Supreme Court Considers Pregnancy Discrimination Claims

By a 6-3 majority, the U.S. Supreme Court provided clarification to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) last week in Young v. United Parcel Service, No. 12-1226, explaining how workers can prove discrimination when they are denied pregnancy-related accommodations. After examining disparate-treatment claims under the PDA in depth, the court revived plaintiff Peggy Young’s lawsuit against her employer UPS alleging pregnancy discrimination. Justice Stephen Breyer authored the majority opinion, joined by Justices John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, with Justice Samuel Alito concurring in a separate opinion.

At issue in Young’s case was the nature of the evidence needed at summary judgment to create a triable issue for a jury on whether the company had engaged in pregnancy discrimination under the PDA. Congress passed the PDA in 1978 to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in General Electric v. Gilbert¹ which found that an employer’s policy that provided sickness and accident benefits to all employees but did not provide disability-benefit payments for absence due to pregnancy did not violate Title VII. In particular, the Supreme Court reasoned in Gilbert that the employer’s plan was facially nondiscriminatory because it did not cover any risk for men that it did not also cover for women, and further concluded that the plan’s failure to cover a risk unique to women, such as pregnancy, did not render the plan discriminatory.²