Cameo Dalley | Workplace pregnancy discrimination is widespread

For my partner John and I, the arrival of our daughter Dune in March 2022, exceeded all our expectations of joy and excitement.

But it was also tinged with anxiety and uncertainty about the future of my career.

When I was about 19 weeks pregnant, I told my employer, Deakin University.

Nothing could have prepared me for the response.

Seven days later I got a call to say the contract I had been verbally offered was now going to be advertised instead.

Until that point, I'd been an integral part of the Indigenous Studies research team and worked late nights and weekends to meet deadlines on a grant application to the Australian Research Council that would fund our research for three years.

The application named the position for me, as "Senior Research Associate Dalley" and described me in glowing terms as, for example, the "ideal candidate".

All up I'd been part of about 500 emails over 15 months related to the project.

When the contract was advertised in the days after Dune's birth, I had to work on my job application while still in hospital recovering I felt torn during this time, desperately wanting to just focus on my beautiful new baby but also being worried about our future.

It was a struggle, but I still hoped that Deakin would do the right thing and give me the job I'd already been offered and worked so hard to get.

A few days later I found out that I had an interview for the job, but it didn't start well.

The chair of the panel opened by exclaiming "Cameo just had a baby!"

And the person who'd already told me I wasn't going to be given the contract when I shared my pregnancy news was also on the interview panel.

The HR delegate that I was told would be present also didn't show up on the day.

I'll likely never know what conversations transpired behind the scenes, but I don't think I ever had a real chance of getting that job.

Since my story went public in The Age newspaper on January 18, I've received a huge number of messages of support.

Some of them are from women who've experienced similar discrimination but didn't make a formal complaint.

Staggeringly, the Australian Human Rights Commission has suggested 50 per cent of mothers have experienced some form of pregnancy discrimination.

This is backed by other studies, such as one by JobWatch Employment Rights Legal Centre, which found that pregnancy discrimination is increasing, citing a growing number of enquiries to their call line between 2019 and 2021.

However, the rates of formal reported pregnancy discrimination are shockingly low, with only three formal legal claims for all of Victoria between 2016-2020.

Only one of these three cases was successful.

I imagine that the women involved at Deakin - and it was mostly women with children making the decisions about my future - tell themselves that this is all part of the competitive tussle of academia: "we had it hard in our career so why shouldn't you?"

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On hearing my story, others might wonder if I wasn't good enough at my job.

The perverse reality is that at the same time as the discrimination occurred, Deakin promoted me - an especially arduous process at universities.

I know I am good at my job and could've managed raising Dune and doing the work and that's what I proposed to them.

Deciding to pursue my claim of pregnancy discrimination through Deakin's internal processes and now through the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal hasn't been easy.

The support of the National Tertiary Education Union and my partner John have made it possible.

But it is still a long process involving countless meetings, trawling through emails, and drafting and responding to letters.

I took on all of this with Dune cooing and gurgling beside me and after starting a new job full-time lecturing at the University of Melbourne, because I thought it was the right thing to do.

Though it will have an impact long-term, thankfully for me the discrimination I was subjected to hasn't meant the end of my academic career.

I'm now in a team where my supervisor is supportive and the students that I lecture love hearing stories about my daughter.

Having a baby has been an absolute joy of my life, but it shouldn't have come at the cost of a job that I had been offered and worked hard to secure.

I want to draw attention to this so other people are treated better than I was, and that if one day Dune has a family, she doesn't experience what I have.