“When to Tell a Prospective Employer That You’re Pregnant”
In today’s New York Times, Rob Walker (a/k/a “The Workologist”) entertained a question from “Anonymous,” who had been negotiating a new job and its relocation terms, and disclosed to the prospective employer that she was pregnant. She did not get the job.
She asked “Should I have withheld this information?”
Citing an EEOC official, The Workologist said that “[w]hile there’s nothing legally or even ethically misleading about waiting until you’ve accepted an offer (or even started a new job) to disclose a pregnancy, the timing of that conversation can be a very personal decision.”
Title VII, of course, forbids discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, but The Workologist noted that “The problem here is that we can’t say definitively that the company chose to cut things off because of your pregnancy. And this gets to the heart of your question: The law may be clear, but the hiring process and job negotiations can be maddeningly murky.”
He said that “it might have been better to wait until, say, management had explicitly committed to conceding the deal-breaker relocation issue — rather than merely signaling its willingness to mull it over.”
To our HR readers: what do you think?
