The Equality Act protects you from the moment a job is advertised, not from the moment you start work, and that catches employers out as often as it catches applicants off guard.
Employee-favourable
2024
Keeping in Touch days rarely cause a claim on their own, but mishandling them alongside other issues can tip a wider pattern of treatment into unlawful discrimination.
Working out maternity leave and pay can feel like decoding a different language while you're already stretched thin. This guide sets out the entitlement rules in plain terms.
Employee-favourable
2026
You can win an unfair dismissal claim over a dismissal timed around your return from maternity leave, even where a tribunal won't also uphold a discrimination claim on the same facts.
Thinking about asking for different hours, times, or working from home? Here's what the law requires from your employer, and what to do if they get it wrong.
Employer-favourable
2010
Nothing obliges your employer to assess risk until you've put your pregnancy in writing. Even then, the obligation only bites if your job could genuinely endanger you or your baby.
Employee-favourable
2021
If your employer disciplines or dismisses you without a proper process, and the timing lines up with a pregnancy or maternity leave, tribunals will take that timing seriously and can award the maximum penalty for it.
Employee-favourable
2024
If your employer promises to fix something, through a grievance outcome or a return-to-work plan, and then doesn't deliver on it, that broken promise can itself count as harassment, separate from the original problem.
Pregnancy and maternity discrimination protection starts on day one of your job. Here is what the law covers, and what to do if you think it has not been followed.
Mixed
2010
If you're made redundant during maternity leave and a suitable role exists, your employer must offer it to you outright, not just invite you to apply.
Employee-favourable
1999
Your employer's duty to risk-assess for pregnancy-related risks starts the moment they have women of childbearing age on staff, not once you've told them you're pregnant.
Employee-favourable
1995
If you're dismissed because you're pregnant, that's discrimination in itself, you don't need to compare your treatment to anyone else's.
