my day. Anyway, we can we can keep going with what else I had planned. Today is book club. You can join us free if you go to babelmia.com forward slash book club, you can get the free link there. It is also not too late to jump into the website challenge. It is free and you can get access to that if you join us on Strategies and Support for Doulas in Business. It's a Facebook group. It's also free and we will help you get your website converting. So the September challenge is underway. You can watch that video. They're only a few minutes long. They've got your tips for you to make your edits. Post those. Let us know you're participating and you can win swag We're doing a monthly swag draw, so that's really exciting. It's also not too late to jump into our MSP course. That's our Full Spectrum Doula Training. We started last week, but... They're recorded so you can jump in anytime in the next couple weeks. If you are looking for just a birth doula training, you can also grab that. We still have our discount code going and that's also on our website as well as in the show notes. It is a good time to get certified as a doula. Insurance companies cover us in so many of the states. Tricare, Medicaid, Medicare, and you can take care of folks who really, really need your help and love and education and care and support and insurance recognizes how amazing our role is which is just so it's just like such a huge huge movement in our industry and it's so exciting after you know watching for two decades here to see finally finally folks are like wow that's amazing so it is a good time to become a doula Okay, I have been really excited about this interview dropping and it was so good. I had the opportunity a couple weeks ago to chat with Jack Tuckner and Catherine Crider. They are both attorneys and we got to talk all about workplace rights, rights that continued not just in pregnancy, but how hard they're working to get these rights continued on into marriage. menopause that were really covering a longer reproductive life cycle. A little bit about Jack. He is a women's rights in the workplace attorney and a founding partner of his New York based law firm. And he is just championing to have workplace gender rights, which is really exciting for a cishet man to be doing. And he's been doing this for over 20 years. So I just loved his contributions to this conversation. And he's just so passionate about advocating for extending our working rights as women for all stages of a reproductive life cycle so again like the conversation is going to start with pregnancy but he wants to have these protections for us through our stages of perimenopause and menopause and you know needless to say with that comes battling sexual harassment pregnancy discrimination illegal gender pay disparity sex discrimination maternity leave matter unlawful retaliation and wrongful termination so he's just such a wealth of knowledge on all of those topics and he was joined by Catherine and Catherine is awesome because she not only is a lawyer she is also an active birth and postpartum doula which meant this conversation was very robust because she is in the trenches with us so when she's talking about these issues she's seeing all angles of it from from not just the legal, what's happening there, but she's in these hospital rooms, she's in the same spaces in that postpartum period with families in their homes. And so, you know, she's she's oh my God, she's really cool. But she teaches classes and she works on families with families one on one. And so I just adored this conversation. I think it's really important. And we would love to hear your thoughts on it. So after the interview, if you could hit those five stars, if you loved us and leave a review and let us know what your thoughts are around what Jack and Catherine are both championing. All right, y'all. Here's the interview. Catherine and Jack, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm really, really excited to have your expertise and have you really answer some of these burning questions that I personally have about pregnancy discrimination because it's a topic I think there's room for a lot of gaps in knowledge. Thanks so much for having us, Bianca.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Bianca. Pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_02:Excellent. What called you guys to this work? Why did you pick this topic?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's not so much a topic as it was, at least for me. I'm not speaking for Catherine right now because this goes back 25 years. I was, pardon me, I was a public defender in New York City and I had gone to an Anthony Robbins Mastery University in Hawaii to sort of, you know, get in touch with Just to get in touch with... It's a personal development. Anybody knows Anthony Robbins. It was a lengthy course. And during it, I was burning out at that time from the public defender work. This was in the Bronx. It was very challenging, difficult, and debilitating work. But I loved it. Tried a lot of cases, helped a lot of people. But I was asking the universe... what's next for me as a lawyer? Here, I was always, you know, I attended a public interest law school. My intention was always to serve individual human beings, not to be a corporate lawyer, to, you know, again, this sort of tired old response that many first year law students say, what do you want to do? I want to change the world. Well, I actually felt I want to make a difference. It was never really just about, wasn't about making money. And it hasn't been about making money because It's sort of difficult when you're doing that type of challenging work. But the universe answered at that time, this was 1998, said to me, women, if you're looking for the largest minority majority in the United States that is underserved, you don't look no further than half of our gender than the other half. than women. And again, I was personally brought up in a matriarchal household where I'd always, I was a kid, my mother was not able to secure a credit card without my dad's co-signing. This was the world I grew up in. My mother couldn't go to college. This is in the 50s and 60s here in the US. And yet in my family, women were, at least to this oldest of my generation, young little boy, were the ones who deserved the respect, who were making the decisions, who showed the most love and empathy. So I kind of came up with this whole notion of it's always unfair. I never understood it even when I was doing public defender work. Why are women making less than men? Why are women, why do we do what we do in a patriarchal paternalistic society where women are second class? whether it's in terms of- Good
SPEAKER_02:questions. I also wonder this, Jack.
SPEAKER_01:Right? But it's not. And I would say if you're the 50% of the population that's not a woman, presumably you know, like love a woman who you're close to, why wouldn't you want the best for them? It's not a competition. So when it turns out the two children that I have, our daughters, which was what I had wished for and wanted. And my wife and I had decided at the time that we were going to raise daughters in a sort of gender neutral type environment. And this goes back, you know, about 35 years now, where we're going to raise them to say there are no limitations. We're going to buy you Tonka trucks if that's what you want and all of that. This is kind of old news and maybe trite. But I have, so when this shift changed for me in the late 90s, Bianca it became it was it was really an epiphany because no one was doing it let alone here a guy you know a white male now an old white male at the time a middle-aged white male was saying how is this how is this sustainable how is this acceptable unequal pay also known as gender pay disparity pregnancy discrimination was rampant sexual harassment wasn't even yet on the radar screen really into, of course, an endemic situation, but we weren't dealing with it. This is long before the Me Too movement, right? It was acceptable. Again, back to just one last little anecdote, back to my own mom. My mother worked in the 60s when she had to get a job because my dad lost his job at a Jack LaLanne health club in Queens, New York. And she had to wear those little, what she would call those tutus, And stockings that went up and pumps, pumps to sell memberships in Jack LaLanne. And the sexual harassment she used to tell us when I was a child and come home and say, this is what happened. Men touching her, co-workers, potential clients. And there was really nothing that she could do but cry about it and get angry, et cetera. So I just have always had this sense of, I don't get it. I still don't get it. And I think we all need to be a little bit more outraged. You know, listen, when it comes to pregnancy, something I've been saying for 25 years, if men could bear children, we would have a fully paid FMLA for 18 months, right? And when I say this to juries, when I'm trying pregnancy cases, everybody laughs during voir dire when I say this line, everybody laughs. Why are they laughing? They're laughing because they know that it's true. And it's kind of one of those gallows humor thing. Yeah, if men could bear children, if men could get pregnant, and just like if men went through andropause, the way that women go through perimenopause and menopause with the same level of severe symptoms at times, we would have far more accommodations and awareness. It wouldn't be so taboo. Like everything is in our world from menses, from the onset of menses, Through menopause, everything is taboo, right? We look at it as like an icky, private topic that shall not be mentioned in a workplace, publicly. So that's why lately when, who are the movie stars or the rock, who is it? I don't remember. Rihanna or, who is it?
