Vincent Roscigno, professor of sociology, is co-author of a new study finding that pregnant employees are more likely to be singled out as poor performers and held strictly accountable for tardiness than non-pregnant employees.

The study, conducted with Reginald Byron, assistant professor of sociology at Southwestern University, was published online and will appear in the June 2014 print edition of the journal Gender & Society.

Roscigno and Byron agree that performance and tardiness are very legitimate business concerns. The problem, they say, is the appearance that not all non-pregnant employees are being held to the same
standards.

The researchers analyzed 70 verified cases of pregnancy-based firing discrimination that were handled by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission between 1986 and 2003. They also looked at another 15 cases processed between 2007 and 2011.

Their key findings included the following:

• Pregnancy accounted for 40 percent of all gender-related firing cases.
• Poor performance was the reason employers cited most frequently for terminating pregnant workers; about 30 percent gave this as the reason.
• Fifteen percent of employers claimed pregnant women were fired because of poor attendance and/or tardiness.

One example the researchers cite in the study is the case of a woman who was fired from her job as an assistant restaurant manager after she became pregnant. Her supervisor claimed that the company was restructuring and needed to reduce its number of assistant managers from three to two. But after she was fired for "business reasons," the restaurant hired a man to fill the exact same position that was supposedly no longer needed.”

Some states have their own laws that are broader than the federal law, but even with those in place, researchers said some companies are reluctant to change the way they are run.

Read the Southwestern University release.