Part 2 (1/2)

These types of explanations go some way to understanding individual differences in self-reports and the discrepancy between self-report and objective tests. Are there other reasons for these, and why does research with women generally nd decits in cognition whereas studies with other 44 animals generally nd improvements? Striving to understand cognitive skills, particularly memory, through carefully controlled, objective tests, psychologists and other researchers seldom study the kind of memory failures that are regarded as important by lay people. Although attempts are made to make ndings relevant and applicable to everyday life, psychologists are still more likely to be found testing memory for lists of words than the ability to remember an antenatal appointment. The development of questionnaires such as the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire, and the use of cognitive diaries, was in part an attempt to tap the kind of cognitive impairment that has an impact of people's everyday lives. So perhaps tests of cognition such as explicit memory tests are not close enough to real tasks to reveal decits of which women are aware.

The belief that women experience cognitive impairment during pregnancy has a real effect on women's lives. As we and others have shown, such beliefs affect the way that women are treated by employers and fellow workers (Pattison and Gross, 1996; Pattison, Gross and Cast, 1997).

Jackson et al. (1996) found that up to 30 per cent of registered midwives have negative att.i.tudes to women's ability to learn during pregnancy.

Several of the studies we review here found no evidence of cognitive decits during pregnancy. The following quotations are taken from two such studies: Pregnant women and new mothers generally should be condent of performing to their normal cognitive capabilities, but may be more affected than usual by a high cognitive load.

(Casey et al., 1999: 158) It is argued that the cognitive efciency of workers is not compromised by pregnancy but steps should be taken to ensure that work load is adjusted to take account of the self-reported reduced arousal that may arise.

(Morris et al., 1998: 377) As the above quotations ill.u.s.trate, even when researchers nd no evidence of cognitive decits, their conclusions or recommendations may suggest that women should a.s.sume that they have. The strength of the expectation of an a.s.sociation between pregnancy and cognitive debilitation seems to override research ndings to the contrary, and leads the researchers quoted here to undermine their own research.

4.BEING PREGNANT AT WORK.

Pregnancy and employment.

Work is one of the predominant components of everybody's daily life.

Employment is not only a means of achieving economic security or independence; it has psychological importance. At its best, work can provide opportunities for self-fullment, self-ident.i.ty, creativity, social engagement and the success of shared goals, skills or activities. At its worst, the money helps. Statistics show that the majority of women are in employment and women of childbearing age are therefore likely to be working when they become pregnant for the rst time (Eurostat, 2004). Immediately, however, the conjunction of pregnancy and work (by which we mean paid employment) invokes a variety of potential discourses concerning the role of women in the public domain. Thus, the topic of work, and the research on women, work and pregnancy, refer directly to the debates we have alluded to in the discussions of the medicalisation of pregnancy and childbirth and the normalisation of pregnancy through the predominance of the biomedical tradition. Furthermore, the issues of cognition and performance we discussed in the previous chapter can be regarded as integral to perceptions of women when they are pregnant in the workplace.

To examine these issues, we review some of the work on the a.s.sociations identied between pregnancy, work and health, particularly the health of the baby, and we examine aspects of women's experiences at work when they are pregnant, with a view to explaining how pregnancy is perceived in the workplace. In so doing, we will raise a number of issues which characterise the discourses of pregnancy and pregnancy research and which are revisited through the book. First we look at the impact of pregnancy on the workplace by reviewing evidence describing women's experiences of announcing their pregnancy and being pregnant at work. We go on to explore how these experiences might be explained. We then consider whether or how employment affects pregnancy, and the relations.h.i.+p between pregnancy, employment and pregnancy or birth outcome. Finally, we examine the products of research described, in terms of the advice and information about working that women may encounter and their behaviour in response to it. In the process of looking at how pregnancy affects 46 work, we make use of a range of research arising from a perceived need to address social policy and employment practices as well as psychological or health concerns addressed through academic studies of the topic. In considering the way that work may affect pregnancy, we draw on the epidemiological and physiological literature on factors inuencing pregnancy outcome as well as that examining the relations.h.i.+p between work and health.

