Disclosure

I had an interesting discussion last week about whether a woman should be required to disclose whether or not she's pregnant at a job interview. Now I know that legally she's not, but what about ethically?

I don't think so. I've heard the argument that an employer should know if the person they're hiring is going to be leaving in a few months on maternity leave, which perhaps leads to the real discussion: maybe it's not pregnancy that's the issue, but maternity leave.

Obviously women need to take some time off after the baby is born and since 2001, Canadian families have been able to take as much as 52 weeks of combined maternity/parental leave and still be able to return to their jobs. Most of the women I know have taken the whole year, although a woman's particular career may dictate that taking that amount of time off just isn't possible.

But getting back to my original point, how do we (and I mean the global, societal "we") balance this time out of the workforce with our career and family plans, and how do we expect employers to deal with the fact that if they hire a woman of child-bearing age, the odds are good that at some point she'll be away from the job and they're going to have to figure out some way to compensate for her absence. Where do the lines of being a responsible employee and making a personal, private decision, cross? Do you owe it to your employer to notify them well in advance (i.e. we're trying) or do you wait until it's too obvious to ignore (a la Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up)?

I'm sure there's a happy medium that is entirely individual; it depends on you, your employer, the kind of job you have, and where you see your career heading. The only thing that's certain is that no man, no matter how well-intentioned, will ever have to deal with these same considerations.