SPEAKER_02:Halle Berry.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, talking about
SPEAKER_02:menopause.
SPEAKER_01:And someone else who was the actress who was in... who was the kid who was in Last Encounters, not for the Spielberg movie, and now she's grown up, and was having a hot flash on national television and talking about it. And that was like newsworthy. She's talking about it here. Well, we think this all needs to be... I'm talking now particularly about menopause. Pregnancy is a lot farther along in protections that women do have, even if many companies still don't know it. So... I'm just going on and on now. Perhaps you have... No, I
SPEAKER_02:love this. I think it's great. And thank you for noticing how shitty it is to be a woman in many ways on this planet due to the patriarchy. It means a lot. We need more men feeling outraged about it for change to happen. And I think that's incredible. And I love that, Catherine, not only do you have this legal entry point, but you're also a birth worker. So I want to give a huge Shout out to the fact that you're in this space of reproductive health and justice on so many levels.
SPEAKER_03:Thanks, Bianca. Yeah, that's actually, so before I was working for Jack, I was actually doing birth work. So it's been interesting to see how you can combine both. And I do want to encourage, because I think there aren't enough doulas who have other careers, like that it is possible to do a part-time birth load and also do things that you're passionate about if you're interested in policy or something like that. And so I do want to encourage other doulas to think about things like that.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. Yeah, that's amazing. And we do need more doulas who understand both sides. So I think it's just such a gift that you can walk to both sides of the aisle as far as when you're looking at the laws and the policy, which is great. Actually, clients, they were... they had two babies and they were both lawyers. And at the end of it, they were like, this was some bullshit and they're queer. And, and they moved the policies of they birthed in Toronto and they single handedly changed the face of both. They added three parent birth certificates. There's no more adoption for queer families. So you can just write who you want on the birth certificate in Ontario. Like they just, as they went through the system, they were like, Nope, Nope, Nope. And they released sign. Ruby's bill and it was it was history making and so it was cool because they were you know got to see see the whole range of it okay
SPEAKER_01:so
SPEAKER_02:oh yeah sorry Jack
SPEAKER_01:I was just going to say the fact that we're still fighting and talking about these things as if is this this isn't just built in this should be the way an equitable civilized culture should should operate and you know what just like I think you were saying about you know acknowledgement Chris Rock the comedian that has, there was a bit a few years ago, which I heard again recently when he was in concert in New York. And he said something to the effect, I'm gonna mangle it and I'm not Chris Rock, but something to the effect was that there isn't a white male in the room that would trade places with him and he's rich, right? And make the point, there's a one-legged white bus boy in here who would say, you know what, no, no, I'm not trading with, you know, I'm gonna ride this white thing out. The room erupted in laughter. Why? Because again, we all know it's true. It's the same thing with men and with women. Most men wouldn't choose to trade places and be female. And we need to change that. I said that since we were raising my daughters. I don't want them to feel like it would have been easier for me. It would have been better if I had been born male, right? I would have. Anyway, that's
SPEAKER_02:possibly
SPEAKER_01:a trite aside. Yeah. No,
SPEAKER_02:it's great. PSA, stop raping and murdering us and pay us equal pay. It'd be real swell. Although I don't know what I would watch seeing as I watch true crime almost exclusively. I'd have to find a new genre of television if we were safe on out in our communities. Okay. Thanks for some gallows, you or Jack. I enjoy it a lot. Okay. So looking at the concept of pregnancy discrimination, could you guys elaborate on, you What does that entail? What does that umbrella cover? So I'll pass this off to
SPEAKER_03:Jack, but I did want to make a caveat to all the listeners that there are many different types of pregnancy discrimination. And the work that Jack and I are going to talk about specifically today involves the employment side. But in your work as a doula, you're going to see a variety of types of pregnancy discrimination and not just as doulas, as lactation coordinators, as nurses, as anyone who works with pregnant individuals. So know that there are legislations and policies and other things you should be aware of. If something doesn't pass the smell test to you, it's a good idea to reach out and find out. Much like you were talking about, Bianca, with your clients who had issues with the birth certificates, that is a type of pregnancy discrimination and something you want to look into. But we're going to focus on the employment side today because that's There's so much we could talk about for days on end if we just talked about discrimination as a whole.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah,
SPEAKER_03:awesome. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Well, so when it comes to employment, and this is when we're talking about economic lifelines, again, one should be able to maintain gainful employment, your career, your profession, your job, and also bring a baby to term successfully, healthily, and then get back to your work no worse for wear. That's the struggle, has been the struggle since forever because pregnant women do find themselves in a sort of a debilitated state vis-a-vis work where the terms and the conditions of their employment often do change or do become degraded and they do lose their jobs for all kinds of reasons, but it's related to pregnancy. So if it is related to your gestational status from the moment of conception and you notify your employer, here's the first pro tip. When you're pregnant, and of course I rely on both of you to correct me if I'm wrong, but most OBGYNs, doulas that I know and in my own experience, Women are told, you may not want to notify the world of your pregnancy until on or about the end of your first trimester. Does that make sense? Is that a true statement? And the reason in my experience, when we did announce, my wife and I, that my wife was pregnant at a wedding many years ago, and then she lost that baby through a normal early miscarriage, it was a difficult thing to have to start telling people 300 people and everybody they told, and it was painful. So one waits until, if that's still medically correct, the birth is as stable as one can. And typically, when it comes to work, before you're showing, because if you work in person, you don't want to show up, have everybody know you're pregnant, you haven't told your employer yet, and here's why. Being pregnant itself now is a protected status, as well it should be. Obviously, it's only for the most part in the main. We're talking cisgender women are pregnant, getting pregnant. So any type of poor treatment or change in employment status due to pregnancy is discriminatory and is illegal. So when you are ready to announce it to your parents and to the world, we recommend sending a friendly email to your company's HR person or whichever benefits or in a smaller company, even just the president saying, here's the happy news. And I'm just trying, we're trying to, I would like to find out what this company's maternity leave policies are, but I'm letting you know. And so even though really it's just saying, thank you, the happy news and what are the policies and et cetera, you want to put that in writing so that you have that sort of date stamp in case things go south. And they often do because to companies, your pregnancy is not a blessed event. It's basically a profit draw. I mean, loss. It is difficult. They know that now they're going to, your company needs to be flexible with you during your nine month cycle gestation. And they're going to have to give you time to recover now postpartum for your maternity leave to recover from