Information on working during pregnancy comes from qualitative surveys of women and their employers investigating the implementation and experience of maternity rights, such as those by Rodmell and Smart (1982), O'Grady and Wakeeld (1989), McRae (1991, 1996) and a report from the National a.s.sociation of Citizens Advice Bureaux (NACAB, 1992). There are some experimental studies of pregnancy and employment, including our own (Corse, 1990; Halpert et al., 1993; Pattison et al., 1997), together with some more anecdotal work, for example Baildam (1991). Popular women's magazines, and publications aimed at pregnant women, also address these issues (Gross and Pattison, 2001). In other work of our own we have interviewed pregnant women about their experience at work and we will give some examples from these interviews. The largely quant.i.tative literature on outcomes is extensive and could form the substance of an entire book; only a sample of this is discussed here. There are a number of other texts that address similar issues from different perspectives, which are not reviewed here but provide fascinating additional material on the tricky work/life balance that has come to represent modern working life in the twenty-rst century (Brannen and Moss, 1988; Devlin, 1995; Humphries and Gordon, 1993). Our particular interest is on the period of pregnancy itself rather than on the related concerns of managing childcare and returning to work. These are signicant concerns in their own right which naturally follow from pregnancy but are not the focus of this book. Nevertheless, it is likely that pregnancy irretrievably affects women's relations.h.i.+p with paid employment.

Announcing a pregnancy at work Given women's current employment partic.i.p.ation rates, it might be a.s.sumed that pregnancy would be unremarkable in the workplace. But this is not necessarily the case: in 2003, a news item covered the outcome of an industrial tribunal that had found in favour of a lawyer who had been dismissed from her job while pregnant (BBC Radio News, 2003).

McGlynn's (1996) concern appeared to hold true: advances so far gained in relation to pregnancy dismissals do not yet reect a cultural s.h.i.+ft in att.i.tudes and consequently vigilance and continued campaigning is required to improve the real situation of women in the workplace' (McGlynn, op.

cit.: 229). Recent statistics conrm this (Dunstan, 2002; EOC, 2005; James, 47 2004). Of the 440,000 working women who become pregnant in Great Britain each year, almost half can expect to experience some form of disadvantage at work and as many as 30,000 will be forced out of their jobs while they are pregnant. Such gures clearly demonstrate that for a signicant number of women being pregnant at work is seen as unacceptable in some way, prompting commentators to liken such treatment to outdated Victorian values rather than suited to the twenty-rst century (The Guardian, 2 May 2003). Women's experiences of responses to pregnancy announcements catalogued by research ndings show that these can take several forms.

Rodmell and Smart (1982) interviewed 30 pregnant women at work in London about their experiences. The women represented a range of non-professional work where women were and still are commonly employed: as carers, in catering or in clerical jobs. Although women found work physically tiring, most felt able to cope well and said that they preferred to be at work rather than sitting at home. This was despite the fact that when asked how their managers had responded to the news of their pregnancy, the women indicated that att.i.tudes had varied from positive, through indifferent, to some cases where they were described as contemptuous. The women also talked about the responses from their direct colleagues; this was reported as more positive from female colleagues than male ones, with women saying that by and large their female colleagues were really pleased for them. In contrast, several women reported that men used the fact that pregnancy was not an illness but a normal event as an excuse not to be helpful or even pleasant, and were resentful that the women were going to be paid to take time off. Interestingly, some partic.i.p.ants were sympathetic to their colleagues' feelings of resentment and acknowledged the difculties that follow for all workers when someone is going to be off work for a length of time.

In their survey published seven years later, O'Grady and Wakeeld (1989) highlight similar ndings. Their survey involved 250 women and they summarise the responses of managers and colleagues to the news of a woman's pregnancy as generally positive. Women also reported a neutral response to the news from their boss as a good response, perhaps suggesting that negative comments are so obviously unpleasant that anything less than overt hostility is seen as positive. Overall, these women too reported that their female colleagues were more interested in their pregnancy announcement than their male colleagues. However, as in Rodmell and Smart's (1982) study, men's negative comments and responses often centred around the rights of pregnant women to pay and particularly to leave, on the grounds that maternity pay was a woman's benet not available to them and that maternity leave was seen as basically a paid holiday. Some older women were resentful that they had not had the chance to benet from newer maternity provisions themselves. Hence, it is not only the pregnancy 48 itself but also the consequences of the pregnancy for the rest of the employees that may create tensions in a workplace, and both their own current and future state have to be managed by pregnant women while they are working.

In Europe there are formal health and safety requirements, involving risk a.s.sessments, to move women to less dangerous working environments when they are pregnant. There are also inst.i.tutional policies with regard to pregnancy and alterations to working conditions, as well as rights for pay and reinstatement following leave. Rodmell and Smart's (1982) ndings suggest that arrangements to reorganise work or to change jobs to take account of more risky activities, for example using heavier cleaning equipment, or to cover during maternity leave, were frequently the result of informal arrangements with fellow workers rather than with their managers. Informal arrangements can break down through no fault of the individuals concerned and any arrangements can mean, of course, that women are not necessarily taken out of dangerous or physically demanding jobs, even when they should be. A further problem with informal arrangements was that the women concerned felt that their colleagues were doing them favours and this in itself caused the women anxieties about not letting fellow workers down, not being fair to them or getting them into trouble. Even when formal arrangements are made in an organisation, they are not always helpful. The relations.h.i.+p between the rhetoric of the legal requirements and the practice is exemplied by the case of a nurse, considered to be at risk working within a radiology department when pregnant, who was moved to a job involving anaesthetic gases, even though these carry as great a risk as radiation. It is also the case that changes in the employing organisation can effectively be used to ease women out of jobs while on maternity leave. Though this is against the law, there are many cases in literature where employers' responses have been aggressive and discriminatory, seeking to prevent women from working long enough to claim their rights to maternity benets or to create grounds for dismissal. For example, 'When the client discovered she was pregnant, her employer indicated his ''moral outrage'' at her unmarried state . . . and told her that he will reduce her salary by 40% on the grounds that she is not doing her job satisfactorily' (NACAB, 1992: 9).

Taking such an unhelpful line in response to a pregnancy announcement is not the only way that the experience at work can be affected. The women in Rodmell and Smart's (1982) survey said that personal comments increased: comments about their appearance or their size that would not otherwise have been made. mean, I got a lot of comments about my b.u.m or my body looking like some revolting blob' (op. cit.: 104). They also had to cope with some people's embarra.s.sment, particularly younger people. In O'Grady and Wakeeld's (1989) survey, they reported that men who were not directly unpleasant nevertheless behaved in ways that would normally 49 be considered unacceptable or even as hara.s.sment, such as patting a woman's stomach and making comments on fertility, on size and shape.

Comments on appearance are a common nding, even a ground for dismissal, as in the case of a care attendant dismissed by her proprietor who told her t isn't very nice having someone with a big belly working here'

(NACAB, 1992: 9). O'Grady and Wakeeld (1989) showed that marital status was another factor that affected how women were treated at work.

Like the client in the quote above, some single women reported that their colleagues wereshocked' that they were pregnant and not planning to marry: all my difculties stemmed from being unmarried but my pregnancy was deliberate. I was expected to marry straightaway. In fact I only returned to my job through lying and saying I am now married' (ibid.: 7). In our own interviews with pregnant women there were similar comments about marital status, especially addressed to the youngest women: 'people at work said I was too young' (Kirsty, age 17). The most recent Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) survey (EOC, 2005) found that disabled women who became pregnant were dismayed to be asked questions that colleagues had no right to ask, such as how they became pregnant and whether they should have.

Rodmell and Smart (1982) summarise their ndings as demonstrating that the responses of co-workers and management to the presence of a pregnant woman in the workplace were experienced by the women in the study as implicitly dismissive, even where ridicule was not intended. In order to explain away what they obviously found upsetting or discon-certing responses from people they regarded as friends or colleagues, some women resorted to blaming themselves. They suggested that they were being oversensitive and therefore reacting to situations in an atypical way.

Indeed, in an attempt to distance themselves further from the personal criticism they felt they had attracted, they accounted for their own sensitivities as the effect of their hormones. Pregnancy can hardly be considered routine in the workplace, when women have to negotiate this complex positioning of both their colleagues and themselves.

Women's experiences at work when they are pregnant are not solely the result of personal interactions. In a study of 2,250 pregnant women, Cherry (1987) examined the physical demands of work during the last three months of pregnancy. She found that 20 per cent of the women studied were required to stand for four hours or more every day, some with their back bent over work or handling loads with a twisted position. In most cases women could take a break when they felt it necessary but 8 per cent (still nearly 200 women) had to sit or stand for two or more hours at a stretch. The incidence of fatigue, varicose veins, back problems and breathlessness were all found to be related to general or specic job demands like these. Very few women in Rodmell and Smart's survey of pregnant women had regular and permitted access to rest facilities; many 50 were not allowed to sit down during the working day, and this refusal has been the basis of employment tribunal cases for constructive dismissal over a number of years. Women in the 2005 EOC survey also reported that although they were told they were allowed to sit down regularly by the health and safety a.s.sessor, managers overrode this permission because by sitting down 'they didn't look busy'. Furthermore, for some women who were expected to wear a uniform or protective clothing at work, there was not always an alternative version available for pregnant women. Indeed, many workplaces, workstations and much equipment and protective clothing are adaptable for overweight people but not for pregnant women.

Not having appropriate work clothes made the women feel self-conscious and drew attention to their state, making comments more likely.

The emphasis so far has been on negative experiences, since it is these that give such cause for concern. However, it is important not to automatically a.s.sume that all women will be treated the same way, since all the studies mentioned also found that women had had a positive experience, with colleagues and managers being extremely supportive and thoughtful.

A small survey of maternity policy in practice in Eire found that during their pregnancy women were treated well; the difculties arose when they returned to work (Brady et al., 1999). Importantly, however, the dif- culties that women encounter in the workplace do not necessarily detract from the benets that women gain in working. One woman in Rodmell and Smart's (1982) survey commented that she found her work easier, because she felt 'centred' and 'calm'. The emotional high of pregnancy can thus carry women through the more negative aspects of their working experiences during this 'special' time.

Nonetheless, an extremely important issue raised by women in several of the studies was that they no longer felt that they had the same employment status as they had done before they were pregnant (and this has implications for return to work too). Women found themselves excluded from training courses or promotion-linked activities, and this they felt was 'not exactly direct discrimination' but a form of exclusion. One woman quoted in the summary report of the EOC survey (Greater Expectations, EOC, 2005: 2) said that she felt treated like an utsider' the minute that she found out she was pregnant. O'Grady and Wakeeld's (1989) earlier study reported very similar comments together with some incidents of demotion or problems with promotion. There seemed to be an expectation that, once pregnant, women would no longer be as interested in work as before, and would probably not return to their job after maternity leave. In some cases this was taken to the extreme of appointing a permanent replacement before any nal decision had been made about a woman's return to work following her leave. Kate Figes, in her book Because of Her s.e.x, also gives examples of harsh treatment, for example the dismissal of a woman, who had taken a week's annual leave following the announcement 51 of her pregnancy, because the employer did not like the woman's att.i.tude (Figes, 1994).

It is usually the case that by looking at a series of ndings over time, it is possible to demonstrate a change for the better. This is not so in the treatment of pregnant women at work. Depressingly, the experiences described by Rodmell and Smart's study published in 1982 and the EOC surveys of 2005 are almost interchangeable, whether this is the negative responses to pregnancy announcement, the feelings of exclusion and lack of opportunities or the intrusive personal comments. While many women do report a positive experience, given the extent of possible negative treatment, it is perhaps not entirely unexpected that pregnancy also provides some women with an opportunity to give up work that they have disliked (Harris and Campbell, 1999). The consistency of the comments and ndings over time suggests that there is nevertheless a persisting resistance to pregnancy in the workplace.

The frequency of pregnancy discrimination highlighted by these studies draws attention to the different ways in which pregnancy continues to be represented in different domains, as we alluded to in Chapter 2. As we have discussed, pregnancy can be seen as a normal event that is treated in many ways as an abnormal one, and women are treated accordingly. The explanations appear to draw on not only social and cultural norms and expectations of women and of women when they are pregnant but to incorporate knowledge which arises in part from research on pregnancy.

Such research, in turn, depending on its rationale or theoretical position, both colludes with and challenges these representations. As with the other topics we are addressing in this book, the area of pregnancy and employment is a good example of how conicting and confusing evidence can be and how entrenched att.i.tudes and beliefs about pregnancy remain.

