Nichole Foley had worked at Google for well over a decade when she was laid off in the fall, as part of yet another round of layoffs at the tech giant. “I had never had a bad experience,” she says of her tenure at Google. “I drank the Kool-Aid. I loved working there.”
Then she learned she was losing her job while she was still out on maternity leave and just as her child turned 10 weeks old.
It had already been a tumultuous few months. Foley had experienced a devastating loss when her brother died one week before she gave birth. At the time, Google had granted her four weeks of bereavement leave in addition to the six-plus months of parental leave she had already secured. When she was laid off, however, all that changed: Over a call with someone from the people team, Foley was told the company would no longer honor the bereavement portion of her leave.
“The meeting was over Zoom, and the woman was just so cold,” she says of her conversation. “The fact that she told me that I had to take out my bereavement leave when I lost my brother? That part has truly stuck with me through this whole process.” (Google declined to comment on the record for this story and would not comment on the circumstances of specific employees.)
Over the past year, as the tech industry tried to cut costs, employees such as Foley have become collateral damage, swept up in mass layoffs despite being pregnant or postpartum. Between Google, Amazon, and Meta, big tech companies have laid off tens of thousands of workers over the past 16 months—and the cuts to head count have continued into this year. Just last month, Tesla slashed well over 14,000 jobs. According to Layoffs.fyi, more than 340,000 tech workers have lost their jobs since early 2023, when layoffs accelerated across the industry.
While it’s difficult to pinpoint just how many pregnant people, expecting or on leave, were dismissed through mass layoffs, their accounts have emerged across social media in significant numbers. After her own layoff in 2023, former Google employee Brittany Lappano encountered so many people with similar experiences that she launched a support group on Discord last November. Dubbed the Labor Club, the group has drawn more than 400 members, offering camaraderie and counsel to laid-off workers looking for job opportunities and legal advice. Lappano is now seeking nonprofit status to formalize the group.
There are no explicit legal protections that shield pregnant or postpartum workers from mass layoffs driven by business needs. But in interviews with eight women who were laid off by companies big and small, most of them expressed shock that they lost their jobs while pregnant or on leave. Some of them wondered whether their terminations were legally sound or at least suspected their pregnancy had played a role in the decision.
Jack Tuckner, an employment lawyer who focuses on gender bias in the workplace and frequently takes on pregnancy-discrimination cases, says he has been fielding calls from workers “coast to coast” who have found themselves in this situation. “I believe that new moms and pregnant women are certainly vulnerable and do get terminated more,” Tuckner says. “But it’s kind of the same analysis as it always is: You [can] be fired when pregnant, just not because you’re pregnant. The bigger problem is when you have a massive layoff of a thousand or more folks, where the positions are being eliminated—how do you prove that sex, pregnancy, and perceived disability was a factor?”
Without a federal paid leave policy, the women who have lost their jobs have been left to weather the fallout with limited support from their former employers and no guarantee of a new job, all while caring for a newborn or on the cusp of giving birth. After a few months of considering her options, Foley finally hired a lawyer to push back on the terms of her layoff. “It took me a really long time to find a lawyer because I just wasn’t in the headspace,” she says.
Her lawyer sent Google a demand letter that argued her termination was discriminatory, given that someone else had stepped into her role; the letter also asked that her bereavement leave be honored. Google responded by citing performance issues for Foley’s termination—a claim she denies—and noting that the company would defend itself against any legal claims if she declined to accept the severance package. (A Google spokesperson noted that all laid-off employees were given severance and enough notice to apply for other roles, both within Google and elsewhere, and that employees who were on leave were supported in a manner that was specific to their situation.)
At that point, Foley felt like she had to move on, rather than fighting back. “My partner is a stay-at-home mother, so it’s just me as the head of the household,” she says. “I really had no choice but to accept the severance agreement.”
It’s not just big tech
The experience of losing your job while pregnant or on leave certainly isn’t unique to Big Tech employees. But the scale of layoffs at companies such as Google has meant that there are simply more workers who happen to be in that position. Many leading tech companies have also spent years courting would-be parents with generous benefits: In 2022, Google expanded its parental leave from 18 weeks to 24 weeks. Meta provides 20 weeks of paid leave, while both Salesforce and Adobe offer 26 weeks for birthing parents or primary caregivers, and Netflix grants all parents up to a year of paid leave.
