10 News San Diego fills in the details:
A San Diego mother says working from home during the coronavirus pandemic cost her her job. She claims she was fired because her kids were making noises in the background of her teleconference calls …
Like many parents, Rios was unable to find childcare for her four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. Despite juggling parenting and working from home, Rios claims she was able to complete all her tasks. She adds that her clients never complained about her kids being in the background of her conference calls. The only complaints, she says, came from her male, direct superior.
"I said, 'Do you want me to lock my kids in the room? My one-year-old in the room? Do you want me to do that?' And… he responded and said, 'Figure it out.'" Rios said.
She says she tried to arrange calls to be during her children's afternoon naptimes but claims her boss continued to ignore and demean her.
"He would purposely overlap schedules," Rios said.
According to research conducted by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, 42 percent of the U.S. labor force is currently working from home full-time. It an ideal way to stay safe and promote physical distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's less than ideal for other reasons, especially if you have young children at home. For example, we've all seen more than one viral video of a child interrupting a Zoom meeting. (Personally, I had one interrupted by my dogs loudly fighting over a toy. After my apology, my clients said it was the best distraction they had all week.)
Work from home calls for understanding, compassion, and flexibility, not hard lines in the sand, deceit, and termination. If an employee is working well from home, being productive and timely, and putting out a quality work product (as Ms. Rios says she was), let it be. There will come a time when everyone could return to the office, but now is not that time. Work from him is going to be the "new normal" for many for the foreseeable future. If we can't work with it, we are going to lose too many good employees.
Moreover, it's just plain illegal to fire a woman based on her parental responsibilities if you don't hold similarly situated male employees to the same standard. As Suzanne Lucas writes at Inc.com: "If you enforce hours and quiet backgrounds for females but not for males, you'll violate sex discrimination laws. So, you can't call it cute when Joe's baby shows up on film but unprofessional when Caroline's toddler shows up. It's all or nothing."
No working mother should be discriminated against. That's called sex discrimination. It's also flat-out wrong to fire an employee in these circumstances, and it might just make you the worst employer of 2020.