Mother or Leader (or both)? - The Costs of Pregnancy and Motherhood for a Working Woman in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Being a woman is probably one of the biggest gifts a human being can be blessed with: women can give life, with all the tenderness and hardship that this event brings. Unfortunately, however, in a society that has developed over centuries following a patriarchal scheme, in which women had motherhood as their only role in the family, this same gift has transformed in the biggest obstacle for women’s emancipation. When it comes to the professional aspect of a woman’s life, in fact, the condition of being pregnant still represents one of the main causes of discriminations, limiting the chances of self realization and resulting, too often, in a complete exclusion from the labor market. A discrimination on the basis of sex sui generis, pregnancy discrimination is a plague which requires particular protective policies aimed at safeguarding new mothers in the labor market and at changing firms’ culture on such matters, putting into question many other issues related to parental and family rights. This paper will deal with the problem of pregnancy discriminations and maternity leaves giving an overview that will start from the macroscopic background to end in a microscopic analysis of the matter. In order to define gender discrimination, in fact, there is the need to deeply understand the two main aspects of it, namely that it is a discrimination and that it affects women. Therefore, the paper will begin with an analysis of the legal developments in matters of human rights and non-discrimination law, which can be defined as a relatively new doctrine, still evolving and widening its field of action over time. The analysis from the legislative point of view will be focused on two realities: the European Union and the United States. Nevertheless, having the international community had a central role in the development of the doctrine, a brief overview will be inserted to introduce the common background of the two legal systems. This first chapter will then proceed with a detailed description of the legal language used, making clear the differences among words that may be used as synonyms in everyday language, but which are not in legal terminology. The goal is that of getting to a definition of discrimination. In the second chapter, the attention will be shifted to one of the many possible grounds for discriminations, namely gender discrimination. Women have, in fact, always been seen as the weaker sex, receiving different treatments, too often lacking of the right consideration and respect. Not only in the labor market, women are the victims of a perpetrated patriarchal culture, still much more rooted than what it can be commonly thought. This depth of roots is proven by the choices that women do in the pre-entry to the labor market phase, in which, academic data demonstrate, women prefer by far fields of study related to humanities and altruistic careers that, usually, are also the least remunerative ones in monetary terms, creating a pay gap between sexes hard to eradicate. Also in this part of the dissertation, the approach to the different levels of legislative protections from gender discriminations will be a comparative one, between the EU and the USA. In the third and last chapter, the focus of the paper will be shifted on the main aspects of pregnancy discriminations as a sui generis form of gender discrimination. The analysis of legal instruments for the safeguard of such particular conditions available for the countries taken into consideration, has the goal of identifying the limits of laws into force in this moment. Should it exist a human right connected to maternity? Since motherhood is proven to be a limitation for the professional advancement of women, instead of being seen as an added value to the cultural depth of the person, there is the need of some concrete action in order to overcome these limits and set new goals for best practices for the safeguard of the deepest sense of existence: giving life.