In a decision likely to increase the pressure on President Barack Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court, the justices today ruled that employers may give less credit for long-ago pregnancy leave than for other medical leave in calculating pension benefits.
The 7-2 decision in AT&T Corp. v. Hulteen focuses on the way in which employers calculated the effect of pregnancy leave on pension accruals before passage in 1978 of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. That law required employers to treat pregnancy leave the same as temporary disability from that point forward, but it was not retroactive. AT&T responded to the law at the time by equalizing treatment of both kinds of leave prospectively, but four employees now say the prior lesser treatment of pregnancy leave amounts to actionable sex and pregnancy discrimination.
Retiring Justice David Souter, writing for the majority, said AT&T's actions were not illegal when done, so cannot now be viewed as discriminatory. The Court's only woman, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote a dissent joined by Justice Stephen Breyer. Ginsburg asserted that AT&T committed a "current violation" of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act "when, post-PDA, it did not totally discontinue reliance upon a pension calculation premised on the notion that pregnancy-based classifications display no gender bias."
Ginsburg did not announce her dissent from the bench as she had in a 2007 case she has said raised similar issues -- the so-called Lilly Ledbetter case, which ruled out pay discrimination claims based on long-ago pay inequities even though a woman might not have known about the disparity when first hired. In a recent interview with USA TODAY, Ginsburg said the Dec. 10 oral arguments in Hulteen were "just for me, Ledbetter repeated." She also said her male colleagues showed "a certain lack of understanding" of the bias a woman can face on the job. In the same interview, Ginsburg renewed her call for appointment of more women to the Court.
Check back later for more on today's action at the Supreme Court
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