Hiring manager asks if she's wrong for not hiring woman because she's pregnant.
It's hard to run a business. When this female hiring manager is worried she made the wrong call about a pregnant applicant, she asks Reddit:
"AITA for not hiring a pregnant woman?"
I (F26) work in HR hiring people. For this position one of the candidates was a 7 months pregnant woman (I had no idea until the interview), and while she had all the qualifications, her condition made a huge impact in my decision of not hiring her.
I'll list all the reasons so you have the full picture: This position was for a supervisor of a national scale project, it requires constant traveling to inspect the infrastructure we're building. We consider it a high risk position as it involves a lot of electrical and environmental risks.
The infrastructure we're building is in very remote areas, I'm talking 8-10 hours in car from the nearest city and long walks in different terrains to inspect the work (mountains and forest).
There's small villages on the road but without proper health services and we have a few camps but nothing big. We have laws that protect pregnant woman and while they're quite lax, we're really committed to keep our workers safe.
With high risk positions, our policy is that if a woman of our team gets pregnant, we transfer her to the main office (in the city) for administrative work only (same pay and benefits, the only thing that changes is the daily chores and the location)
Our country have obligatory paid maternal leave and also our internal policy adds a couple more months to it, if we hired her now, she'd work with us for about 2 months tops and then take 6 months off, i mention this because for that time we'd have to hire someone else as a temporal replacement.
I cleared everything with our legal team and external consultants and the decision is perfectly legal (Please take into account that this is not the USA).
The reason i think i may be an a*&hole is because this issue ended up being the talk of the office, this woman was referred to us by a person who works in the company and told everyone about what happened.
Now i have people telling me I'm an a#%hole for denying the woman this job, that pregnant woman can do anything and i wouldn't know as i don't have any kids of my own and I'm discriminating her for her condition.
To be honest, i'm not a fan of pregnancy or kids and i'm childfree and while i think this is not influencing my decision i may be biased so i ask for your judgment. I believe as part of my job i have to make sure everyone is safe and to hire her for such a dangerous position would only put both the mother and child at risk.
For the cold business part, hiring her would only cost a lot of money as we'd have to replace the position soon and it'd also be a liability if anything happens to her on the job.I did tell her I'd keep her information and contact her if any other position for her profile is available and i fully intend to make this happen if possible. AITA?
Let's see what Reddit had to say on this.
shiel009 writes:
NTA -She probably wouldn’t be able to travel at all before going on maternity leave because I bet she wouldn’t have been able to start for 2 weeks or a month which would make her 8 months pregnant.
No doctor would say yeah go 8 hours away when you’re that pregnant. As for your coworkers you can just say that candidate X had a better interview or CV but you will keep the coworkers friend in mind if a new position comes up.
koalainc disagrees:
YTA. Please tell me that you're not suggesting that companies deliberately not hire pregnant women because they will require maternity leave in a couple of months as a strategic move to minimize costs?
Please correct me if I'm wrong about what you're suggesting, but that sounds like the very basis of why discrimination laws exist. The company chose to extend its maternity care coverage, with the risk of it having to pay extra for new employees. THIS IS SEXISM.
engineeringown98 writes:
NTA. If you'd hired this woman, 2 months after hiring her, you'd have to then hire someone else and pay BOTH these people. You chose to make a logical financial decision. Also, what if she'd gone into early labour while out on site? It's 10 hours back to the City and a decent walk from wherever on site she might have been.