Discrimination?

In the Name of the Most High

I have been dealing with feelings of inadequacy throughout my pregnancy.  When I found out I was pregnant, we had just moved to our new area and I was working part time at home at a job that didn’t challenge me and that had no opportunity for growth (because I dropped out of my PhD program and got this job as a “transition” job until I could find something else).  I am still working at that job because my husband and I decided that right now wasn’t the time to embark on a challenging career path.

I have always been challenged academically or in the work force with more than I could handle at most times in my life.  I had a friend in high school whose motto was “Bite more than you can chew, then chew like hell”… and I liked that philosophy and realized that I was living it every day.  Whether I was in middle school and taking college courses during my summer vacations or receiving grants to perform research abroad or traveling 90 miles (one way) as a professional at a job where I worked 10-12 hours a day- I have always been busy, ambitious, and anxiously looking for opportunities to grow professionally and academically.  Since arriving in our new location, my self-perceived idleness has left me feeling completely and utterly inadequate.

So.  A few weeks ago, I decided to apply for a few jobs.  One that I applied for was a research coordinator position at a very prestigious university nearby.  A few days later, I was asked to come in for an interview.  At that point, I was about 20 weeks along and was showing… but I could easily hide my stomach behind a new maternity shirt I got and with my suit coat that I left unbuttoned.  I stressed about whether or not I should tell him I was pregnant, and I had to remind myself that I didn’t even know if I wanted a job right now.  My husband made it pretty clear that he didn’t want me to get involved in a job like this until after the baby is born and I’ve had time to adjust to my new lifestyle.  Still, my profound feelings of inadequacy made me curious about what I could do to make it work, given that it was a very good opportunity for my career.

At the interview, I answered his questions very well and we talked a lot about my experiences.  He commented more than once that he was “very impressed” with my educational background, and when I told him about my previous work experience, he said that I was “exactly” what they were looking for.  At one point in the interview, he said that I had the skill set that was lacking in his current research coordinators that he was so desperately seeking.

I nailed the interview.  And then.  He asked me if I had any questions for him.  I then told him I was pregnant.  He was very professional about it, and because he couldn’t legally ask me any questions about my pregnancy, he didn’t.  I left the interview laughing because I knew I had aced it before the talk of my pregnancy came up.  And while I knew that it was technially illegal for him to discriminate against me because of my pregnancy, it wasn’t going to stop him from doing so and just cite another reason for not hiring me if he had to justify it to anybody.

I always thought that if I were to be discriminated against, it would be for wearing a hijab (headscarf).  I never thought that it would be because I am a woman and I am going through something that most women will go through in their lifetime.  This incident really made me reflect on the status of women in today’s modern society.  Women have worked so hard to be equals in the workforce, that it has backlashed.  A man justified discriminating against pregnant women in the workforce by saying: “Well, if I were to hire a man, and I knew that before hand he would have to take 3 months off for whatever reason, I would be hesitant to hire him too.”

What a wrong analogy!  We are expected to reproduce, and yet we are punished for doing so?  Equal rights is not what I want.  I want to be a woman, and everything that comes along with that.  While men are able to move straight up their “career ladder” in a linear fashion, women sometimes need a little break but can shoot back up that graph very quickly, if given the right opportunities.  In this gender-neutral obsessed society that is so determined to make production the end-all and be-all of life, women have set up unrealistic expectations for themselves and we just set ourselves up for failure.

We can not be the same as men.  Men don’t have to carry around a baby in their womb for 9 months, go through delivery, and then breastfeed.  Women have a lot that they are able to add to the workforce, but we just do it differently than men.  That we haven’t taught men this simple lesson yet says a lot about our own priorities.  Maybe that’s why women are delaying having children until their mid to late thirties and early forties.  This is also a mistake- it makes more of us high risk (during pregnancy in particular), and we put ourselves and our children in more vulnerable positions.  We are breaking down in family structure, and women are left with such difficult decisions to make.  And… I think we have done a lot of this to ourselves by demanding things like gender neutrality.

I know for a fact that I could have added so much to the job that I applied for.  I was doing virtually the same thing in my previous position- and I did very well at my previous job.  I was the youngest person in that position and yet quickly rose to the top and earned a reputation of being meticulous with my work.  One of the reasons I was working such long and hard hours was because many of the investigators I worked with were giving me a lot of responsibilities that they didn’t trust to give to my other colleagues (with some exceptions of course).  But, unfortunately, we live in a male-dominated society where pregnancy is seen as a weakness and a deficiency, and taking some time off for a few months to raise a newborn child (and maybe not even completely… I am very efficient at working from home) is perceived as an inherent flaw in someone.

We as women are told over and over again that we can be like men in every way possible.  We believe this lie, and it leads us to make mistakes in both our careers and our families.

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