It Happened To Me:Pregnancy Discrimination

Deitra Golson was a loan collector for Green Tree Financial Services. During the first half of 1997, she had been meeting all of her monthly performance goals and exceeding many.

In the summer of 1997, Golson told her boss that she was pregnant. The company assigned a new employee to close her accounts, but with this new employee in charge, her accounts missed the performance goal for July. Because of pregnancy-related medical problems, she missed work from July 23 to August 5. This includes three days when she was an inpatient at the hospital.

According to one of Golson's supervisors, if a collector provided written medical verification that she was unable to work for three or more days, Green Tree wouldn't hold the collector accountable for her goals that month. Golson provided such a note to supervisor Thad Pope. Nevertheless, when she returned to work in August, she was placed on a 90-day probation for failure to meet her performance goal. She was fired after only 30 days.

Golson had been told to improve her numbers in August but wasn't given a specific goal. She was discharged in September for failing to meet specific performance goals despite having improved the status of her accounts overall.

Golson's employment history played a big part in the trial. In April 1997, she had told Pope and his supervisor, Ira Usry, that she was considering becoming pregnant, in which case she would need Green Tree to transfer her to a less stressful position that demanded fewer and less demanding hours. She was assured that if she became pregnant, the company would place her in a less stressful job.

In June 1997, Golson informed Green Tree that she was in fact pregnant. Pope and Usry told her that they intended to transfer her to a department requiring a less demanding schedule, provided that she train her replacement. She trained a replacement, but when she returned from her pregnancy-related absence in September of 1997, the company didn't transfer her. She was fired instead. From this evidence, the jury could infer that Green Tree used the promise of a transfer as an inducement for Golson to keep working and to stay long enough for Green Tree to find a replacement who was not pregnant.

On Sept. 24, 2001, Deitra Golson's case was argued before a judge. On January 10, 2002, Golson was awarded over $230,000. Punitive damages are available for a Title VII violation when the discriminatory action was conducted "with malice or with reckless indifference to the federally protected rights" of the plaintiff. The large award was an inspiration to women everywhere. Her greatest victory, though, was establishing that companies cannot protect their employees by merely having laws on the books, they need to enforce the laws to guarantee pregnant women's security. Even though the company had an employee manual that contained an "Equal Employment Policy", and the company stated in writing that it did not discriminate on the grounds of race, sex, national origin or religion, the court still found that the mere existence of an antidiscrimination policy does not automatically satisfy the good faith requirement. So the jury was entitled to find that the company had acted in bad faith. The company policy did not specifically mention pregnancy, but Maryland state law finds that such discrimination is a form of sexual discrimination. Deitra Golson spent almost five years of her life fighting for her rights, and her fight was well worth the effort. If you feel you have been discriminated against, you must take action.