childbirth, whether a vaginal or cesarean section delivery and to bond with your baby. And they can't obviously get rid of you and replace you during that time either. So companies resent that because they are profits over people based in the main. So that's the first thing you need to know is that you're protected that, and this is only now under federal law since last June 27th, 2023, we now all have in these United States, in every state, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. That's a federal law. And the only limitations to this law is if you work for an employer with less than 15 employees, one five, not to be confused with the 50 employees necessary for the FMLA, which we'll get into. But if your company has at least 15 employees, you're covered. You're covered as a woman based on sex discrimination. You're covered from pregnancy discrimination. You're covered under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and all of the new lactation laws that have now also, as of last year, protected 9 million more women, mostly lower income, who need to express milk in the workplace. And there are very few exclusions to that law. So there's a lot of protection that women need to understand that just because your boss or your manager is making a snide comment, for example, which is illegal. So if anything happens to you, statements made, adverse employment actions that are hurting you, even if they're opportunities lost because of pregnancy, it's illegal. It's illegal sex discrimination, it's illegal pregnancy discrimination, and it's also often illegal disability discrimination because pregnancy itself is now, while not considered a disability, the status is a protected status simply because you're pregnant. That's taken 20 years for us to obtain on a federal level. We've had this in New York City for 10 years already. But this is huge news. It hasn't caught up with all of corporate America yet, which is why everyone themselves needs to know for themselves and loved ones, family members, that pregnancy is protected. And we wouldn't have to go through, one shouldn't have to go through anymore what Ms. Peggy Young had to go through. I don't know if anyone, Peggy Young worked for the United Parcel Service a few years ago. And when she became pregnant, she had a high risk pregnancy. Her OBGYN said she can't lift more than 10 pounds for six months. She was an air driver, meaning she delivered packages, even though they were mostly the lighter ones. Very occasionally, she had a heavier package she would have needed help with. And UPS said, we're not doing it. We're not accommodating. Pregnancy is not a disability itself. And even though we accommodate We're employees who lose their licenses through DWI convictions, by the way, and who can't drive. We let them work in an office, and we let people who are injured on the job work in an office. But for you, when you're pregnant, because you're a woman, in effect, and because it was elective, so to speak, sorry, no soup for you, sister. And she had to leave their employee and lost her health insurance. And that was a very common occurrence. the supreme court of the united states in 2015 bianca with a court that would no longer our current court would no longer have found for peggy young but this court by a five to four decision found that yes the pregnancy discrimination act should have protected we're going to reinterpret it we're going to reinterpret some of the ambiguous language to now say if a company provides reasonable accommodations to workers for other reasons, you can't exclude accommodations for pregnancy. And that was a huge change which led to the enactment of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act eight years later, finally. So this is very big news for essentially everyone who is planning on or is pregnant right now in the United States to understand because Listen, I know I tend to just rattle on. So did you want to ask me something? Cause I could just, should I stop? I
SPEAKER_02:think it's, No, it's great. Well, it's great content. And so, you know, I want to pull out some of these pro tips is one, if you have an employer with more than 15 folks, make sure you do tell them by email, put it in writing timestamp. So, you know, encouraging your clients that they might not want to tell their community for reasons of dealing, you know, coping with potential loss. But to definitely use a different set of rules as far as your employer and get that information in. Now, I do have some questions. You said that these things are illegal, but if you do have somebody that might be, say, pulling projects from you or icing you out slowly, not putting you in a seat that you might have had, what are the repercussions that pregnant folks have if they are running into these barriers themselves? How do you prove it and how long does that process take? Do they lose their income in the interim? How well is this act protecting us as it plays out in reality?
SPEAKER_03:Well, one thing to know is that when you tell your employer that you're going to need accommodations, because let's say, you know, your pregnancy is high risk, or maybe your doctor has advised that you're going to need bed rest or something like that. It is like a collaborative process. So I do want another pro tip for the listeners is you can't just make unilateral decisions that you're going to add more breaks to your day, or you're going to change your uniform to something that hasn't been approved by your employer or something like that. You do need to start the process by going to your employer, letting them know that you're pregnant, that you need an accommodation as a result of this for some reason, and then begin a collaborative process. Because where people will run into problems, particularly with the court system, is when you've made a unilateral decision on on your own to change something. And the employer can point to that as a reason for why you needed to be let go or why the situation needed to change. So that's pro tip number two for any listeners. Don't make unilateral decisions. Start a collaborative process. At least start from a place of your employer's going to want to work with you. That's a good place to start is don't start from this is going to be an adversarial process. Start from we want to work together to get to a good place.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. Thanks for that, Catherine.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So that process actually has a name in the law, and it's called the interactive process, which is pretty much what Catherine just said. But it is something that the employer does. needs to establish with the employee who is requesting some flexibility with respect to pregnancy. So in other words, the interactive process, and then it leads to what's known as a reasonable accommodation analysis. So for example, it doesn't matter whether it's just the so-called natural limitations of pregnancy, which used to not matter unless you had a pregnancy-related medical condition, you would not have covered because the notion was, well, pregnancy again, do that on your own time and everybody gets pregnant, then it's not our problem. But it is your employer's problem now because now the natural limitations of pregnancy, morning sickness, more frequent trips to the laboratory when you're working and when you're a little further along, orthopedic issues, OBGYN appointments, all of the things that might slow someone down, make someone need a little, maybe I can't commute in the middle of rush hour, I need a slight adjustment. The employer is obligated to make that adjustment after you engage with them in what Catherine mentioned was this process. Unless the employer can prove, certainly just allege, that they can't do it because it would be such an undue hardship on the business. But that's a high standard. It's a
SPEAKER_02:high threshold.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. They can't just say, nah, it's annoying to us. They have to say, no, no, we can't. We have a non-sex-based reason why we really can't do this. It would be too much. We wouldn't stay in business. So if you work for a so-called mom-and-pop shop, Which, by the way, you mentioned, and I'll just parenthetically say this, if you work for 15 employees, that's the threshold for this, but what happens if you work for a smaller employer?
