Last week I told you about the phone call I’ve had hundreds of times. Pregnant woman. Employer who thought the FMLA was their only obligation. An argument that took twenty years to become federal law.
What I didn’t tell you was where that argument came from.
The Case That Proved It All
Peggy Young was a UPS air driver in 2006 – mostly light packages, letters, small parcels. When she became pregnant her doctor restricted her to no more than twenty pounds. She asked UPS for light duty. A temporary accommodation. Nothing extraordinary.
UPS said no. Pregnancy is elective. The law doesn’t require it.
Here’s what came out in litigation, and what eventually reached the Supreme Court: UPS was already accommodating three other classes of workers with light duty. Employees injured on the job. Employees with ADA-qualifying disabilities. And employees who had lost their driver’s licenses due to DWI convictions.
If you got a DUI, UPS took care of you. If you were pregnant, you were on your own.
Peggy Young lost her job. She lost her health insurance. She fought all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 2015 – with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court, in a decision that would not happen today – she won, 6-3.
That ruling laid the foundation for what came seven years later: the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, signed into law in December 2022 and effective June 2023. An affirmative right to reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers. No comparison class required. At the same time, the PUMP Act extended safe, private lactation rights to nine million more women who had previously fallen through the cracks of existing law. The argument I had been making in phone calls with skeptical defense lawyers for two decades was now federal law.
The Other End of the Arc
The moment it passed, my team and I turned our attention to the other end of the arc.
If the legal framework existed for pregnancy, why not for the stage of life that affects every woman who lives long enough? Unlike pregnancy, every woman goes through menopause. Every one. And yet for years, employers have been managing women out the door for symptoms they are already legally required to accommodate – they just don’t know it yet.
Here’s what I’ve been telling those same skeptical defense lawyers ever since: if your employee’s perimenopause or menopause symptoms substantially limit her ability to sleep, concentrate, work, or affect major bodily functions like her endocrine system, she is already covered under the ADA. You are already required to engage in a good-faith interactive process. And because menopause affects only women – and virtually always women over forty – adverse action based on those symptoms is sex discrimination under Title VII and age discrimination under the ADEA simultaneously.
Sex. Age. Disability. Three overlapping protected bases. One employer who thinks menopause isn’t their problem.
I’ve heard that before. I know how it ends.
The Law Is Moving
Rhode Island became the first state to require menopause accommodations by law. Philadelphia enacted the first municipal ordinance covering menstruation, perimenopause and menopause in the workplace. Sixteen menopause-related bills are active in 2026 legislative sessions alone. My team presented draft Menopause Workers Fairness Act legislation to Congress in 2024. The law is moving.
But you don’t have to wait for it. The floor already exists.
A law you don’t know about is a law you can’t use. And a right you don’t raise is a right you don’t have.
Jack Tuckner
Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP