Discrimination against protected parties occurs in almost every work level across the nation. Despite reforms and more attention-getting drawn to the topic, it continues to make the lives of workers everywhere more miserable.
This includes the lives of pregnant workers, who often suffer from a less visible form of discrimination. Technology in the modern workplace, unfortunately, serves to worsen this discrimination, too.
Reasons for discrimination
American Progress discusses some of the efforts made toward dismantling bias against pregnant women at work. Pregnancy discrimination exists due to unfounded opinions and beliefs that these workers will end up ditching their jobs after giving birth, or that the quality of their work will decline after becoming a parent.
Because many states have laws against directly firing pregnant workers simply for being pregnant, employers often find other ways around this. A popular method is to ice out an expectant worker by making the work environment inhospitable to them.
The rise of technology-aided discrimination
Unfortunately, technology aids in this technique by allowing workers and employers to create private chat channels or group messaging systems and disclude whoever they do not want privy to their chats.
In workplaces with high rates of discrimination, online bullying is a major issue. This often occurs inside of private chat channels, where employers and employees can talk amongst themselves about the employees they do not like without any repercussion, and without the victim having any awareness that this is happening.
By the time the harassment spills out into the real world, it is often amplified and notably aggressive, causing even more stress for the targeted individual. This is why many targeted victims of harassment seek compensation.