SPEAKER_02:That was my next question. So,
SPEAKER_01:for example, in certain states, like in New York State, you could be the only employee, and you're covered under New York's anti-discrimination statutes, which are pretty good and protect pregnant women from discriminatory treatment. One employee. And New York City... has four employees, although it's meaningless because New York City, for the New York City version of the laws, but New York State encompasses New York City and it's one employee. Many other states have eight employee thresholds, six, 12, some states are 15. Catherine, how many are in California? Do you know the California state threshold?
SPEAKER_03:It's low. I know that. I don't know the exact amount
SPEAKER_01:though. So one just has to check, simple Googling this. And in Connecticut, where I'm also a lawyer, I'm a lawyer in Connecticut, New York. We also help people in other states because much of the time we don't have to actually go to court to help someone. But in Connecticut, where I'm a lawyer, it's for employees. So you're not out of the box entirely if your employer is smaller. So that's just important to know. Yeah, great. And was I answering another question? Yeah, but
SPEAKER_02:the process, like if we do run into an issue where there's been a violation of that protection, you know, because I know that can people being unfamiliar with what the steps are, kind of what to expect can cause people to shy away from making those claims.
SPEAKER_01:Well, here's the thing. One does have to step up a bit and not just wait, you know, or as to quote Blanche Dubois from Streetcar Named Desire, if that was the play, Tennessee Williams, you know, relying on the kindness of strangers, you know, you have to be proactive. So first of all, it starts with the notification of pregnancy. If you notify your employer that you're pregnant, they go, Mazel Tov, that's great. You know what you're having? You have names set up, blah, blah, blah. We have a great policy. We have full paid leave, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Great. And if things go smoothly throughout, let's say you have a a relatively easy pregnancy. And let's say you can work remotely. All the pieces fall into place. Terrific. You go out, everything can and sometimes does run smoothly. And there are companies that do it correctly. But if after you notify your company that you're pregnant, things change, even if it seems to be somewhat subtle to you, you mentioned Bianca, they might be managing you out quietly, right? You're suddenly not promoted or you're not interviewed for something or things just the one way or another, they are excluding you because they're thinking to themselves, you know what? And I, we hear, we hear defendant employers say this, she's going to be, she's pregnant. She's going to be slowing down. She's going to be out. Who knows whether she'll be in return from attorney leave. Many women don't blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_04:So
SPEAKER_01:there's a marginalization that can come into play before it takes on a life of its own. And they have now, let's say, put you on a performance improvement plan, which is already shows you're kind of too late. You want to nip it in the bud by putting it in writing your concerns. If your concerns, if you're saying to your employer, to your HR designated person, listen, I just notified my boss that I was pregnant. And again, you're going to put this in writing. a month ago, and now these several things have happened, which are really concerning to me. And it feels a little bit, I'm afraid, like pregnancy discrimination. Even if you don't say those words, your notifications are called, is known as protected activity. It is something that your employer knows. Anyone who's taken HR 101 knows that when a woman, when anybody says, I feel I'm being treated differently, because of X, Y, and Z, but in this case, because of my pregnancy. That is a protected invocation. The company must investigate that. That is a sex discriminatory complaint. And again, obviously sex discrimination embodies pregnancy discrimination. Pregnancy and sex discrimination often embody, encompass disability discrimination because ultimately that's what it comes down to. Women are being held to account for a perceived lessening of utility for the notion that now that they're going through what they're going through and have certain changes that make them more difficult, they can't go out and wine and dine with clients anymore, they might not be able to fly as much and they're going to be slowing down toward being out down for the count for three months. You may find as many women do that, you are being managed out the door. Often pregnancy, family values, despite the talk of our culture, they don't jive. Corporate profit-based centers and your pregnancy is not something that the employer is happy about. I mean, we know this from ourselves at our firm. We have an associate who's had two babies on our watch and we still, we pay for her maternity leave, we're excited for her when it happens, It's a pain, right? You still have to deal with the fact that she'll be out. The doula
SPEAKER_02:world is very pregnancy. And so when I had an agency, I was like, you're a great doula and I'm happy for your pregnancy. What are we going to do for those seven months that you're not there or a year or two years?
