10 Things That Could Be Pregnancy Or Pregnancy Related Discrimination In Your ABA Practice

I often hear Behavior Analysts saying that they move pregnant employees from clients who are more physically involved to clients with less physical involvement in order to reduce the chance for injury or with the intent to show compassion. Many analysts are unaware that moving technicians from one client to another (changing their job assignment) can have an impact that parallels discrimination.

ABA Practices have a duty when interviewing, hiring, assigning jobs, conducting performance reviews, and promoting pregnant individuals or individuals with pregnancy related conditions, to ensure that they are not engaging in discriminatory practices.

Owners and leaders shouldn’t automatically assume that an individual has lesser ability to preform a job solely because of being pregnant. Our continuing education course on Pregnancy Discrimination discusses best practices for talking to and documenting restrictions for pregnant employees.

Here are a few examples of other actions that could be considered pregnancy discrimination:

1. Have an interview question that asks, “Are you currently pregnant or trying to become pregnant in the next year?”
2. Have an interview question that asks, “Do you have children?
3. Have an interview question that asks, “Do you need to pump during the day for a nursing child?”
4. Not hiring an applicant solely because they are pregnant.
5. Reassigning a tech to another client solely because they are pregnant.
6. Telling a tech that because they are pregnant they will need to take a leave of absence and come back after they have the baby.
7. Denying an employee a “reasonable break time” to express milk for a nursing child.
8. Denying an employee maternity leave.
9. Denying a pregnant employee the ability to perform modified job tasks when that option is available for other employees with temporary disabilities.
10. Not allowing an employee to return to work after maternity leave.

PracticeEd offers an informative continuing education course of Pregnancy Discrimination. This course outlines policies and procedures that ABA Practices should put in place and discontinue (if doing) in order to ensure that pregnant applicants and employees are treated with dignity, respect, and afforded equal rights of their colleagues.