13◼ REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek June 17, 2019GETTY
IMAGES
● Anti-discrimination laws haven’t
relieved the relentless pressureto
devote more hours to the office● By Claire Suddath
NilabTolton had beenworking as anassociate at the
international litigation firm Jones Day for five yearswhenshe
learned she was pregnant. Looking back, Tolton sayssheknew
but also didn’t know—at least not in a conscious,articulable
kind of way—that having a kid was going to complicatehergoal
tomakepartner.WomenmakeuphalfofJonesDay’sjunior
associatesbutonlya quarterofitspartners.( JonesDayhas
representedBloombergina numberofemployment-related
matters.) The century-old firm boasts a client list—Toyota,
Starbucks, General Electric—that looks like the S&P 500 and
demands the kind of round-the-clock attention fromemploy-
ees that only single people or those with a stay-at-homespouse
can easily give. But Tolton had landed at Jones Daystraight
out of Harvard Law School for a reason. She wasn’tafraidof
long hours. She was willing to do the work.
“In my eternal optimism, I took the lack of femalepart-
nersasanopportunityratherthana signalthatI’dmeetthe
samefate,”Toltonsays.Shespentherpregnancypullingall-
nighters and working through the weekend to preemptively
make up for the 5½ months of maternity leavethatsome
of the male partners jokingly referred to as her impending
“vacation.” For a while, her efforts seemed to payoff.“Holy
cow! ... You’re not supposed to be that smart at 9.5months
pregnant!” one partner wrote in an email after Tolton,who’d
started her maternity leave, sent him her latest work.
She was still on maternity leave in June 2016 whenJones
Day notified her it was freezing her salary. She wasshocked.
“The only time I’d heard of someone getting theirsalaryfro-
zen was after a male associate called female associatesc--ts
at a work event. There was an HR investigation.Healmost
got fired. Instead, they froze his salary,” she says.Tolton
couldn’t figure out what she’d done to deserve thiskindof
punishment. She printed out copies of all the “greatjob!”and
“excellent work!” emails she’d received over the pastyearand
pressed her superiors to point to specific criticismsinher
annual review to explain their decision. They toldhertodrop
it—the freeze was a done deal. After her secondpregnancy
and maternity leave a year later, Tolton says, hersalarywas
frozen a second time and she was told to look fora newjob.
In April she and five other former employeesfileda law-
suit against Jones Day alleging gender and pregnancydiscrim-
ination. Their complaint is rife with scandalousanecdotes:
a male partner who told female summer associatesthathe
wouldn’t offer them positions at the firm unless theydanced
and sang to a Care Bears song at a firm event; a“Lawyerly
Ladies Lunch” that Jones Day advertised with a4-foot-tallcardboard cutout of a lipstick tube. One plaintiff, who remains
anonymous, says that when she asked about a dearth of
female partners at the firm, a male partner said it was because
“women have babies and stay at home.” The most troubling
accusations come from Tolton and a second plaintiff, both of
whom got pregnant, went on leave, and were told to leave the
firm. Jones Day declined a request for comment, but a pub-
licresponseonthefirm’swebsiteprovidesseveralstatistics
thatit says“belietherecentclaimsofsixformerassociates.”
(Thereare 240 female partners at Jones Day; 42% of associ-
ates promoted to partner in January 2018 were women.) The
firm plans to litigate the case in court.
Jones Day is just one of several companies facing preg-
nancy discrimination lawsuits. In the past few years, tens of
thousands of women have come forward with complaints
against companies such as Whole Foods Market, Walmart,
21st Century Fox, and, more recently, Netflix, where a for-
mer manager alleges that after she’d told her boss she was
pregnant, he removed her from a show she was working on.
She says she complained to HR and was fired the next day.
(A Netflix spokesman says the company has investigated the
matter and found the claims to be meritless.) The Jones Day
lawsuit comes after another gender discrimination suit filed
last year that focuses on the firm’s “black box” compensa-
tion plan, in which employees’ salaries are determined in
secrecy. The suit alleges this leads to widespread pay dis-
crepancies between women and men. “These issues are all
related,” says Deborah Mancuse, the employment attor-
ney representing Tolton and other Jones Day employees in
both cases. “It has to do with the way women are valued.
Their pay, their promotions, the stereotype that a pregnant
woman—or mothers with kids—are not going to work as hard,
it’s all ways in which women are undervalued and under-
compensated for their work.”
The reasons women are undervalued are complicated,
and the problem defies an easy solution. It’s clear, though,
that anti-discrimination laws aren’t enough. The Pregnancy
Discrimination Act of 1978 made it illegal to fire an employee—
or demote her, refuse to hire her, or treat her differently—just
because she’s pregnant. Talk to working mothers, and you’ll
quicklydiscoverthedifferencebetweenwhatthelawsays
andhowoftenit’sactuallyfollowed.ThePDA,asit’sknown,
is morethan 40 years old, yet women still talk of bosses who
refuse to accommodate medical complications. Big projects
that culminate after their due dates get reassigned to some-
one else. Promotions that seemed within reach are suddenly
not a good idea right now. “At my old job, my boss pointed
to me, in a room full of people, and said I wasn’t a candidate
for an open position ‘because you’re not done having babies
yet,’ ” says Murphey Sears, an executive at a Dallas nonprofit
who was pregnant with her second child at the time, in 2014.
Women who make a living from freelance or contract work
worry they’llnolongerattractclients.“Ican’twalkintoa
meeting fora six-monthcontractandbesixmonthspregnant.
I don’t thinkanyone would hire me,” says Molly Magnifico,