SPEAKER_01:Many companies that still have an extreme, you know, patriarchal slant and are really run by, you know, alpha men who really care mostly about profit and don't really care about your reproductive rights. You know, what's interesting about reproductive rights is on the one hand, here we are at a national level going back 50 years, right? And eradicating women's right to choose what they do with their body. And on the flip side in our work, you have women who are choosing to get pregnant. And from the same right to life factions, they get zero support. Because it's like, have a baby on your own time, don't have a baby on your own time. It's like the same thing with, we love, the fetus is a human, And we want that fetus to come out no matter what, whether you were raped at 12, we don't care. But once the baby is born, you're on your own, sister. And so is your baby, right? So is your child. So that duality is always, it's enraging, right? And that's what has always gone on and what is still going on in corporate America. The tool for this firefight, which is awesome, is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. And I have one more perhaps illustrative anecdote. What we used to see all the time is women would be working for a company. They would let the company know they're pregnant. The HR person would bring that woman down and say, listen, remind me again when your due date is. And she'd say, well, February 2nd. And the HR person would say, hmm, that's interesting and maybe a little troubling because when your baby is born, if your due date is correct, you will only have worked here for 10 months. And the employee says, and what was your point? And she says, well, the Family and Medical Leave Act is the law that allows you to take 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, but you don't qualify because that law requires 50, five zero employees, which either we don't have, or as another rule to the, another element of the law, you have to have worked for us, even if we have 50 employees, For 12 full months, which is true, before your water breaks, before your baby's induced, before your baby is born, you had to have one full year under your belt. And this woman in a case that, by the way, we used extensively because this was one of the first, this was a woman who was lured away from her prior employer to work at this company based in Connecticut, a national company. She was a six-figure employee. And then they told her, Sorry, and listen, this isn't our problem. You can Google that. Write to your congressperson. This is not our fault. You write, there's no FMLA. How many days of accrued vacation do you have? And she said, I don't know. I've been here 10, you're the HR person. How many days do I have? And the HR person said, you have four days. Thank you for asking. You have four days. So are you going to be able to have a baby and get back to work in four days? And of course the answer is, don't be silly. So what was the answer for her? Just go out, have your baby, good luck. We'll send your flowers, blah, blah, blah. When you're ready to come back to work, give us a shout. And if we have a job opening, we'll be happy to have you back. That happened all the time. It is illegal because even though what the company was stating about the FMLA was true, 50 employees, 12 months on the job for unpaid leave, and we're still the only country in the industrialized world that doesn't have paid leave, parental leave available, right? Totally. It was true. It's still a why in that it's sex discrimination. If the same woman broke her leg in a skiing accident or had a heart attack or anything or had COVID for a month, they couldn't fire her and say, you didn't work here a full year. It would be disability discrimination. So how is it not disability discrimination? Postpartum, when even insurance carriers, nobody's friend, they don't give away money for nothing, insurance companies consider vaginal deliveries to be, you're disabled for six weeks minimally, and C-sections eight weeks minimally to recover from surgery. So you're disabled postpartum. And of course, that company in that first case eventually settled with our client. And it kept happening and kept happening. And now awareness has been raised sufficiently, especially with the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. That happens much less often. But we still find that HR people are confused or at least say they're confused because if the FMLA doesn't cover, unless you work in a state like New York where we have a paid family leave law, What are you relying on? So companies use smoke and mirrors at all the times to gaslight pregnant women into, you know, resigning and into giving up hope and into self-exile. And that is, by the way, there's a great book out there I just want to recommend to your listeners called Black Box by Chelsea Glasson. I was honored to write the foreword for this book that's available anywhere you can buy these books. But Chelsea Glasson is a hero to me. And I consulted with her early on in her struggles, her pregnancy discrimination issues with Google. And I've represented a lot of tech workers in these big tech companies, pregnancy cases, where women who are pregnant lose their jobs because of these companies' algorithms. Because when you're not only just because of direct intentional pregnancy discrimination, but because these companies use algorithms in terms of productivity. And if while you're pregnant, you've had more time that you were entitled to take off, you might not be from your pregnancy until you came back, come back from maternity leave. You might not have been as productive as you would have been where you're not pregnant. So there's many things to look out for, but the key thing is the paper trail. is keeping a running, even if you have a conversation with HR, your boss, about whatever you're talking about that you need. I'm not saying you're setting them up to sue them. You're not. You're protecting yourself by having these discussions, as Catherine said, the interactive process. What do you need to not lose any of your momentum at work and to also have a healthy pregnancy and baby and then get back to work at the same position or equivalent position that you left for your maternity leave that's what
SPEAKER_02:issues sorry jack what issues do you um just if somebody has to actually report some of the concerns let's say they've they've announced their pregnancy they've run into some issues but the very person they're having the issues with would be the person that you'd be reporting to um And, you know, is there is there somewhere else that people can get kind of like an ombuds support or with the, you know, if they're like I've noticed that this has been happening to not have a really stressful work environment, once you've kind of started naming pregnancy discrimination.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I don't know about an ombudsman, and you can always go outside. You can go to an outside lawyer or an outside agency, but by then you've escalated it typically in a way that you should exhaust the internal before you do that. Or you can certainly consult with lawyers like Catherine and I, who will give you some other specific tips for your situation that are maybe customized for what's really going on for you. But to answer the question, what about if the perpetrator of the discrimination is the person you would report to? I mean, typically that happens in a smaller company where perhaps the CEO is the discriminator and there's like nobody else to go to. And even if the CEO is the discriminator, there may be, there's typically an HR person. It really doesn't matter whether it's the CFO, the COO, the CEO, the executive director, the president, or the HR person. You need that paper trail. of protected complaints where you're not just whining about, you know, the treatment, you're calling it what it is. This has only happened to me since I notified the company that I'm with child.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Or since I needed extra time to go for my, you know, sonograms or amniocentesis or whatever it was or is. You just want to make sure you document them. Why for all of this is because here's the idea. There's no silver bullet for it. If we just want people to avoid, you know, just like going slinking, going downhill, downhill emotionally and physically and mentally, and then lose their job. And it was sort of too late and they haven't documented anything. They don't really have legal leverage. Many times if the so-called marriage can't be saved because of your pregnancy and you work in a hostile work environment because of your pregnancies and your protected needs for life, flexibility,
SPEAKER_04:then
SPEAKER_01:by complaining that opens the door. If you don't want to stay there and the company clearly doesn't want you there to commanding a severance package. That's kind of what makes the world go around. How do you get paid to leave their employee? How do you get a divorce settlement?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. I have a tricky question only because we have a very big following within the surrogacy community. So my question is, In the US, you get paid to be a surrogate. In Canada, you don't. And that's a whole other topic I could talk about. It's crazy. I
SPEAKER_03:just want to throw out there that- I
SPEAKER_02:can't even.
SPEAKER_03:Mad respect to the surrogates in Canada because that is a huge undertaking to take on.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's bonkers. So leaving the commodification of uteruses to the side, what happens here when technically you might have a conflict between two employment contracts?
