Can Pumping a Bottle Get You Fired?

Sue Shellenbarger at The Juggle reports that "an Ohio Supreme Court decision allowing a breastfeeding mother to be fired from her job for taking breaks to pump milk has ignited an angry buzz among bloggers."

A closer look at the ruling reveals the court actually dodged the core question – whether breastfeeding mothers are protected by pregnancy-discrimination laws – and focused instead on the fact that Ms. Allen’s attorneys didn’t offer enough evidence up front that her employer was motivated by discrimination. One dissenting justice, J. Pfeifer, objected that the court should have ruled anyway on the core question of whether breastfeeding mothers can legally be fired for pumping at work. (He and two other justices believe they cannot, court papers show.) And legal experts warned employers not to assume they can deny breast-feeding mothers the breaks they need.

The breastfeeding mother in this case was a warehouse laborer who was scheduled a break after five hours of work, arguably a quite different environment than that of many women lawyers. Still, the issue of pumping at the office has popped up from time to time. 

Have any readers experienced difficulties finding the time or space to pump in the office?

Scaling Back Career for Baby

In a recent post on her New York Times' Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin turned a question she received over to her readers. Here's a snippet of Anna's letter to the readers:

I used to secretly look down on stay-at-home moms. I’m not proud of being so judgmental, but opting out seemed like the easy road to me, an excuse to avoid the 9-to-5. If I asked someone I just met at a party what she did for a living and her answer was “I stay at home with the kids,” I’d mentally check out of the conversation. Surely I had nothing in common with this person....Then my husband and I decided to have a baby.

...I returned to work last week, and I already feel like I am missing so much at home. When I lock eyes with my daughter during a feeding or rock her to sleep in the glider, it feels right — like this is what I was born to do. I know it’s not logical or even true, but I feel like I am the only one in the world who can take care of her properly...

What is the right thing for me to do?

Almost 400 readers responded in the comments, including some attorneys. The dialogue is quite interesting with a wide range of advice, opinions, and thoughts for Anna--and for any of us who have faced returning to work, leaving a new baby at home.

On a Tightrope

In her New York Times piece, The Tightrope of Managing a Law Office, Anita J. Cicero discusses the challenges of being an office managing partner.

Watching management issues unfold each week is like watching TV when someone else controls the remote. One moment you’re watching a documentary, then — click! — it’s a thriller, then a drama, then the evening news. Switching among unfolding story lines, focusing on practical and fair solutions and trying to remember to prepare that agenda for a 4 p.m. teleconference make for stimulating and often exhausting days.

At 43, a relatively young partner at Drinker, Biddle & Reath, Cicero sought out advice and support from friends and nearby law firm managers.

Speaking Salary

In her recent New York Times article, Girl Power at School, but Not at the Office, Hannah Seligson discusses the "new arsenal of skills" that women need to succeed in the workforce. She suggests that letting go of perfectionist tendancies and creating professional networks are two critical skills to success. Additionally, to keep up with the old-boy's club, women need to start "speaking salary."

Gen Y and the Blame Game

The New York Times’ Lisa Belkin—she who graced us with the oversimplifying phrase “opt-out”—is a good writer, and she frequently touches on subjects that I find personally compelling. This is largely because she’s one of the few mainstream media writers writing about the working life struggles that I face or will face, and which I spend a lot of time thinking about. (Why she has been cosigned to the Styles Section, rather than, say, the Business Section, and what message that sends about the valuation of issues relating to working women and men vis-à-vis their personal lives, is worth a whole other post.) Still, while I appreciate that she is talking about various issues that I think are extremely important, I always feel as though her articles leave me feeling unhappy or unsatisfied because she has left out important points or only presented a narrow side of the story.

Today’s column, Prepping Children for the 9 to 5, is no exception. In it, she talks about the effect that parents can have on their children’s attitudes and expectations about work. For the record: this is a great topic, and one that is probably deserving of much more study and discussion. I’m sure that if you scratched the surface a little, most people will reveal that their thoughts, expectations, and aspirations about work are heavily influenced by their parents’ experiences, and their interpretation of their parents’ experiences. I, for example, realized very early how frustrating it was for my mother to give up her career to stay home with me and my two brothers, even though she made this choice willingly and wanted, at some level, to be a SAHM.

But where Belkin lost me is when the article took a turn and indicted an entire generation—my generation, Generation Y—for being self-absorbed, unwilling to work hard, and easily dissuaded. The anecdotes used are particularly telling: one is about consultant running into a friend who quit his job because it interfered with his social life and he had to work weekends. The other is a quote from another consultant, who said “This generation has been spoon-fed self-esteem cereal for the past 22 years. They’ve been told it’s all about them—what they want, what they are passionate about, what they find fulfilling.” And while Belkin does allow that the “sharply different attitude toward work” of Gen Y is “probably their parents’ doing,” there is not much else to counter this image of Gen Y-ers as fragile, self-centered creatures who will quit or give up at the slightest sign of difficulty.

[More after the jump]

Is opting back in really a trend?

What would we do without the New York Times’s Lisa Belkin?  I know that I’ve acknowledged that every now and then, the Times gets it right, but I’m returning to my default position, which can be summed up like this: oh, come on.

No Pressure - Just Be Perfect

I was having a great weekend (given that Ms. JD had its national launch at Yale Law School on Saturday) when I opened up my Sunday Times. Great, I thought: just as was noted in Ms. JD’s presentation at the start of Legally Female, The New York Times has gone six months without some earth-shattering revelation about women, so another pronouncement was due.