The unlikely new face of radical women's activism in the US? Meet Kiki Peppard, a 53-year-old switchboard operator and grandmother from Pennsylvania who claims she is one of millions of victims of "maternal profiling." Defined as "employment discrimination against a woman who has, or will have, children," feminist groups say that maternal profiling has reached epidemic proportions - and is getting worse. In essence, it involves employers building up information on a woman's age, marital status and family commitments to determine whether to hire her, how much to pay her and how much responsibility to give her. Is she likely to have children and need maternity pay? Will she want to work shorter hours?
All these factors push women up against a "maternal wall" - which has been described as the new glass ceiling - potentially stopping them from landing a job for which they are specifically, even uniquely, well qualified.
Peppard has spent the past 14 years campaigning unsuccessfully for a law to ban the practice in Pennsylvania. She experienced maternal profiling first-hand in 1994 when her husband left her and she moved from Long Island, New York, to Effort, Pennsylvania ("The name is appropriate," she sighs over the phone). She was rejected from 19 job interviews in a row because she was a single mother to James, then 14, and Carissa, then 11.
"The first question was always, 'Are you married?' The second was, 'Do you have children?' After that, they stopped the interview." After a year on welfare she finally got a job as a secretary at a high school where they asked no questions about her childcare responsibilities.
Unbelievably, then as now, it was perfectly legal in 28 states, including Pennsylvania, for interviewers to ask questions about a job applicant's marital status, family plans and caring responsibilities. At the end of last year, the New York Times called "maternal profiling" one of the political buzzwords of the coming year. Moms Rising, the increasingly high-profile US campaigning group, which promotes mothers' rights and has doubled its membership to 140,000 in the past year, has championed Peppard's case. And maternal profiling is edging its way onto the election agenda: Hillary Clinton pledged her interest when campaigning in New Hampshire last year.
In the UK, asking questions in a job interview about a woman's maternal status would leave an employer open to a sex discrimination case, yet there is a great deal of evidence that such profiling goes on unspoken. And it is a practice that affects not just mothers, but all women of childbearing age. Whether or not you intend to have children, the possibility that you might, could well be enough to put off a potential employer.
Last year, a survey by the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission, headed by Trevor Phillips, found that 70 percent of recruitment agencies had been asked to avoid hiring women who were pregnant or likely to get pregnant. The commission also found that mothers face more discrimination in the workplace than any other group. Those with children under 11 were 45 percent less likely to be employed than men, with that figure rising to 49 percent among single mothers.
A YouGov poll of 1,000 UK directors, also conducted last year, revealed that 21 percent knew of instances in which their company had avoided hiring women of child-bearing age - 19 percent admitted to making this decision themselves. In the same poll, more than two-thirds of senior executives said that the bureaucracy surrounding parental leave posed a "serious threat" to their companies. And in 2004 an extraordinary survey by HR information provider Cromer found that eight in 10 human resources managers would "think twice" before hiring a newly married woman in her 20s. (They had fewer reservations about hiring mothers with older children, they said, as they would be "less likely to take maternity leave.")
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