SPEAKER_03:So it's interesting that in the United States, the surrogacy is still an area that I think a lot more law is going to come out around because it's becoming more and more popular. It's becoming more and more discussed. But the big thing to think about is if you're the surrogate yourself, you are a pregnant person. And so therefore you are entitled to all the pregnancy benefits. right acts that Jack has been describing today. So whether you choose to keep that child or not does not matter. However you want to view that, you're still going through pregnancy. So that means that you are still entitled to all the rights, not only during pregnancy, but in this postpartum. I know that you're not going to be bonding with the child, but you're still entitled to the time to heal from either a vaginal birth or a C-section. And honestly, you don't even have to tell your employer whether you're keeping that child or not. That's your own private information. All you have to reveal to them is that you are pregnant and you are entitled to certain rights as a Now, on the flip side, it becomes a bit more interesting when it in regards to the surrogate parents, right? Because that's an area where you're going to have to have a lot more detailed conversations with your HR department. And this also kind of goes into adoptive parents, right? People who are taking on a baby where there wasn't necessarily a pregnancy period in advance. And different companies are going to have different policies around that. There's going to be different state laws, things of that nature you're going to need to navigate. There is going to be a degree, how long were you at that company, how, you know, Nice is the HR package you're going to be offered. So those are conversations you are going to want to have in advance. Just as Jack mentioned earlier, that sometimes, you know, you don't want to tell people that you're having a baby in that first trimester because things are most likely to happen in that trimester. Some people don't want to talk about surrogates babies or adopted babies until right around when it happens. Or in some cases for adopted babies, you might not know. until right before it happens. You might get that call at very last moment, but it is important to like start having those conversations with HR. Even if you're not saying I'm definitely going to have a baby on X date that is joining my family because you do want to start that paper trail. You do want to start that understanding of what are, what is my company going to do for me so that we can start those conversations. So that, that from a side, some things you should keep in mind. That's great
SPEAKER_02:advice. It's funny to hear when I support surrogates that even when they're negotiating appointments and stuff, there's way less give and take versus when the pregnant people are also the intended parents and so I when I work with my surrogates when I'm even talking about like how's your appointment it's always brought up as like their employer wants to know further in advance when they change they get exasperated when they have to wait so long for doctor's appointments because it's perceived as kind of like a double dipping like you're even though in Canada you do not get paid that it's very much a factor in the even just like preparation that is not the case when it's people when you're like sorry I'm still at the OB they're three hours behind your employers are like oh I know that's the worst and then with with my surrogates they're like um we're gonna need your testing schedule ahead of time like it would be great if you could have a better window better understanding and it's very different how they're treated in my experience
SPEAKER_01:by by whom though by which employer
SPEAKER_02:by their paid employer like so if you work at a bank. It's the bank is gets, they're not as cute and accommodating for your appointments because they don't see it as your baby. They see it as this, like, it's more of a bother. They're already bothered by your pregnancy, but it's even more irritating that this is perceived as like another compensated revenue stream.
SPEAKER_01:Well, As Catherine said, I mean, pregnancies, pregnancies, you'd be entitled to those accommodations. Listen, adoption, the adoption of a baby is covered by the FMLA and the New York Paid Family Leave Law as one's own natural childbirth would be. I think maybe, and I've never actually confronted this situation yet, if a surrogate were being paid and then also had her day job and the day job was just saying, well, you actually have another job on our time,
SPEAKER_04:I
SPEAKER_01:don't know how that gets played out. And I don't know what surrogates are earning here. But if you're expected to do that, as you said, and they're saying, well, you are double dipping, you have another part-time job, even though it's a unique one. And so we might not be that accommodating toward you just because who said you could have another job on our time, on our dime, right? Does that make sense? I've never-
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's
SPEAKER_01:my question.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. There's more law that's going to need to, I think, evolve around that. For right now, I would definitely, at least in the United States, probably minimize the fact that it was a surrogacy and focus on the fact that you're pregnant. Because the HR departments, your boss is going to know that pregnancy carries certain protections. That's
SPEAKER_04:right.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So, and it's not, honestly, it's not really their business what happens to the child after it's born.
SPEAKER_02:None of their
SPEAKER_04:business.
SPEAKER_02:And it's legally, the piece of surrogacy, I mean, again, I could talk about this forever, is that they have to turn over parentage. And so that's why we do see abandonment of like when babies have disabilities or the parents change their mind. The surrogate actually is... the parent in those situations. So until you know that you've actually signed over that parentage, it is your baby as far as your legal rights. I mean, and that is changing again in states and provinces as we're catching up with the modern family, for lack of a better term. I
SPEAKER_01:mean, it would also seem to me it's none of their business whether it's a surrogacy or your pregnancy. You're pregnant, you're carrying, I don't know that it's their business. And by the way, if you're going to terminate the pregnancy, you know, abortion is a pregnancy related medical condition that's also covered on the laws. So I'm just saying, I don't think it would change at all. Pregnancy is pregnancy and it's entitled to accommodation from the day job. I don't know that it's necessary that you have to get into the particulars of whether you're keeping the baby or not. Seems to me too much information.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay, great. Okay, I do want to hear because you guys are doing very cool work in around perimenopause. So just to wrap up this, the pregnancy discrimination as an umbrella, what is each of your rapid fire favorite pro tip you'd want to pass on so that folks could, you know, continue to protect their clients?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I would just say, as I've said this to many OBGYNs, by the way, back in the day, I used to, I would communicate with OBGYNs in New York. I had a mailing list because they would call, their patients, clients would come in and say, everything is going, I'm feeling great, except work, that's so messed up. I got to tell you what's going on at work. So OBGYNs were the ones referring, just like doulas and nurses might be the ones to first hear from a woman that they're physically feeling okay, or what have you, but their work situation is problematic. Rapid fire, document, document, document. Just make sure to document from start to finish your pregnancy and any challenges that arise. You want the employer to be on actual notice. That's sort of a legal term. They need to be notified and you need to be able to prove that they were notified of what's going on without being, you know, you don't need to overdo it. You just want that paper trail. This way, if things... go south and you end up calling lawyers like us to say, I just suffered pregnancy discrimination and I got fired or I'm getting fired or I'm on a performance improvement plan. A lawyer then like a women's rights in the workplace lawyer has much more to work with to get you a certain measure of workplace justice in the form of US currency.