Multiple former Google employees have said, across social media and in interviews with Fast Company, that they felt misled after working at a company that had portrayed itself as particularly welcoming to working mothers. Following a major round of layoffs in early 2023, when Google cut 12,000 jobs, a group of employees who were laid off while on parental leave and medical leave sent a letter to senior management, looking for assurance that the company would pay out any leave that had already been approved; the letter reportedly went unacknowledged. (A Google spokesperson said that the company’s severance package was in line with the industry standard, including for employees who were on leave.)
While many employees did get considerable severance—which is determined by an employee’s tenure at Google—the company did not cover the remainder of their leave in most cases, according to a CNBC report from last year. Other Big Tech companies, including Meta, reportedly took a similar approach after layoffs in 2023, while Amazon paid out employees for the remainder of their leave.
Fiona, an ex-Googler who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, was laid off barely two weeks before she was set to return to work. “I had already made a whole plan with my team and had bought a bunch of clothes to get myself ready for work,” she says. “I had gotten childcare lined up. That’s thousands of dollars.” When Fiona was notified about her layoff—by someone she had never met—she was told the decision was not related to performance.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been let go because she was not “visible” for the six months she had been on leave, especially once she discovered that the man who had taken over her role during that time would stay on after she was laid off. “I worked really hard before going on leave to train my colleagues,” Fiona says. “It was very convenient to let go of the person on leave because the work’s already being covered.”
As for the two weeks that remained of her leave: Like other employees, she was told that she wouldn’t get paid out in full. The company argued that those two weeks were actually classified as “makeup holidays,” which are meant to account for company holidays that an employee misses while on leave. “It’s almost as if they were saying, You weren’t really on leave,” she says.
There has been no shortage of stories about tech companies fumbling mass layoffs over the past few years, including during the recent wave of job cuts. And while major employers like Google tend to be under a microscope due to their reputation and outsize place in the tech labor market, many startups and smaller tech companies have quietly dismissed their fair share of workers who are pregnant or on leave as well, and usually with much less of a financial cushion. Unlike at larger tech companies, where employees can band together and put pressure on management, those who experience layoffs at smaller firms may not encounter the same level of support.
Brianne Gasquet was laid off five years ago while on maternity leave and then again in 2023—this time, while eight months pregnant. As a senior-level employee who has spent more than two decades in tech marketing, she’s familiar with the kinds of tough decisions companies are often forced to make in the event of layoffs, especially at startups, and that they likely aren’t intentionally targeting employees who are pregnant or on leave. But she also believes that employers could handle those moments with more humanity and grace.
“I have, in my past, had to lay off a woman who was in chemotherapy and who had just had a double mastectomy,” she says. “It’s hard and awful and terrible. [But] the first thing I said was, ‘She has cancer. Can I do something else? . . . Because you can’t take someone’s healthcare away from them when they’re sick and fighting for their life.’” When it comes to workers being laid off during or after pregnancy, Gasquet feels that companies don’t necessarily think that way, despite the uniquely difficult circumstances those women face when they lose their jobs. “I don’t know how many of those conversations happen,” she says. “But I would say I think there’s very little advocacy for pregnancy in those situations.”
Other women told Fast Company they were not entirely shocked by getting laid off, given the financial realities at startups and the discrimination that many still face due to pregnancy. An engineer who asked to remain anonymous told Fast Company she was laid off from a small startup last month, weeks before she was slated to return to work. As soon as she disclosed that she was pregnant, she grew concerned about how the news might impact her job security. “I was kind of scared that I would be an easy layoff considering I was pregnant,” she says. But she was taken aback by the aftermath: She was offered only one month of severance.
She is still negotiating with her employer in the hopes of getting a bigger payout and extending her insurance coverage—and she says she is willing to take legal action if necessary. “I just think companies will try to get away with it wherever they can, which is why I’m trying to be firm,” she says, adding, “I have a daughter, and I feel like what I’m doing now is indicative of her future.”
