She Got a Baby, but Lost a Bonus

New York Times

22-02-2025

Maternity-Leave Moola
It's unfair, in my opinion, but in this case my opinion carries little weight. This is a legal question, and a very interesting — albeit complicated — one.
I spoke to Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, to get her take. Ms. Chettiar says that if there's a prorated bonus and it's clearly based on performance, then what your wife and her colleague experienced was legal.
But what does 'performance' mean? Does going on medical or maternity leave mean a person has demonstrated a lesser performance than, say, someone who didn't? The additional wrinkle here is that you say in general everyone gets the same bonus, so it's unclear that it is in fact a performance-based bonus.
This is one of those gray-area examples where it comes down to interpretation of the law and the individual circumstance, and whether your wife is being treated the same as other people who took leave. For example, if workers who took leave for something other than disability or medical reasons did NOT have their bonuses prorated, Ms. Chettiar says, that would clearly be discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which make it illegal to retaliate against workers for being pregnant or because of pregnancy-related needs. In this case, however, it seems that your wife is being treated the same as her nonpregnant colleague.
Marylou Fabbo, an employment lawyer in Massachusetts, your home state, said it was important to know that there's also the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal statute that entitles employees to take unpaid leave for specific medical or family-related reasons, which include a birth, a relative with health issues that require employee care or, as the website of Department of Labor says, 'a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job.' Massachusetts has a fairly new paid-leave law that is similar to that federal law, Ms. Fabbo added.
In this circumstance, she said, while the prorated bonus didn't sound strictly discriminatory, it didn't sound particularly fair.
She suggested that it would probably in your wife's best interest to consult an employment lawyer just to be sure. A statute like the Family and Medical Leave Act would probably require an employer 'to pay the full amount, depending on the laws that are applicable to the particular employee,' Ms. Fabbo said.
And if you're worried that the legal fees would exceed the bonus amount, she pointed out that many employment statutes, including those related to discrimination or failure to pay wages, required the employer to pay the employee's legal fees if the employee won the case.
You may want to start by contacting the Massachusetts attorney general's office, Ms. Fabbo added, and go from there.
Good luck.
Why Is the Apple Polisher Getting Ahead?
OK, you have two questions. One: whether there's anything more that you can do to communicate your concerns about your colleague E. Two: whether there's a way to contain your frustration about her continued enabling. My response to Question 1 is: No. I don't think there is. You've made attempts to broach the subject, and your frustrations appear to have been acknowledged by your boss, at least to a certain degree. But your boss doesn't want to really hear them or doesn't want to act on them, or both, for reasons that are unclear and, in the end, unimportant. The situation is what it is, no more, no less. Bringing it up again will probably just frustrate you more.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and the author of the book 'Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?,' pointed out, delicately, that just because you think something is unfair doesn't necessarily mean it is. Perhaps, he said, E is great with managing (or sucking) up while at the same time offering your boss something actually useful or valuable. You're not necessarily going to know.
If the goal of talking to your boss is to simply vent, this won't go very well. The best way to communicate your ongoing concerns is not to communicate them as complaints. You don't want to walk out of a conversation with your boss having compromised your reputation with your manager; you want to have improved it, Mr. Chamorro-Premuzic said.
As for the question of having to pick up the slack for E, he suggested having a conversation with your boss that's less about E and more about the team as a whole. (One risk is that your boss will perceive that you're criticizing him or her for being unfair and inequitable.)
'You don't want to look like a high school snitch,' Mr. Chamorro-Premuzic said. 'Maybe 10 or 20 percent of it should sound like a complaint, and 80 percent of it should sound like something that shows maturity and engagement and a deliberate attempt to improve the team performance.' He suggested leading with questions like 'Is there something that can be done to improve the team dynamics?'' to reframe the conversation as a positive one.
There is, however, something you can do to directly address your specific situation, which is to say your frustration. Karen Dillon, a former editor of The Harvard Business Review and the author of 'HBR Guide to Office Politics,' said she, too, once spent way too much time complaining about underperforming colleagues and talking about unfair favoritism. Now, she said, she has concluded that this was largely a waste of her time. She, not the colleague getting the special treatment, ended up the loser.
'As hard as it is, I think the advice I'd give people is focus on shining in their right,' Ms. Dillon said. Feeling resentment toward someone else will start to affect your performance, if it hasn't already. 'You have to decide it cannot affect how you do your job, because it's really destructive to you and you can be seen as the complainer or the critic or the downer person by if you're constantly talking to other colleagues about it or to your manager,' she said. 'When I let go of that, I think I just became a better employee myself.'
Listen, I know you want your boss to take direct action — but keep in mind that you're not seeing the entire picture. Your boss may not feel empowered to further address the problem with E because E, as you say, is adept at managing up, meaning that there may be people your boss isn't willing to go 'against.' Think of it this way: Your boss also has to manage up, and if E has strong allies farther up the food chain, I'm afraid to say there's no real advantage for your boss to make waves by making E an issue.
It's also hard to address favoritism when its origins come from elsewhere. Your boss may be an enabler, but she's definitely not the impetus. Your former boss is.
Your current boss may also be unwilling to take action because he or she is in some sort of denial. As a manager who has occasionally overseen subpar employees, I know that it can feel easier to put one's head halfway in the sand and take on the employee's work myself. I'm not proud of that, but there it is. As Mr. Chamorro-Premuzic puts it, 'Most managers, like most humans, prefer to avoid complicated issues.'
Which brings me to this: Your boss knows about E's failings and just doesn't care. It's a possibility, Mr. Chamorro-Premuzic said. It may even be a probability. And raising the issue with your boss 'is not a battle that you can easily win,' he said, not to mention politically unsavvy in an office where playing the game clearly matters. 'You might not like the rules of the game, but you cannot change them,' he said.
You can, maybe, hope for some self-reflection at some point from your boss. Ms. Dillon said managers reading this column might be well served by asking themselves: "Are they creating two different sets of standards for people who report to them?' If so, she said, 'you will not be seen as a great leader by your peers if you're not seen as managing your full team effectively.'