SPEAKER_02:That's amazing. Um, Catherine, before I hear yours, I do find it interesting how just even like the wrap up part of people who with their package, they almost have to do the three months of work before they leave. Cause I would say that I was reflecting as you said that. And I was like, oh yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest complaints all my clients have is they're like, yeah, I feel okay. My mother-in-law has a pain and like, I'm so stressed about work because they're trying to get the projects done or get them like so handed off that like a baby could do it for the team, which means they're essentially doing that labor on top of it. So that was a good reminder. Catherine,
SPEAKER_03:what's your favorite
SPEAKER_02:pro tip?
SPEAKER_03:So my pro tip is going to go out to all the experts who work with the pregnant people. And that is that you need to ask your clients how things are going with work. Because a lot of times we focus so much on, did you talk to your doctor? Like, are you getting enough sleep? Things like that. We don't ask like, are you excited to go back to work? Are you scared leaving work? Like find out about that. That's a huge part of your client's life. And we do a disservice when we don't ask about it. And we all have resource books where we keep track of our favorite chiropractors, acupuncturists, all that. Include your favorite lawyers. I know that sounds crazy, but there's going to be a lot of times when things happen, whether during the birth or the postpartum. And this goes for anyone who works with someone who has a child where they need legal representation, even if it's just someone to send a letter. They don't necessarily, a lot of times, Jack and I don't want to take things to trial. We want things to settle. But just having someone who you can say, hey, I know this great person who can help you write a letter to so-and-so and help navigate this process along. So add that to your resource book.
SPEAKER_02:Awesome. I hope you guys are added on our resource directory. If you're not. We'll do that right after this podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, we'll do. Thank you. I also just want to say, you know, it's always best, like Chelsea Glasson, who I mentioned, who not only did a great service for herself, but to the world at large, because she wrote, she settled against Google. She beat Google and did not have to sign an NDA. So she's been able to speak about everything they did to her. And the book is an eloquent, if anybody is going through or anticipating pregnancy, read this book. It's really empowering. It's called Black Box by Chelsea Glasser. She reached out to me years ago for assistance as a lawyer. And at the time, not at the time, even still, she was an employee in the state of Washington. So we recommended that she goes to find someone in that state because unless it's a situation where I'm just giving advice, which I could do to anybody, in any state, or I'm helping someone leave their employer, which is called an exit strategy, we call them that, where we are negotiating with the employer's lawyer to get our client out with the best severance package. If you're going to go to court, you really want to find a lawyer in your city or state. And the National Employment Lawyers Association, NELA, based in San Francisco, is who you should call if you're looking for an employee rights lawyer in your particular jurisdiction.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, amazing. Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_01:You're
SPEAKER_02:welcome. In our last few minutes here, you guys are doing really cool work around, you know, extending these rights and protections into that perimenopause menopause phase, which I love because I'm in it. So tell us about what that looks like and what made you champion this part to extend these protections.
SPEAKER_01:Katherine, do you want to take this first? Do you want me to?
SPEAKER_03:Sure. So Jack has done a great job in his career of helping to push pregnancy legislation along. But unfortunately, Menopause isn't quite as far along in the United States. And so it's interesting because there are protections that exist for it already. They're just not actually named for menopause yet. And there's also, there's additional protections that need to get wrapped in, right? We're seeing this all the time as people who work in the pregnancy world. It's no longer, you know, as many 20s and 30 year olds that we're working with. We're working with a lot more people who are in their late 30s, early 40s with the advances with IVF and egg freezing. We're seeing a lot more older parents. So the reproductive life cycle is extending longer and we need to make sure that people are protected during the entirety of it. So while you still have your uterus, if you no longer have your uterus, whatever it might look like. So what we're really trying to do is work with the legislation that currently already exists um and also encourage it to press a little bit more forward um because we are behind in america other countries who have greater protections for menopause so jack i don't know if you want to follow
SPEAKER_01:oh that was great catherine it's just you know bianca and after last year's pregnant workers fairness
SPEAKER_03:act
SPEAKER_01:we started thinking, well, why is there not a Menopause Workers' Fairness Act? It's the same issues. Perimenopause and menopause are pregnancy-related medical conditions along the reproductive life cycle. It's just another natural biological bookend to women's reproductive life cycle. They have menses, they have pregnancy. And perimenopause and menopause happens, unlike pregnancy, to all women who live long enough, right? Not all women have debilitating symptoms to a certain degree. Many women do, but some do not and say, why would I? It's nobody's business. And if it's nobody's business and you're doing fine with it, fine. But when you're seeing cases like we do, where women are being managed out because certain symptoms that they weren't even aware of. And many physicians are still not aware. They will treat it with psychotropic meds and say, right, it's psychosomatic, or you're having anxiety. They don't understand that insomnia, for example. And again, the North, hot flashes, right? All of the common symptoms- They're so fun. Ruling- right, are natural related to this cessation, right, through the perimenopause, which can last up to a decade into menopause, I believe the definition, right, 12 months without, you know, a period, then you're in the menopause, right, and then all postmenopause. Those symptoms, for example, insomnia, insomnia is a major life activity, so-called, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. If you have peri or menopause-related insomnia, you are already protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act and entitled to an interactive process, a reasonable accommodation with your employer for that alone. When your hormones are going wild or diminished and all the things that happen specifically to people to the endocrine system, which is a bodily function protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. So when you have any combination of, and there's all kinds of others because major life activities or sleeping, thinking, when you have brain fog and you say, you know what, temporarily, I'm having these situation until it is managed by a menopause aware practitioner through perhaps the use of HRT, when indicated, et cetera. Right now, I'm simply saying to the employer, like we did with pregnancy, I need a fairly minor adjustment during this temporary transition. We all thought it needs to be temporary. We're not talking about anything as being forever. During this temporary transition, and in addition to it being a covered disability under the ADAAA, that's the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008, It's also sex and age-based because most of the time, women are 40 plus, most of the time when we're talking about these, I know that there's many other younger women for a lot of different reasons, but at 40, we are all protected in these United States from age discrimination. So you have this powerful intersectionally protected status of sex, age, and disability that should already be enough when someone says, and I know it's difficult, especially when there's no specific statute yet that says we're the Menopause Protection Act, and this is what employers have to do, but rather than being managed out the door, which has happened to clients of ours, we're representing right now 10 tenured teachers in New York who were denied air conditioners, over 40, all in menopause, during the summer months, as there's an undue hardship no acs for you right for no reason other than we don't really feel like giving that to you because what about the younger ones who they're going to want air conditioner too well whatever it is if you give them
