Family Responsibility Discrimination

The North Dakota Employment Law Letter analyzes the growing issue of family responsibility discrimination. An excerpt:

Consider the following two scenarios:

A male employee requests extended leave to provide at-home care to a sick child. Instead of evaluating the request based on his eligibility for leave, the employer questions why the child's mother can't care for her.

A qualified female employee with two preschool children is considered a "poor fit" for a promotion because the job requires out-of-town travel and would reduce her parenting time.

Although you may not have experienced those situations, you can probably recognize the cultural stereotype that mothers should be responsible for taking care of children. Unfortunately, factoring in that stereotype when making employment decisions is a form of gender discrimination known as family responsibility discrimination (FRD).