By Tara Deschamps
Arina Kharlamova was cradling her two-month-old daughter when an email popped into her inbox that disrupted the calm of her maternity leave.
The message invited the Whitby, Ont., woman to a meeting where she was told she was part of a layoff affecting 30 per cent of the staff at the company she worked for.
“It felt like a tailspin, honestly,” she recalled. “It was very, very destabilizing, very difficult to be present and continue just focusing on my baby rather than starting to panic.”
Though she didn’t know it at the time, Kharlamova was not alone in her experience.
A new study funded by advocacy group Moms at Work and law firm Hudson Sinclair found 15 per cent of 1,390 Canadian moms who gave birth in 2022 and 2023 were dismissed, laid off or had their contracts go unrenewed during their pregnancy, maternity leave or when they returned to work.
The respondents were surveyed online and reached through social media posts, email blasts and partner organizations, including women’s associations across Canada.
The overall Canadian workforce has an average involuntary turnover rate of 5.1 per cent, according to 2023 research from consulting firm Mercer.
Allison Venditti, Moms at Work’s founder, found the gap striking even though she had long suspected there was a connection between motherhood and job loss.
She’s heard many stories of pregnant women or new moms losing their jobs.
Some, like Kharlamova, were terminated as part of a larger group of layoffs because their employer was closing or downsizing, which means they likely would have lost their jobs regardless.
However, Venditti suspects that some companies add pregnant women or mothers to broader layoff lists because they’re “out of sight, out of mind” and easy to cut when managers are asked to let go of staff.
Others terminate them because they worry parenting will get in the way of work or reduce productivity, she said.
When Venditti broached the phenomenon with other people, she says they told her things such as, “it’s not a real problem” or “anecdotally hearing it from a couple of women doesn’t make it true.”
Realizing that “in order to fix the problem, you have to show that it’s a problem,” she set off to collect data. At 15 per cent, the findings suggests this group has more than three times the involuntary departure rate as the broader working population.
That wound up being “validating” for Deborah Hudson, a Toronto employment lawyer whose firm co-funded the survey.
She’s had at least 100 clients, including three in a recent week, draw a link between their pregnancies and their unemployment.
Employers cannot lay off workers because they’ve taken leave but are allowed to terminate employees during their leave if the reason for the cut is entirely unrelated to them being pregnant or giving birth, Hudson said.
That means moms on parental leave can legally be laid off if their employer goes out of business, closes one of its divisions or cuts a wide swath of its workforce to cope with mounting costs.
But a company can’t hire someone to temporarily cover a leave and then terminate the original worker to give the job to their replacement for the long term, Hudson says, because Canadian laws dictate that employees on parental leave must be reinstated to their original position or a comparable role upon their return.
In these cases and others, employers are betting their employees won’t go to lawyers, she says.
Employers that cut staff as a result of their impending or current parental status are often hoping workers won’t have the time, energy or funding to fight them, Venditti said.
When they do, she said it often ends up in a settlement because no one wants to endure a lengthy and expensive legal process.
“These are women who have been on maternity leave and are often getting 55 per cent (of their wages through employment insurance) who need to go back to work and are, in most instances, not in a financial position to go after their company because they’re trying to find daycare and a new job,” she said.
While the bulk of Canadian mothers Moms at Work surveyed kept their jobs through pregnancy, 16 per cent were denied flexible work during that time and 11 per cent said they were discouraged from attending prenatal appointments.
After giving birth but still on leave, 21 per cent said they were pushed to work while off with their baby and 29 per cent reported feeling pressured to return early.
When they were back on the job, 26 per cent reported reduced earnings because they were demoted to lower paying jobs or got fewer bonuses and commissions. Twenty-five per cent were denied promotions and one in six were reassigned “undesirable duties.”
Those numbers suggest to Venditti that “women are coming back to organizations that are making it very clear that they don’t want them there.”
“If they’re not pushing you out the door, many places are trying,” she said.
Companies should instead think more long-term, said Beth Wanner, a Regina-based marketing executive who started Mother Cover, a firm supporting workers that take leave.
She said about a third of parents leave their jobs within 18 months of returning from parental leave. Many make the leap to new companies because they felt unsupported during or after pregnancy at their last employer but would have stuck around if they were afforded more flexible work hours or weren’t overlooked for promotions or raises.
With companies spending up to 200 per cent of someone’s salary to replace employees gone for good and pouring months into training new workers, she said there’s not just a moral case but also a business case for them to treat women better during and after their pregnancies.
“This isn’t about charity,” she said. “This isn’t about just doing what’s right.”
It isn’t only companies with a role to play. Venditti said there is much the federal government can do as well.
Because Canada’s current employment insurance program requires recipients to have worked between 420 and 700 hours prior to a leave, when moms lose their jobs during or following pregnancy, they’ve likely burned through all of or most of their eligibility.
She’d like to see income support for mothers not be contingent on hours worked and be more generous than EI, which pays up to 55 per cent of a woman’s salary.
She envisions those supports could be offered through a program dedicated just for parental leave, rather than the traditional EI system.
“EI was designed as a protection but many, many, many people don’t qualify for it anymore,” she said. “The bottom line is, EI isn’t working for most mothers.”
