Host Kortney Ross dives deep into the significant costs businesses face when they lack proper support structures for working parents, particularly those dealing with pregnancy and lactation-related issues. Kortney highlights startling statistics and shares real-world examples to illustrate just how much organizations can lose—both financially and in terms of talent retention—when they fail to provide necessary accommodations. She also emphasizes the importance of awareness and training, especially with the implementation of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. If you're keen on building a family-friendly, future-ready workplace, this episode is a must-listen.
Note - This transcript is automatically generated and has not been checked for errors.
Welcome to the NextGen Work Culture podcast, where leaders learn to support working parents. Because being a family friendly business isn't just a nice to have anymore. It's essential for businesses that want to stay competitive, and it is critical for the next generation and those who are raising them. I'm your host, Courtney Ross, and I am so glad that you're here. Welcome back to the NextGen work culture. We're coming at you with a solo episode today. I want to talk about how much it can cost an organization if they don't have support in place for working parents. Specifically, we're going to talk about pregnancy and lactation related issues.
So let's pretend that a company has about 40 employees working for them, 40 female employees. The statistics show that about 30 of them are going to become pregnant during their career. And if you don't have good support structures in place, chances are about six of those original 40 are going to leave. Because around 20% of women quit work just before or shortly after giving birth. The cost of replacing each of those employees is probably going to cost about six to nine months of their salary. So let's say for easy math that each of them makes $100,000 a year. That means it's going to cost at least $50,000 to replace each one of those six employees that left just because they weren't feeling supported during or after their pregnancy. Now, multiply that by six and you've got about $300,000 just in the cost to replace these employees that you've lost.
And if one of them left because they felt that they were being discriminated against during their pregnancy, and they file a pregnancy discrimination claim, the average cost of those, if you settle outside of court, is about $18,000. So those costs added up really quickly for a relatively small organization of just about 40 female employees. Now, let's say that you're a much larger company with about 1000 female employees. That math is going to really add up, because out of those 1000 employees, 75% of them, or about 750, are going to become pregnant at some time during their career. And that's going to cost over seven and a half million dollars in recruiting and training new employees to replace the all of the pregnant women who are leaving either shortly before or shortly after they give birth. So why is this important? Why should we be caring about supporting pregnant employees in the workforce? Well, times have changed significantly. In the early 1960s, only about 44% of women worked at all during their pregnancy. But in the early two thousands, that went up to about 66% of mothers who gave birth to their first child between 2006 and 2000, 866 percent of those moms were working during their pregnancy.
And in the early 1960s, only about 35% of women actually worked up to that 9th month of pregnancy, and 82% worked into the final month in the early two thousands. That's a pretty big difference. So now we have up to 82% of women working up to or very near their due dates while they are pregnant. And that was just not happening 40, 50, 60 years ago. So now we have the pregnant Workers Fairness act in place. We have the pregnancy Discrimination act. We have some laws that are supposed to help ensure that women are getting the support that they need at work, that they're not being discriminated against, that they're getting the accommodations that they need. But we still have a lot of organizations that just aren't quite getting it right.
But times have changed. We have a lot of women who are breadwinners or are single parents. And our workplaces really have got to catch up to the new norm. And it's not even new. It's been around for decades now. It's just time that we got up. Let's think about a couple of examples of when it could really cost you if you don't have this sort of support or accommodations routines in place in 2020. There was a very large food processing plant, Purdue, who told a pregnant employee that she was not going to be able to keep water nearby and have extra restroom breaks when she came back to work.
She had a high risk pregnancy. She was coming back off of having an infection, and those were the bare minimum things she needed just to be able to do her job. She needed extra water, and she needed to go to the bathroom more often. And an HR manager told her that that wasn't going to be possible, that she needed to take leave and apply for short term disability, which she did, but she was still eventually fired, and they cited that her extended absence was the reason. Of course, she got very upset about this, as she should have, and she filed a suit claiming discrimination due to sex, pregnancy, and disability. Poor Duke settled out of court. So I don't know the exact cost of this litigation, but I'm sure it was a lot. And this was before the pregnant workers Fairness act.
Now, under the PWFA, we have some accommodations that just must be done every time they're asked for. These are called predictable assessments. And those predictable assessments are the right to carry or keep drinking water nearby, have extra bathroom breaks, sit or stand, the opposite of what may be normal for the job and have extra breaks for eating and drinking. So that would have been a clear cut case under the Pregnant Workers Fairness act, that this woman absolutely should have been given those accommodations. But one manager told her no, and that cost the company a lot of money to file outside of court. Earlier this year, in 2024, Walmart also had some problems where a manager told a female employee that she was not promoted just because she was a mother with young children. And this isn't exactly related to pregnancy. But of course, she had gone through a couple of pregnancies to get to those children.
Probably. But this is just an example where one manager cost the company a lot, and I think we're going to run into that problem very frequently with the Pregnant Workers Fairness act. The EEOC even specifically states that managers must be trained to be able to recognize accommodation requests, which may be a simple conversation or even something like a text message from an employee. And they must be trained to act on those requests quickly. So they need to know the predictable assessments. They need to know what to do if a pregnant employee asks for accommodations, and they need to know how to do it quickly, they have to be empowered to do it themselves without going through a bunch of hoops and loops and jumps and paperwork and forms or third party providers like that is just not going to be acceptable under the Pregnant Workers Fairness act. So it's super important that companies train their managers on this new law that they understand they have to give accommodations and that they have to support women or employees during their pregnancy and after, during the phases of lactation or maybe postpartum depression or other issues come up. That's all covered under the Pregnant Workers Fairness act, and it can really cost the company a lot of money if they're not doing this.
The settlement for that Walmart case that I mentioned, where one manager messed up, told an employee that she wasn't promoted just because of her children. The cost of that was $60,000 in settlement fines, plus, I'm sure, an additional corpath costs, and they had to promise to train all of their managers. And that wasn't even a claim under the Pregnant Workers Fairness act. That was just a discrimination claim. The Pregnant Workers Fairness act, we are going to start seeing claims that are going to cost companies a lot of money when most of it is going to boil down to one manager was asked by one employee for a relatively simple and short term accommodation. So if your managers don't know about this, they absolutely need to. And if you need some help training them, you could check out courtneyross.com leadershiptraining to learn more about the programs that I offer to help, be sure that all of the frontline managers understand how to comply with this new law, because it's super important and it can cost your organization a lot of money if you don't do it. So go check it out.
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