Why is pregnancy still so stigmatised within the workplace?

There are a number of explanations that might provide pointers to the way that pregnancy is situated within the public perception and why it continues to provoke such negative responses in the workplace. As the evidence suggests, treatment may reect current socio-political and cultural att.i.tudes to women in the workplace more generally. Discourses of femininity brought into play by the crossing of private and public boundaries through the visibility of pregnancy may present difculties for women wis.h.i.+ng to maintain their role as worker, and for employers and colleagues (Gross and Pattison, 2001). Alternatively, the persistence of negative treatment may result from the cultural perception of pregnancy as an ambiguous health state, falling between a natural healthy experience and a health state requiring medical attention. This is emphasised by the legislation which allows time off for visits to hospital and clinics, as well as maternity leave 52 itself. The a.s.sociation of pregnancy with sickness can lead to problems (Hanlon, 1995), since the ideology surrounding pregnancy as a healthy or sick state may affect women's own views of themselves as competent workers or as responsible mothers and their colleagues' expectations of pregnant women's performance (Pattison et al., 1997). The various explanations proposed are not mutually exclusive but represent a means by which the complexity of the issues, which are not exclusive to employment, can be explored.

Private life/public activity boundaries The rst of these concerns the overlap between the private and the public.

At a fundamental level, pregnancy very obviously brings into the workplace aspects of a person's private life that are normally restricted to conversations between close friends or family (though they may create the subject for jokes and gossip at work). The working environment comprises a mix of managers, subordinates, colleagues and friends, all of whom may have different responses to this visible transgression of privacy. The visibility of pregnancy as the representation of reproductive fertility and of s.e.xuality can transgress boundaries, here between home and work, which may normally be carefully policed. For example, workers may wish to display their commitment and adherence to the hegemonic male model of work.

An interesting anthropological study of a North American working environment, referred to as The Laboratory, demonstrates the way that home and work boundaries can be created and maintained by different types of workers and artefacts (Nippert-Eng, 1996). Nippert-Eng points to the variety of ways that such boundaries are represented, for example by the restriction of personal telephone calls, the availability of places to put personal effects and the degree of freedom to carry work equipment between home and workplace, as well as the integration of domestic and work items, such as keys or addresses, onto combined keyrings or home address les, and socialising with work colleagues out of work time. She describes both individuals and workplaces as integrative or segmenting, that is, those that encourage or allow a crossing over of the private into the public arena and those that do not. In this context she says: t is hard to imagine anything more fundamentally, undeniably integrating than a visibly pregnant worker. A pregnancy is a powerful souvenir of home life.

It brings the very essence of home into the workplace in its most sacred form' (Nippert-Eng, 1996: 213).

In an integrative workplace, pregnancy may enhance a family-friendly environment and Nippert-Eng describes the experience of three women who became pregnant around the same time within The Laboratory's personnel section. For them, pregnancy was a highly positive experience, 53 with the women sharing notes and discussing their progress with each other and other members of their group. In addition, they became more friendly outside work than they had been before their pregnancies. However, signicantly, such harmony was not the case elsewhere in the same organisation and by contrast t [pregnancy] seriously, undeniably challenges . . .

more segmentist groups. More than anything else, the varying treatment of pregnant women in the workplace shows that ''pollution'' is in the eye of the beholder' (op. cit.: 214). In clarifying this position, Nippert-Eng cites the case of a worker who found that on announcing her pregnancy not a single departmental member commented on it throughout the ante- and postnatal period and most avoided her altogether. This extreme response, which might in other circ.u.mstances be described as discrimination, chimes with reports in the EOC study (2005) of the ways that women were treated, which included not speaking to them and ignoring their presence.

Clearly, pregnancy can really create problems in maintaining boundaries for others and calls into question the way that women are perceived and how they are able to function in their work roles when at work.

One reason that this public/private distinction is so powerful may be because of continuing strongly held beliefs that it is a woman's primary duty to care for her family. Working during pregnancy may be seen as simply inconsistent with that belief. Furthermore, the boundary s.h.i.+fts between the personal/private and the workplace, and the a.s.sociated links with taboo images of women, can mean that it is seen as inappropriate, offensive or embarra.s.sing to have pregnant women in the workplace at all.