Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday evening used an attack from the right about her past experience with gender discrimination to lead a national conversation about a common occurrence in American workplaces—the firing, demotion, and unfair treatment of workers who become pregnant.
“Rendering subjects of discrimination untrustworthy narrators, because they can’t prove it, or perhaps aren’t even sure if it was definitely wrong—is part of how discrimination works.”
—Rebecca Traister, journalist
On Tuesday evening, a day after the Washington Free Beacon claimed Warren had lied about experiencing gender discrimination, the Massachusetts Democrat and 2020 presidential candidate released a video detailing her experience of being fired from a teaching job after she became visibly pregnant in 1971.
The video also included stories from a number of women who had suffered similar treatment at work—some recounting incidents that took place decades ago, like Warren’s, and others detailing their treatment at work in the very recent past.
“When I was 22 years old, I had an experience that a lot of women will recognize,” Warren said, as she has at many campaign events. “I had been hired for the next year, all hired and set to go. And then when they realized I was pregnant, the job was given to someone else.”
“This kind of stuff still happens now,” she added.
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The senator shared the story of a woman named Summer, who said she was not offered a job based on gender discrimination.
“Women are still fired or not hired at all basically for looking like they might one day soon want to become pregnant,” Summer wrote. “Someone at the U.N. once told me to my face this was why I didn’t get a job.”
Another woman wrote about mistreatment her mother faced in 1989:
Warren posted the video on social media after the Free Beacon published a story on Monday claiming she lied about her experience. The publication reported that Riverdale, New Jersey school board records refuted her claim that she had not been asked back to teach for a second year due to her pregnancy:
The Free Beacon also pointed to tweets posted by Jacobin journalist Meagan Day on October 1 suggesting “that Warren’s story appeared to have changed over the years.” The Free Beacon noted that Warren’s two retellings of her experience—that she wasn’t asked back when her pregnancy began to show and that she decided, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me” while pregnant—”aren’t necessarily incompatible.”
Many observers quickly defended Warren, with Vox.com journalist Emily Crockett writing, “It’s actually trivially easy to reconcile what some believe are contradictions” in Warren’s story.
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In an interview with CBS News Tuesday, Warren said she was indeed offered a job for the next school year in April 1971, as the records showed, but that the offer was rescinded in June when she was 6 months along in her pregnancy.
The story led many women on social media on Tuesday to share their own stories of pregnancy discrimination—and their frustration at the suggestion that Warren’s story wasn’t believable.
“Insisting that a woman who has described (and perhaps understood) her own professional trajectory in different ways at different points in her life is ‘obfuscating’ contributes to the sense that those who’ve faced discrimination and felt confused or ashamed about it, can’t be trusted to tell us that they’ve experienced it,” wrote journalist Rebecca Traister. “Rendering subjects of discrimination untrustworthy narrators, because they can’t prove it, or perhaps aren’t even sure if it was definitely wrong—is part of how discrimination works.”