The Canada Labour Code says employers cannot dismiss, suspend, layoff, demote or discipline someone because they are pregnant or take maternity leave, but they can be included in larger company layoffs.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Arina Kharlamova was a freelancer when her first child was born. She found balancing work and a new baby so stressful that she sought out a permanent job before getting pregnant a second time, so she could access maternity leave.
“The plan was to get more of a safety net,” the Whitby, Ont., technical writer told The Globe and Mail.
She got a job in early 2020, got pregnant in late 2021 and went on maternity leave in August, 2022. Despite good performance reviews, she found out she’d been laid off two months into her maternity leave – and that the person she’d trained was staying on.
“Immediately my mind started racing, worrying about, ‘What am I going to do after?’” said Ms. Kharlamova, who said her dream of spending her leave focused on her new baby evaporated once she knew she was out of a job. “I would have to start from scratch with two little kids, and without a plan.”
Ms. Kharlamova’s case – being laid off during maternity leave – is not rare, despite the legal protection that comes with such a leave.
I hired a great maternity leave cover. Can I keep them and fire the original employee?
Can I end maternity leave early? And must I tell my boss it is because I’m pregnant again?
A new survey from Moms at Work, a community and advocacy organization for working mothers, found 15 per cent of Canadian women who take maternity leave are dismissed, laid off or have contracts not renewed during pregnancy, during their leave or upon their return.
That adds up to 25,000 women a year, three times the layoff rate of the general population, says Moms at Work founder Allison Venditti, a career coach and human-resources consultant.
“On paper, the policies are strong; in practice, they fail to address systemic barriers that hold mothers back,” states a report summarizing the survey’s data collected from more than 1,300 working mothers who gave birth in 2022 and 2023.
The survey was conducted in partnership with Hudson Sinclair, an employment and labour law firm, and with data analysis by Rachel Margolis, a demographer and sociologist at Western University in London, Ont. Participants were found through online outreach and by approaching womens’ organizations.
“Maternity leave and the years surrounding it represent the single largest point in which women off-ramp from corporate organizations,” the report states.
Ms. Kharlamova says that since she started talking openly about what happened to her, she’s heard from many other women who faced job losses when they had kids.
“There’s not a gathering of women I’ve talked to where someone hasn’t said ‘me too,’” she said. “Everyone has the impression it’s a very protected time. That’s just not the case.”
The Canada Labour Code says employers cannot dismiss, suspend, layoff, demote or discipline someone because they are pregnant or take maternity leave. However, workers on such leaves can be included in larger company layoffs, and most contractors are not protected.
The Moms at Work survey also found that 26 per cent of respondents made less money after returning from their leave, 80 per cent lacked clear direction on how their return to work would be handled and more than 40 per cent considered quitting upon their return.
“The ‘Motherhood Penalty’ continues to widen the gender wage gap, reduce workforce participation, and limit women’s leadership opportunities, undermining gender equity and economic growth,” the report states.
It also calls for better ways for women to stay connected to their workplaces during leaves, formal return plans, flexible work arrangements, and an overhaul to the federal maternity and parental leave programs that remove them from the domain of Employment Insurance.
The motherhood penalty is a well-documented phenomenon in which mothers often take a pay cut after having children, while fathers often see a pay increase.
Elizabeth Hirsh, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, has studied employment discrimination for mothers extensively.
In a 2020 paper, Dr. Hirsh and her team studied about 160 workplace discrimination cases brought by caregivers to human-rights tribunals. They found two main sources of conflict: Cases where caregivers were asking for specific accommodations and those where anti-caregiver bias was the perceived reason for certain decisions.
The team found that cases where workplaces were accused of a bias were less likely to get an outcome. “It’s just really hard for workers to prove, or to identify, motherhood bias as the reason for certain decisions,” Dr. Hirsh said.
She added that the idea that mothers are less productive, which often feeds these biases, is not founded in research.
“Employers will couch their decisions in performance terms,” she said. “There is very weak evidence for this.”
Ms. Venditti, from Moms at Work, says women who took part in the survey reported being told openly at work that they should just focus on their families.
“Companies would say things like, ‘We really want someone who is all-in at work,’” she said, noting society sets high expectations for women – to have a successful career while still doing most of the housework and child rearing – and somehow many women get close to pulling it off.
“These are women who are talented, committed, all of those things, and they dared to have a baby – the thing that society is screaming at you to do,” she says. “This is systematic, and it is bad.”
Ms. Venditti says women who find themselves in this situation “should get an employment lawyer stat.” But she also says it shouldn’t be on women to find ways to somehow prevent or predict this – it is up to companies to change their practices.
“Companies are just people,” she said. “These are human beings making decisions to pick the pregnant women and those on mat leave to fire or lay off.
“We change it the same way we change anything: When people decide that this is unacceptable, it changes.”