What legal recourse?
Pregnancy discrimination in the workplace can be difficult to prove in a court of law, in part because companies can rationalize their decisions as role eliminations or cost-cutting measures. Even so, Tuckner says his firm still sees plenty of cases that are clear instances of discrimination. Those cases tend to follow a more typical pattern, in which a pregnant worker might be denied reasonable accommodations or face retaliation as a direct result of their pregnancy. (This kind of discrimination is also protected under federal law, between the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect last year.) “Usually the pregnancy itself, and the accommodations that were sought, were critical factors in the final adverse employment action,” Tuckner says. “Or a woman is being treated differently during her pregnancy, before there’s a termination, and that gives her massive leverage to raise these protected issues.”
Despite the breadth of accounts from pregnant and postpartum women who were laid off, the ongoing layoffs in tech have impacted workers of all stripes, from immigrants on work visas to employees on medical leave. But mass layoffs do present an opportunity for companies to potentially discriminate against employees, unintentionally or otherwise, and frame those decisions as a role elimination or part of a broader restructuring.
In a recent op-ed, Chelsey Glasson—a former Google employee who sued Google over pregnancy discrimination and received a settlement—pointed out that it’s hard to determine whether there’s targeted discrimination against workers who were pregnant or on leave, given that employers don’t offer insight into their layoff decisions. As Glasson notes, companies have also started using artificial intelligence to assist in those decisions, which could introduce algorithmic bias into the process that might penalize, say, employees who’ve been on leave and haven’t been producing work. (Foley and Fiona both wondered if an algorithm could have played a role in their terminations, but Google has previously denied using algorithmic tools to make layoff decisions.)
But even when an employee has a strong case, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff—and it can be financially and emotionally taxing to take on deep-pocketed tech companies. “It’s just always a major uphill battle,” says Tuckner, who has previously brought lawsuits against companies like Google and Salesforce. “We are dealing with an unlevel playing field.”
Regardless of the employer, women face hurdles when they try to pursue legal action. A former employee at a gaming company, who asked to remain anonymous, told Fast Company she was fired from her role while four months pregnant. She had notified her employer early in her pregnancy, since she needed some accommodations at work. “I wasn’t afraid to tell them because my [senior] managers were all parents, as well,” she says. “It seemed like it would be a safe place. When I told my boss initially, he seemed really happy for me—and then slowly, things changed. I didn’t even get to find out about the leave policy because they ended up letting me go.”
Though her employer cited budget reasons, the termination seemed pointed; she was the only person who lost her job at the time. But when she looked into taking legal action, no lawyer would take her case. Eventually, she turned to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and filed a complaint on her own, winning a settlement equivalent to about six months of her prior salary through the agency’s mediation process.
Still, there are plenty of reasons laid-off tech workers decide against moving forward with legal action, assuming they can find a lawyer who believes they have a case. The damages awarded in these cases are often nominal—in the five-figure range, according to Tuckner—and typically hinge on how long a worker is out of a job after their employment is terminated. That means the attorney’s fees can “dwarf the amount that the plaintiff received,” he says.
Like Foley, many women ultimately decide to accept their severance and look to the future, rather than escalating their case beyond an HR complaint or demand letter. Fiona, for her part, is still deciding whether or not to take legal action. While multiple lawyers have said she has a case—given that another employee took over her role—she is hesitant to pursue it. “I don’t want to go to trial and spend the next three years of my life angry and fighting this battle, only to get a very small reward,” she says.
The job hunt
Losing a job at this juncture in tech’s endless boom-and-bust cycle has thrust these workers into a particularly volatile job market, at a time when many parents would prefer to focus their attention on their baby. And many of them are only now realizing the bias embedded in the hiring process, especially in an industry that has not always been hospitable to women. Gasquet says that when she was laid off last year, she believed that it was purely a business decision. But that offered little comfort as she started casting around for a new job. “I knew this was not discriminatory,” she says. “But I was about to have a baby. So who the fuck is going to hire me?”
