College Honors Program

Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) to Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA): More than a New Acronym?

Date of Creation

5-17-2024

Document Type

Campus Access Only

First Advisor

Denise Schaeffer

Abstract

How should gender equality be realized, given the differences in reproductive capacities between the sexes? To address this broad question, I focus on the landscape of pregnancy discrimination law, from the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) to the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). By relying on feminist theories of equality that underpin each statute, I illustrate the substantive differences between them and argue that the PWFA’s reasonable accommodation guarantee will be more beneficial to pregnant workers than the PDA’s equal treatment approach. To do that, I use feminist frameworks to analyze Supreme Court cases that predate & interpret the PDA to reveal differing answers to questions of equality and consider flaws in previous approaches. While no court has interpreted the PWFA, several states have acted as laboratories of democracy, going beyond the equal treatment mandate, and adopting affirmative guarantees of reasonable accommodation. Thus, I turn to the states to consider the implications of this change on the federal level, specifically analyzing the New Jersey PWFA (2014) and Delanoy v. Township of Ocean (2021), a court case interpreting the statute, to compare the new legal framework applied under the NJPWFA to the framework used under the PDA and highlight improvements.

Comments

Reader: Alex Hindman

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