Employer asking me to hide pregnancy

[Silentknight6]

I’m 25 weeks pregnant due to go on mat leave in a few months. My employer and HR dept has known I’m pregnant since about 7 weeks as I was very sick and needed time off that I wanted to be recorded separately.

My manager has asked me if I can keep my pregnancy quiet from clients and ideally from my wider team as they’re worried about how it will look from a business continuity aspect and that my team will panic. I’m not really happy about this as firstly I’m obviously showing quite a bit now so it requires me to think about what I wear. Secondly my time off for appointments is ramping up and I hate lying about this. A few of my clients are actually pregnant and due after me and I find it a shame I can’t show any solidarity!

AIBU and can they actually ask me to do this! My employer is a large organisation if that gives more context but my manager is a young male with no experience of managing a pregnant employee.

I fear this. The fewer people know, the fewer will raise concerns when you are treated badly and discriminated against.

What kind of industry do you work in where clients will be concerned about a pregnant woman? How is hiding the fact that you are pregnant helping business continuity? Surely being open and honest is the best way to prepare the business for your time on maternity leave. Sounds like a load of old bollocks to me.

Unless you pretend you have stolen a watermelon, it's gonna be impossible to hide it.

Why do clients "get nervous"? Is there a history of your company providing poor service due to natural staff turnover? If so this is very much a management problem not yours! A large company should not be that reliant on individual staff members. Very worrying.

Do you work in pr/marketig op? I had a boss like this once (although she was a middle aged woman with a teen son so should have known better!)

It wasn’t pregnancy related but clients were NEVER allowed to know when we went in annual leave - I wasnt allowed to put an out-of-office on my email when I took annual leave; colleagues would log in and reply to any client emails pretending to be me 😑.

I also wasn’t allowed to tell any clients when I’d handed my notice in and eventually left; I just disappeared one day and she told them I’d been ‘moved to another account’! She was a total nightmare to work for, everything was a performance for clients and she lied through her teeth.

Pregnancy is a completely normal part
of life - your manager sounds like he doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s unfair (and probably illegal) to ask you to hide it.

if you have people at work who "panic" at women getting pregnant, then surely they should have time to accept this and be told sooner rather than later and then have time with both you and the person covering you together before the hand over, not just have it sprung on them last minute. ignoring the actual ridicukousness of hiding a pregnancy, which im sure for most of the people you work with, will end up being pretty obvious. hes probably one of those people who think a period is something a woman can pee out and can stop bleeding between toilet breaks and is advising you are somethin he has no awareness of.

Sorry, not read all the replies but it occurs to me that your manager may have a tenuous grasp of female reproductive biology.

I wonder if he thinks you are choosing expand your mid section and show all the other related pregnancy signs. I know this sounds completely daft but there was a thread on MN recently about this kind of ignorance and it became clear how many men think women & girls can 'hold in' menstrual flow. We are just lazy/dirty/inconsiderate about it.

If they think that, it's not impossible that your manager has similar thought processes. If we can dignify such things with the word thoughts.

Emsil him referencibgbyour conversation and ask him if it was a joke. If not, to say so and ask how he expects this to be accomplished and why it even needs to be done.

This way he has to nail his colours to the mast and you have evidence to back up your complaint to HR. Forward his reply to HR and seperately to a private external email lest your work email become inadvertently lost. Consult with a solicitor so they can write a letter should HR not support you.

This behaviour suggests that they may be trying to get rid of or demote you upon your return. Constructive dismissal is actionable at a trubunal and you need the msximum amount of evidence fof a watertight case.

Goid luck x

Business continuity is so often used as a phrase to describe 'keeping the person in the role because no one else knows how to do it' when what it actually means is 'managing changes within the business so that delivery isn't negatively impacted'. Your boss needs reminding of that, and needs to get a plan in place to manage your maternity leave. The ealrier he gets out in front of this, the less nervous clients will need to be. It might be worth reminding him as well that not all babies come at 40 weeks like they are supposed to, and that pregnancy related illness, early delivery etc etc could take you out of work earlier than he currently plans. So being prepared is a good idea all round.

What is HR's position on this?

A lot of managers are often dictated to by HR. Certainly in the last organisation I worked for HR would dictate on recruitment 'We want a woman in this role, we need you to focus on BAME for this role, etc).

I think this is scandalous! Why should anyone have to hide their pregnancy at work?

But they're not legally allowed to "make their problem your problem". That's the point of the legal rights you have in pregnancy. Pregnant women have legal protection in employment law.