She quickly realized just how difficult it would be to find a new role, despite her many years of experience. It felt like there was never a good time to tell a prospective employer that she was expecting. “I had lots of ghosting once I mentioned I was pregnant,” she says. “Complete silence—like [we] weren’t ever having conversations. That exact thing is what women are afraid of when they interview while they’re pregnant.” Gasquet knew she could have accepted jobs without having to share her pregnancy status but didn’t feel that was the right way to start a relationship with a potential employer. “I legally don’t have to disclose it,” she says. “So I felt like I was getting punished for having integrity around this.”
After many interviews, she got a job offer for a “very demanding” senior role at a startup, only to have it rescinded when she revealed her pregnancy; the company then extended two subsequent job offers that were also rescinded. In the end, they asked her to be a contractor for a fraction of her going rate. During the interview process, Gasquet had told several people at the company that she was pregnant; she was also looking into hiring a night nurse so she could begin working within weeks of giving birth.
But the CEO “magically forgot” about her pregnancy, she says, until just before she signed the final offer—at which point she was told that the company needed someone who could start right anyway. “It really reinforced for me that you are not welcome in the workforce in this part of your life,” she says. “It’s a burden. It’s inconvenient.”
Other women say they have stopped looking for a job altogether after negative experiences with recruiters and potential employers. Paiton Tunstall, a former employee at One Medical, was laid off six months into her pregnancy, when the healthcare company went through a round of layoffs in February. Tunstall had been at the company for years and had noticed a shift in the culture after One Medical was acquired by Amazon.
Due to a previous ectopic pregnancy, Tunstall had to be monitored closely by her doctors, and her managers required her to formally request intermittent leave to account for the regular appointments. When she was eventually laid off, she had a feeling her impending pregnancy played a role in the decision, especially since it was documented that she’d had to intermittently step away from work. Tunstall was also one of the highest-paid employees on her team and was about to go on leave. (As part of a statement to Fast Company, a spokesperson from One Medical said, “Neither pregnancy, nor any health condition, nor any leave of absence, are ever factors that contribute to the decision to eliminate roles.”)
Once she was laid off and looking for a new job, Tunstall was told by a recruiter that she was unlikely to get hired due to her public posts on LinkedIn that revealed her pregnancy status—that if another candidate had the same résumé and experience, “they’re going to go with that person, not you.” The encounter rattled her, especially as her due date grew closer. Tunstall worried that she wouldn’t be able to find a job where she would be immediately eligible for paid parental leave. (At most companies, employees are only entitled to parental leave benefits after 6 to 12 months of tenure.) Now that she is 38 weeks pregnant, Tunstall says she has no choice but to put her job hunt on hold until after she gives birth.
The upheaval of facing an unexpected layoff has also prompted some women in tech to reevaluate their careers, as they look to their next chapter. That’s especially true for people like Foley, who were forced out of Big Tech companies and say they felt disillusioned and as if they lost their sense of self. “I want to be present for my family,” says Foley. “I don’t want to go back to the grind because Google was literally my entire identity. I feel like I’m dealing with grief over [that] because my friends are all Googlers; my job was number one. I wasn’t prioritizing anything else.”
Another former Google employee, who was laid off in early 2023 right after going on leave and who asked to remain anonymous, has questioned whether she would ever want to work at a Big Tech company again. In the time since she was laid off, she has heard from women who faced similar experiences at other large companies. As she looked for a new job, some of her contacts at Google had asked if she was interested in coming back to the company—but she didn’t feel comfortable with the idea. “I was very nervous about going to Big Tech,” she says. “I was just so burned by that.”
Nearly all the tech workers interviewed for this story believed their employers could have done more to support them through the process of being laid off during a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. The experience also highlighted the lack of a federal safety net, which leaves women overly reliant on the largesse of their employers for basic benefits like paid parental leave. For every pregnant or postpartum tech worker who has lost their job, there are countless others who have faced a similar plight but without the financial security and privilege that a career in tech can offer. “It has a larger and long-term economic impact because women are delaying having children,” Gasquet says. “They’re reconsidering having children. And sometimes, it’s for these reasons. It’s because their livelihood may be impacted—and they’re not willing to take the risk.”