Supreme Court Votes Against Redressing Gender Discrimination In The Workplace
Supreme Court Votes Against Redressing Gender Discrimination In The Workplace
It used to be legal to discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace. If a woman took maternity leave, that time wouldn’t count toward her retirement benefits. The 1979 Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) changed all that: “If an employee is temporarily unable to perform her job because of her pregnancy, the employer must treat her the same as any other temporarily disabled employee.”
But what happens to women who took maternity leave before 1979? The 9th Circuit ruled in 2007 that the new law should apply to these women. However, today the Supreme Court voted to overturn the 9th Circuit’s ruling.
AT&T Corp. v. Hulteen, involved four women who worked at AT&T and took maternity leave prior to 1979. They said that each reduced retirement check they receive is “a fresh act of discrimination.” A seven-member majority on the Supreme Court, however, agreed with AT&T: Because Congress did not make the PDA retroactive, the company had no obligation to pay the women for past discrimination.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer were the two dissenting voices. Ginsburg wrote that even though PDA does not explicitly address grievances prior to 1979, it does say that all pregnancy-discrimination in the workplace must cease:
The plaintiffs (now respondents) in this action will receive, for the rest of their lives, lower pension benefits than colleagues who worked for AT&T no longer than they did. They will experience this discrimination not simply because of the adverse action to which they were subjected pre-PDA. Rather, they are harmed today because AT&T has refused fully to heed the PDA’s core command: Hereafter, for “all employment-related purposes,” disadvantageous treatment “on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions” must cease. … I would hold that AT&T committed a current violation of Title VII when, post-PDA, it did not totally discontinue reliance upon a pension calculation premised on the notion that pregnancy-based classifications display no gender bias.
In an interview with USA Today earlier this month, Ginsburg said that during oral arguments for this case, her male colleagues showed “a certain lack of understanding” of the bias a woman can face on the job. She said it was “for me, Ledbetter repeated.” In that 2006 case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Inc., the Supreme Court ruled that Lilly Ledbetter wasn’t entitled to file a complaint against Goodyear because she failed to file within 180 days of her first discriminatory paycheck — even though she didn’t learn about the pay gap until years later. Earlier this year, President Obama signed a law redressing the Supreme Court ruling.
Today’s ruling makes clear why diverse voices on the Supreme Court are so important. A study by professors from Northwestern and Washington University offered statistics about why it’s necessary to have women in the judiciary:
For the most part, we found no difference in the voting patterns of male and female judges, except when it comes to sex discrimination cases. There, we found that female judges are approximately 10 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party bringing the discrimination claim. We also found that the presence of a female judge causes male judges to vote differently. When male and female judges serve together to decide a sex discrimination case, the male judges are nearly 15 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party alleging discrimination than when they sit with male judges only. This holds true even after we account for judges’ ideological leanings.
Today's Supreme Court decision is nothing short of hurtful to the thousands of women who took maternity leave decades ago. Sadly, the Court, like it did in Ledbetter, misconstrued an Act of Congress -- in this case the Pregnancy Discrimination Act -- passed precisely to protect women in the workplace. Women who took maternity leave prior to passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act should be entitled to full pension benefits and Congress must act to ensure women's pensions accurately reflect the amount of time they were employed.
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog Roll
I suspect this might be the sort of thing that empathy might get in the way of.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:25 pmMedia myths and falsehoods about the Supreme Court
… a 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled “conservative” were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism — the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled “liberal” were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.
A recently published study by Cass R. Sunstein (recently named by President Obama to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) and University of Chicago law professor Thomas Miles used a different measurement of judicial activism the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court’s “conservative” justices were the most likely to engage in “judicial activism” while the “liberal” justices were most likely to exercise “judicial restraint.”
May 18th, 2009 at 4:32 pmWhat else could we expect from a conservative supreme court? Until we get at least a few progressives in there, all cases will be viewed only through a conservative lens and EMPATHY will not only be denounced, but it won’t even be broached. W screwed us in so many ways during his dictatorship, but this is by far one of the worst ways he screwed us since we have to live with these neocons for such a long, long time.
May 18th, 2009 at 4:41 pmSomeone should tell Scalia that next time he invokes Jack Bauer
May 18th, 2009 at 4:49 pmConservativeForProgress Says:
The majority opinion is legally correct. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law, not to re-write it to fit their feelings.
then explain Bush V Gore…
May 18th, 2009 at 4:56 pmThe majority opinion is the law of the land, but the fact that the Supreme Court has reversed itself on many decisions over the course of its history should give some pause to anyone who wants to hold up their decisions as some kind of absolute truth.
The mistake here may be with the legislation passed by Congress. In any case, Congress can clarify that the same rules should be applied to all workers regardless of when they were employed.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:01 pmI remember reading a number of the ABA evaluations of Bush nominees to the federal bench. There was a consistent pattern of criticism that the nominees failed to show empathy with minorities and the poor. We need to change the basis of the discussion concerning empathy. The Republicans have no problem showing empathy for large corporations, the government and others already in a position of power in our society.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:12 pmConservativeForProgress Says:
May 18th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Interpreting the law often means re-writing it, dingleberry.
Can you say Roe v. Wade? Brown v. Board of Education? And so on…
May 18th, 2009 at 5:34 pmBottom line: We need more women on the Supreme Court.
May 18th, 2009 at 5:59 pmwhen do we get to see the statistics of how it turns out when all of the presiding judges are female?
May 18th, 2009 at 6:14 pmCaption Contest:
“These are not the droids you want.”
May 18th, 2009 at 6:57 pmJohn Stossel from 20/20 did a piece about pregnancy laws a few weeks ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PObMGxeSr_s
Good call by the Supreme court.
May 18th, 2009 at 7:26 pmRoberts and Scalito [yes, two persons, I know] are a necrotizing bacteria eating away at justice for workers, the middle class, the discrimnated against, and all who would seek to fight against oppression by, for, and in favor of the rich, the connected, and big business.
May 18th, 2009 at 8:40 pmMy God. It’s such a relatively small amount of time. Put a Hispanic women on the bench NOW!
May 18th, 2009 at 8:54 pmIt ought to be mandatory for there to be 4 female judges and 3 male judges on the Supreme Court — to reflect the population of the United States.
It’s disgraceful in the extreme that we women still suffer from legalized discrimination – in 2009!!!
Shame.
May 18th, 2009 at 9:09 pmLibellula saturata Annie Says:
It ought to be mandatory for there to be 4 female judges and 3 male judges on the Supreme Court — to reflect the population of the United States.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
4 female judges and three male judges? This has me wondering what the other two would be
May 18th, 2009 at 9:14 pmHeheh – I thought there were 7. :o) Let’s make it 5 and 4.
~A
May 18th, 2009 at 9:36 pm5 and 4 works for me. I would be happy to see that makeup
May 18th, 2009 at 10:30 pmEven Supreme Court justices can be impeached, you know. But it might be easier to get rid of Roberts by reducing his pay. He thinks its too low, you know. Personally, I think $1.00 a year would be overpaying him.
May 18th, 2009 at 11:09 pmThat decision makes Mother’s Day look like nothing we should just remove it as a Holiday as we know no one really cares about woman or Mothers. Just think as woman choose to either work and lose their child or stop working and go on welfare/man-slave. One of those children might have been the next President of the United States or even created a cure for Cancer. Well at lease we know we don’t have to go around the World preaching Woman’s Rights.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:17 amBunch of hypocritical sexists.
May 19th, 2009 at 11:05 pm