What Elizabeth Warren’s Critics Get Wrong About Discrimination

Exactly two years after the hashtag #MeToo began burning through Twitter with searing and deeply personal sexual harassment stories, women are once again mining their pain and pouring out memories to highlight common but rarely talked-about female experiences. This time, the public airing is aimed at bringing awareness to pregnancy discrimination in defense of Democratic presidential candidate and Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren—as if the existence of sexist hiring practices is something they still need to prove.

On the campaign trail, Warren has told the story many times of how she was pushed out of a teaching job in 1971, when she was 22 years old, for being visibly pregnant. "By the end of the school year, I was pretty obviously pregnant," Warren wrote in her 2013 book, A Fighting Chance. "The principal did what I think a lot of principals did back then—wished me good luck, didn’t ask me back the next school year, and hired someone else for the job."

Warren had to defend that claim this past week, after conservative outlets dug through old records and interviews to try and prove her a liar. The Washington Free Beacon unearthed county records indicating that Warren had resigned at six months pregnant, and Fox News recirculated an interview from 2007, before she was elected to Congress, in which she was much more vague about her reasons for leaving teaching.

"I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don't think this is going to work out for me,’ ” Warren said at the time. "I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”

Warren is now fully standing by her story, and she told CBS that the reason she didn’t provide the same details in 2007 was that she simply wasn’t ready to open up about her personal history. As to the report that she voluntarily resigned, it’s ludicrous to think that workplace discrimination would be spelled out in official county records. CBS found two women who worked at Riverdale elementary, the same school where Warren worked, the same year she was there, and both said it was the school’s unwritten policy to let go of women once they were visibly pregnant. "The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant,” said Trudy Randall.

But the narrative that Warren lied has caught fire anyway among her critics and wormed its way into the mainstream news cycle. New York Times politics reporter Shane Goldmacher speculated that it could “quickly” gain hold of “half of the electorate” and become a problem for her in a hypothetical general election. Reporters asked her over and over on Monday and again on Tuesday whether she lied about how she lost her job 48 years ago, to which she repeatedly said no.

Of course, there is nothing hard to believe about a woman being fired over her pregnancy in the early 1970s. After all, Warren’s case was seven years before the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. The fact that it was necessary for Congress to amend the Civil Rights Act to explicitly protect pregnant women demonstrates in itself that there was a problem. A 1970 National Education Association survey found that most school districts required visibly pregnant teachers to take mandatory, unpaid leave, often without a job guarantee.

It’s against the law now to hold such a policy, but women are still regularly sidelined for their reproductive choices across America’s biggest and most prestigious companies, according to a 2018 New York Times report. They’re still passed over for promotions and raises or outright fired. The “Ask a Manager” blog just published a letter last week from an employer wondering whether they can fire a new employee for not having told them in the interview that she’s pregnant.

While it’s fair to question the honesty of any candidate running for president, the fact that Warren is being forced to defend herself over this particular moment in her career—and that the matter has sparked a national debate over how pregnant women were and are treated—points to a long history in America of a portion of the population refusing to acknowledge discrimination against women and people of color.

This dates back to before the Jim Crow era, when black Americans were segregated, systematically disenfranchised, deprived of their property, and literally murdered in public. The National Opinion Research Center polled Americans in 1944, 1946, and 1956 on whether “most [N]egroes in the United States are being treated fairly or unfairly,” and at least 60 percent of white respondents consistently answered fairly. Meanwhile, only 11 percent of black respondents agreed in the 1956 poll that they were being treated fairly.

Even Alabama’s notorious segregationist governor in the 1960s, George Wallace, who literally stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in 1963 to prevent black students from entering it, denied that he was a racist. “It was not an antagonism towards black people, and that’s what some people can’t understand,” Wallace told PBS in 1984. “White Southerners did not believe it was discrimination. They thought it was in the best interest of both the races.”

When David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, nearly defeated an incumbent U.S. senator in Louisiana in 1990, the media scrambled to attribute the candidate’s popularity to economic anxiety and anti-Washington rage—anything but the obvious. “The economic explanation carried the day,” wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. “Duke was a freak creature of the bayou who had managed to tap into the frustrations of a struggling sector of the Louisiana electorate with an abnormally high tolerance for racist messaging.”

A strikingly similar narrative has played out with Donald Trump. One part of the country demands the media directly call him a racist, while another is equally outraged at the audacity of using that term at all. In a 2017 Pew Research poll, 54 percent of white people said they get little to no advantage from their race, while 92 percent of black voters responded that white people have it easier in America.

There is a similar inclination, especially among men, to deny the existence of workplace discrimination against women. This is a more modern phenomenon than racism denial, considering that in 1977, less than a quarter of Americans responded in the General Social Survey that women and men should be treated equally.

Those attitudes have significantly changed—by 2016, only 7 percent of the population said men and women should maintain traditional, unequal gender roles. But sexism in the workplace still very much exists. Pregnancy-discrimination cases have been increasing since the passage of the law in 1978. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that between 1997 and 2013, the annual number of pregnancy-discrimination charges filed with the EEOC and state and local agencies rose from 3,900 to 5,342. Trump stated frankly in a 2004 interview with NBC’s Dateline that pregnancy is “a wonderful thing for the woman, it’s a wonderful thing for the husband, it’s certainly an inconvenience for a business. And whether people want to say that or not, the fact is, it is an inconvenience for a person that is running a business.”

Women still only earn 80 cents for every dollar men make, working the same number of hours. Black and Latina women earn even less. Women ask for raises as often as men do, but are 5 percent less likely to get them. They make up less than 7 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies.

But a 2016 Pew study found that 56 percent of men believe sexism is a thing of the past, while 63 percent of women said there are still obstacles that make it harder for them to get ahead in today’s world. Democrats are more than twice as likely as Republicans to say more work needs to be done to equal the playing field between men and women. Nearly half (46 percent) of men believe the well-documented gender wage gap is “made up,” according to an April SurveyMonkey poll.

The idea that we are living in post-sexist or post-racist times is a myth, but the privileged class is afraid to admit that they have benefitted in life from anything other than their own competence and hard work. Perhaps white men are afraid that reaching true equality for women and people of color will mean a decline in their own status or salaries. Conservative commentator Steven Crowder likened equal pay to “financial castration.” (This is not true—economists predict that closing the gender pay gap would boost the entire U.S. economy, thus benefiting everyone.)

The cognitive dissonance is unsettling. It’s not by sheer chance that all 45 presidents in American history have been men, and all but one white. Women shouldn’t have to continually mine their pain in order to prove the existence of systemic sexism. The fact that a female candidate has to worry that acknowledging her own experience of pregnancy discrimination might cost her the presidency is evidence enough that the problem persists.

Julia Ioffe joins Elizabeth Warren on the campaign trail, where the surging senator has spent the season overcoming her campaign's wobbly start and getting down to business—trouncing debate foes, climbing in the polls, and somehow making a slew of policy plans feel exciting. Suddenly, she's winning over Democrats by making the grandest ideas sound perfectly sensible, including her biggest pitch of all: That she's the one to beat Trump.

Originally Appeared on GQ