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Family responsibilities discrimination ("FRD") is employment discrimination that is based on workers' responsibilities to care for their family members. This type of discrimination may happen to pregnant employees, employees caring for aging parents, parents with young children or workers who have a family member with a disability. If these employees face unfair discrimination in the workplace based on responsibilities such as this, they may be experiencing FRD.
If you have a job and family caregiving responsibilities, you may be affected by FRD. Women with children are most likely to encounter FRD: they are 79% less likely to be recommended for hire, 100% less likely to be promoted, and are generally offered at least $10,000 less in salary for the same position as a similarly situated male.
Increasingly, men face family responsibilities discrimination in the workplace when they seek to actively care for their children or other family members. FDR against men can take a variety of forms, for example some employers have denied male employee's requests for leave for childcare purposes even while granting female employee's requests.
While this appears to be a form of FRD, it is probably not illegal. In most states, marital status or familial discrimination is not against the law. Even if your state does recognize these forms of discrimination as illegal, being forced to temporarily cover for another employee is not likely to be considered serious enough to succeed in a discrimination complaint. Many companies have adopted “flextime” or other “family-friendly” policies which make it easier for workers with children to balance work and family commitments.
If you still believe you have been treated unfairly, you may wish to discuss this situation with coworkers, your supervisor, or your company's personnel department to determine whether the company can adopt leave policies or practices that treat employees with and without children the same, or whether the department's work can be reallocated so that no one person is required to assume the burden of a worker's absence for family reasons.
"Inequality doesn’t just disappear when we move our work online, and gender equity is still elusive, whether you’re meeting via Zoom or in a boardroom."
–Elissa Sangster| Forbes
from Medicare Plan Finder
Caregiver Statistics