A marketing manager is passed over for a director role two months after announcing her pregnancy, and the job goes to a male peer with less tenure. She files a complaint under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The company calls it business planning, because the role launches a major initiative during her expected leave, yet its hiring committee wrote “bandwidth” in its notes three times, and only about her. Rebecca Taylor, host of HR Voices, put that scenario to Lisa Santin, Chief Human Resources Officer at Graham Packaging.
Lisa’s first reaction was that the case is “way more common than people think.” It sits where legitimate business planning meets unconscious bias. Two words stood out to her. Bandwidth and continuity, she said, do “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Why “Bandwidth” Does So Much Work in Hiring Notes
People, Lisa said, tend to use “neutral words to help mask any kind of discriminatory motivation,” and she does not think they do it on purpose. That is how unconscious bias shows up on paper. The investigator’s job is to pick those words out and ask what the writer meant.
Her test is comparative. If bandwidth were a real requirement of the role, the concern would appear in other candidates’ notes too. Here it appears for one person, who happens to be pregnant. That is the pattern a disparate treatment claim rests on.
The law leaves little room. Lisa summarized the Pregnancy Discrimination Act as a bar on treating a pregnant employee differently from any other employee with a temporary medical condition. The statute’s own text requires that women affected by pregnancy be treated the same for all employment-related purposes as others similar in their ability or inability to work.
What the Investigation Has to Establish
A workplace investigation of this complaint, as Lisa described it, covers the employee, the hiring managers, the interview team, and anyone else who shaped the decision. She looks through the employee’s lens and the company’s, and expects the answers in the middle. People who called her for advice early in her career wanted a flowchart. Her answer was “it depends.”
Tenure matters, in Lisa’s view, but it is not the same thing as experience or qualification, so she would set the résumés of everyone interviewed side by side. This committee appears to have had no data behind its choice, which leaves a decision that was “more of a gut feel” and a set of notes as the only evidence.
Managers in this position usually say the same thing: that was never their intent. Lisa’s answer is that the test is impact, not intent. The concern is in writing, it is discoverable, and it looks bad whatever the committee meant. Her recommendation was to settle the claim, retrain the hiring teams, and implement “a structured interview and evaluation process immediately.”
What Actually Works
Build a Rubric That Puts Data Behind the Decision
A rubric states what the team is looking for and gives a way to score each candidate, so a committee can say, in Lisa’s words, there is “some data behind our decision.” Building it also aligns the hiring team on what a successful person looks like.
Lisa’s team keeps interview feedback out of the applicant tracking system, which she finds too hard for hiring managers to use. Interviewers complete a simple form instead: required feedback, a grade of one through five, and open-ended questions at the end.
Treat the Role and the Leave as Two Decisions
Lisa has worked with hiring teams that hired candidates they knew were pregnant, because they were the right people. Those teams kept two questions apart: who should fill the role, and what operational plan would cover the work during a leave. They chose “the right person for the long term” and solved the coverage separately.
A launch that lands during a key leader’s leave is a legitimate business concern, Lisa said, but “the key word is you have to plan for it.” Rebecca called the alternative “short-term thinking versus long-term thinking”: a period of maternity leave is temporary, and a director appointment is not.
Run Structured Interviews for Internal Promotions
Rebecca noted that the promotion process is “underrepresented in interview training,” because managers assume they already know the person. Lisa’s point was that knowing the candidate makes a structured interview harder to run. Set questions feel strange with a colleague.
An interview is already “an artificial environment,” she said, and required questions can make it feel more so. Her answer is practice: skilled interviewers ask the required questions in their own voice and add follow-ups. The alternative performs poorly. Harvard Business Review has reported that dozens of studies found unstructured interviews to be among the worst predictors of on-the-job performance.
Where Employee Relations Fits
The complaint is filed, and the employee still works at the company. Most of the time, Lisa said, an internal candidate interviewed in another department or with another manager, so HR is not managing the risk of retaliation from someone she reports to every day. That changes when the interviewer was her manager’s manager.
Rebecca raised a harder version: the peer who got the job may now be her boss, and moving her after a complaint can itself look like retaliation. Lisa’s answer was short. “Give her options.” One option feels like “this is being done to them,” she said, so HR should offer several and ask whether a different career path reaches what she wanted from the role.
What an employee in this position wants, in Lisa’s view, is “to be heard” and to see the company make it right. For any acknowledgment, her rule is a division of labor: HR tells counsel what it wants to say, and counsel says how.
Frequently Asked Questions About Pregnancy Discrimination in Promotion Decisions
Yes. Title VII prohibits pregnancy discrimination, and the EEOC lists promotions among the aspects of employment it covers. Here the stated reason was applied to the pregnant candidate alone.
Because it appeared for one candidate only. Lisa’s test is whether the same concern shows up in every candidate’s notes. Written three times about one pregnant candidate, it reads as a neutral word masking a discriminatory motive.
Less than managers expect. Lisa’s position is that the investigation turns on impact. The notes are in writing and discoverable, so good intentions still leave you with a record that looks bad.
Give her options. Lisa recommends offering several paths and asking what she wanted from the role. A single option can feel like something done to her, and an unchosen transfer can look like retaliation.
Treat the leave as a separate question. Lisa’s hiring teams pick the right person for the long term first, then plan the coverage. A planning concern is legitimate; using it to turn down the best candidate is not.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Lisa Santin’s framing explains why the accused manager usually says it was never the intent. Pregnancy discrimination, she said, often does not look like malice. “It looks like planning.” The committee that wrote “bandwidth” three times may have been planning a launch. Its notes are what make the decision hard to defend.
The assumption about HR she wants challenged is that it is “just the people people.” Her alternative is the HR business partner role in full: “a business partner that happens to focus on the people aspect of the business,” trusted by employees and by the leaders around them.
See how AllVoices helps HR teams investigate discrimination complaints consistently and document every step.