SPEAKER_02:an inch
SPEAKER_01:exactly
SPEAKER_02:um Okay, I have two questions. You mentioned HRTs. For anybody, those are hormone replacement therapies. There's lots of different ways you can administer them. Is there, when we're looking at perimenopause or menopause, is there any kind of, like... promise of treatment or do you have to be having some steps or can someone just be like barebacking menopause and ask for
SPEAKER_03:those rights? It's very similar to pregnancy, right? Because we're using those same laws right now in the United States because we unfortunately have not created a menopause workers fairness act yet. So it's going to be a very similar process because we're using similar protections. So you want to go to your doctor, As soon as you start noticing those symptoms, you want it on record from your doctor, you know, that it appears to be menopause related. Then you're going to go back to your boss, say, hey, I have this documented from my doctor that I have menopausal related symptoms. And you're going to start the conversation the same way you would with pregnancy. That's really the path you want to take. As Jack mentioned, there are some bosses who are going to be great. and provide the necessary accommodations, there are gonna say some who say, no AC for you. If you're in the no AC for you camp, that's when you're gonna have to begin to educate them about the protections that you do have. And you may need to call in legal backup if the situation requires it.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. The difference Bianca is that these days, your employer is not likely going to say to you when you say you're pregnant, We need to see that pregnancy test, sister, before we believe you. Just because it's now accepted, if you're saying you're pregnant, then you're going to be, you know, you're not going to ask you for proof of pregnancy. But right now, in the current state of menopause protections, if you just say, as you said, if you're just winging it and just say, you know, I'm having it, you could still do that. But the reason it's so much better when you have an employer now saying, employers are saying, what are you even talking about? What laws? Just like the FMLA example I gave earlier, the lawyers for that big company were saying to me, my own law partner was saying to me, Jack, what are you even talking about? They're right. The FMLA doesn't apply. What law are you applying here? Like, it doesn't exist. What are you talking about? What do you mean, what am I talking about? Sex discrimination, Title VII, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. What don't you understand? Women... Any other disability would be covered, but you had to sort of explain it and connect the dots. With menopause right now, and it doesn't have to be your doctor, your primary care, it can be a naturopath, it can be a nurse practitioner, but a menopause aware practitioner that understands through blood testing And whatever other, you know, examinations they give that you're actually in perimenopause or menopause, it's very helpful to have that. Otherwise, the employer might just say you're malingering and, you know, get us a doctor's note. So you should just start out at that because you really want that diagnosis yourself anyway. It's empowering and we should know that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I know what's happening with your hormones. Are there any countries that you guys are turning to to see what they're doing? And I'm going to guess some of the Nordic countries are probably doing a pretty good job with this.
SPEAKER_01:But anyone you're modeling? Well, the UK is way ahead of us. So there are many companies in the UK and there are many menopause coaches do that for a living now and go into companies. So the UK, Australia... I can only imagine that in the Northern countries and the Netherlands, they probably do it better too. They get 18 months of paid maternity leave in the Netherlands. So I'm sure they've got this right too. I
SPEAKER_02:love a good cradle to grave. Amazing. And so where, where do you guys think you would say like moving the needle? Where are you at right now with that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, Catherine and I and a couple of other stakeholders drafted a Menopause Workplace Protection Act that was presented to Congress in June by one of our colleagues. And there's been getting traction. A couple of Congresswomen have expressed interest. I mean, again, I'm just walking in after two weeks for being off the grid. So I'm going to first, without even checking email, so I'm going to orient myself to what's going on with that. But we're excited that that's going to come to pass. Listen, if we still have a democracy come January 20th. I was just going
SPEAKER_02:to say, Godspeed come this fall.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I mean, that's obviously extremely important. Most of these laws, I mean, we still don't have a Paycheck Protection Act following up on you know, the, the really led better act. We, we have so many gaps in our current laws that if, you know, again, the pregnant workers fantasy act spent 15 years locked and stuck in committee, the GOP doesn't vote for it because they think it will cost money for the wrong, to the people they don't like to, you know, fund, right. Women, people, instead of, you know, corporations and billionaires. So, but if right now, I think we're all excited about the momentum and if there's momentum toward a new, toward democracy and democratization of more stuff and more green energy bills and more women's rights issues, if we can survive, I think it will be coming sooner than later. It won't take as long as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act because we have a model now upon which it is based. And with a president like Kamala Harris and a vice president, we'd be able to, and with a House and a Senate that may be democratic, I think this will happen hopefully still in my professional lifetime.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm cheering for you. I'm cheering all around as far as your elections go. I'm waiting with a bated breath to see
SPEAKER_03:And I do like the work that you're doing, Bianca, because the thing is, all this legislation can get pushed through, right? All this policy around menopause. But as we mentioned earlier with pregnancy, if you're not willing to go to your boss, if you're not willing to say, I'm pregnant, the protections don't start. So people... have to be willing to go to their boss and say, I'm menopausal. And that is still a very scary thing to do for women. So I do want to really appreciate the work you're doing, talking about these important subjects so that people do feel less stigma attached to them, because that's what's going to enable these laws to actually become active in the society.
SPEAKER_02:Amazing. Thank you so much. Great point. What a great wrap up. Thanks, Catherine. Thanks, Jack. It was so informative. I love the work you're doing. Thank you for caring about women. I know that sounds insane to say, but thank you. It means so much. And we're just, we have so far to go and any movement we have is possible because of the work that folks like you do. So thanks for coming on the pod. Thanks for answering my questions and thanks for advocating for people through their reproductive journeys.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for your work.
SPEAKER_03:Thanks for training the doulas and fighting the battle, even though you're not even in the United States for our legislative fight there.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Bianca. Thank you, Catherine.
SPEAKER_03:Bye-bye. Bye
SPEAKER_01:now. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Want to keep hanging out? We have created a free mindset mini course to help change makers and birth workers find bliss in their business. You're not in this alone. Let's build together. Head to www.babomia.com slash VIB to grab your space and a free retreat. Once again, go to www.babomia.com slash VIB to grab your spot. We will see you next time on the Hot and Brave Podcast. podcast.
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