How Are Women Still Being Treated Like Second-Class Workers?
It’s one of those stories that makes you double-check the publishing date, just to make sure that this really did happen in the 21st century: Police Officer Akema Thompson nearly lost her chance to try for a promotion to sergeant in the New York Police Department (NYPD), all because she gave birth on the wrong day. Luckily, she fought for her rights and won, but the fact that this story happened at all is yet another reminder that women are still being treated like second-class citizens in the workplace, even though they make up nearly half of workers.
Thompson’s ordeal speaks volumes about the way that female workers are still treated like interlopers in a man’s world. Even though pregnancy discrimination is supposed to be illegal in our country, the NYPD blithely informed her that people who were out on the exam day could only get a make-up test if you were called for court or military service, out with an injury, or had a death in the family. In other words, stuff that could happen to men. But even though pregnant women have no real control over when they give birth, there was no exception for women like Thompson.
This was no small matter, either, as opportunities to take sergeant’s exams only come around every few years, meaning that Thompson could miss out on years of opportunity simply because biology works the way it has for as long as there have been people.
This kind of discrimination was supposed to be banned by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, but the fact that the NYPD was so blasé in its refusal to accommodate Thompson shows that the culture has not yet caught up to the law. In many workplaces, particularly in environments like police departments, the assumption that men are the standard and women are the deviation is so widespread that it goes unnoticed. It is the air people breathe. It allows departments to forget about federal law and simply craft policies around things that are normal for men—military service, disability, death—but to treat things like pregnancy as unusual events that require no special accommodation. This, even though it’s far more common for a woman to give birth at some point in her work career than for a man to become disabled or to be called up for military duty.
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/08/13/women-still-treated-like-second-class-workers/
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"It allows departments to forget about federal law and simply craft policies around things that are normal for men—military service, disability, death—but to treat things like pregnancy as unusual events that require no special accommodation. "
Who would have thought that cops would 'forget about federal law and simply craft policies?'