Your manager's attitude, lack of experience and general cluelessness don't change that. The legal duties lie with the employer.

Please do involve HR because they will understand the implications of his ignorance of employment law. It sounds as though he needs some more training too.

I'm still hoping this is some sort of joke, but otherwise ... this ^^

And as a PP said, ask them to put what they're requesting formally in writing

Some very dramatic/bizarre responses here. Yes it's a stupid thing for the manager to ask and but the cries of discrimination/illegality are bizarre. What, exactly, is the discrimination here?!

OP - ask your manager, in writing, how he wants to prepare for your handover and how he would like to communicate this to clients.

He's an idiot. Clients will be more nervous when you disappear on mat leave without warning or a plan. He's missed the oppertunity to make them feel more secure by you going "I'm pregnant, I will be off from X date and here is what will happen. Y will be covering and I will be doing ABC to hand over to them before I go and make sure no disruption"

I was thinking that too! Some people want to find discrimination and want a union involved in absolutely anything and everything.

There is no sign of discrimination in this at all. Just stupidity and incompetence which is not illegal. I honestly wouldn't even debate it, I would just say I can't hide it anymore and will be letting people know.

I’d have just laughed at that suggestion to be honest. I’m 25w pregnant now and so many people are shocked that I’m not imminently due - this is my third baby, I’m not that big but have big babies. There is no way I could hide it and my manager would never ask me to.

I would say that you hear what he is saying but ultimately it’s your choice when you choose to disclose this information.

Exactly this. Having a well organised handover is much more reassuring to a client than a sudden disappearance. Staff turnover is a concern for clients because of continuity of service, so demonstrating they will have that continuity is the key - especially if there’s a period of overlap with staff and the client has the opportunity to see all is well.

A last minute chop and change of staff is the opposite of that, and your manager is an idiot and a coward who doesn’t want to have those awkward conversations with the clients. They are going to be fully aware that if your absence is due to pregnancy then your manager will have had months to plan and will be less than impressed they only heard about it at the last minute. But your manager just postponing the inevitable with every day which makes it worse. Plonker.

I'd like to know who the clients are so I can avoid doing any business with them, if they really would take a dim view of someone being pregnant. Though to be honest, I doubt if they hold that view at all.

It is potentially discrimination if she is being disadvantaged or treated less favourably because of her pregnancy.

I have never been asked to lie to anyone at work. My personal information about my family, health, medical appointments, absences are mine to share or not. OP's manager seems to be asking her to behave differently, even unethically, because she is pregnant, she would not be asked to do these things if she weren't. That sounds like less favourable treatment to me.

I remember a friend (a decade older than me) at work. They had a client review and all the client’s feedback was positive apart from my friend’s pregnancy. This was recorded as “The only negative was X’s pregnancy and the impact this may have on the team”. She was furious - mainly because the implication was that she’d “let the side down” by getting pregnant (there’d already been a comment from the unit head that he “didn’t want any pregnancies this year”).

Letting this sort of thing slide encourages employers to treat staff pregnancies as a thing they shouldn’t really have to deal with - as though female employees are just being inconsiderate.

Have a read of this link.

Pregnancy is a protected characteristic.

Report to HR and to his line manager.

He needs some training and awareness raising on the rights of pregnant employees and how they should be treated.

Here's the link:

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/your-rights-under-equality-act-2010/pregnancy-and-maternity

Right now there's not enough info to advise whether op is being discriminated against. Op would have to prove she is being disadvantaged due to her pregnancy. The only disadvantage right now is her being asked not to reveal (ha!) that she is pregnant. It's not unlawful for a company to be shit at planning, and the company could say, because of the nature of their clients or whatever bollocks they come up with, that they would ask a male with a planned op resulting in long term absence to also lie, which would set op on the back foot and that may well then result in more serious, but possibly insidious, ill treatment in future.

Op id steer clear of guns blazing discrimination claims or thinking this is discrimination, unless you know the company has form for ill treatment of pregnant women, and just focus on the sheer lunacy of this naive managers request. If they are indeed the type to be discriminatory, they will show that hand soon in a more obvious way that they can't likely weasel out of.

Could fellow Mumsnet people confirm that this is still 2024?
Not 1924 nor 1824?
I just want to be sure.

Good grief. People, us women in particular, need to know their basic rights. Posts like this should not be happening. One mention of the law, and watch your employer s* the proverbial brick.