Mother’s Day has just passed, and Father’s Day is coming up, so what better time to talk about family responsibility discrimination (FRD)? According to a University of California Hastings College of the Law study, the number of FRD cases being filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) jumped almost 500 percent between 1971 and 2005. FRD happens when employers discriminate against employees based on stereotypes of family caregiving responsibilities.

Your supervisors and managers know that they can’t discriminate against employees based on stereotypes of sex, race, age, gender, religion, pregnancy, or disability (they do know that, right?). However, they may not realize that it’s FRD to assume, for instance, that a mother with three small children won’t want to travel for work or that a man would need to take time off to care for elderly parents. Since there’s no federal law expressly prohibiting FRD, employees claiming FRD traditionally have tied their claims to another form of discrimination (mainly gender).

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We’ve already written about how to attract Gen Y workers — or Millennials, as they prefer to be called — but keeping them is an entirely different story.

“Millennials may be defined by the fact that they will never stop marketing themselves. Their resumes will be constantly updated online at social networking sites,” says Libby Sartain, senior vice president of HR for Yahoo!, which employs a large number of Gen Y professionals. “This poses a real challenge to organizations and HR. Our role will be one of constant re-recruiting of our own employees, while at the same time recruiting new employees.”

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As president of San Diego training firm Cross-Cultural Communications, Sondra Thiederman has spent the last 25 years helping companies create diversity programs that actually work. Author of the book, Making Diversity Work: Seven Steps for Defeating Bias in the Workplace, Thiederman’s clients include General Motors, Xerox, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Marriott Corp., American Express, and AT&T. We asked her to shed some light on the right and wrong ways to approach corporate diversity.

Q: You’ve spent 25 years helping companies improve diversity. How have you seen corporate diversity evolve in that time?
A: The biggest change has been in how the word “diversity” is defined. It no longer refers, as it once did, to just race and gender differences. It has been broadened, in most corporate settings, to encompass any ways in which individual human beings differ, including such elements as place of birth, personality, and work style.

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Each year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) publishes information about the number and type of discrimination charges employees have filed along with the amount of money it has recovered on their behalf. In fiscal year (FY) 2007, 82,792 private-sector discrimination charges were filed with the agency, and it recovered $345 million in monetary relief for job-bias victims.

Race, retaliation, and sex charges were the most frequently filed. Additionally, nearly all major charge categories showed double-digit percentage increases from the prior year – “a rare occurrence,” according to the EEOC. For the first time, retaliation surpassed sex-based charges to become the second highest charge category. Race-based charges have lead the types of charges filed every year since the EEOC opened in 1965.

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According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Razzoo’s, a Dallas/Fort Worth-based restaurant chain, will pay $1 million and furnish significant remedial relief to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit. Razzoo’s operates 11 Cajun food restaurants throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis and also has locations in Houston and Concord, North Carolina.

The EEOC said that Razzoo’s refused to hire or promote men to the position of bartender in its restaurants. Razzoo’s management set up and communicated to managers by e-mail a plan for an 80-20 ratio of women to men behind the bar. Before this pretrial settlement, male applicants and servers were expected to testify at trial that managers told them the company wanted mostly “girls” behind the bar. Men who worked as servers at the restaurants were generally denied promotion to bartender because of their gender. The few men who were promoted to bartender weren’t allowed to work lucrative “girls-only” bartending events.

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According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Razzoo’s, a Dallas/Fort Worth-based restaurant chain, will pay $1 million and furnish significant remedial relief to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit. Razzoo’s operates 11 Cajun food restaurants throughout the Dallas/Fort Worth metropolis and also has locations in Houston and Concord, North Carolina.

The EEOC said that Razzoo’s refused to hire or promote men to the position of bartender in its restaurants. Razzoo’s management set up and communicated to managers by e-mail a plan for an 80-20 ratio of women to men behind the bar. Before this pretrial settlement, male applicants and servers were expected to testify at trial that managers told them the company wanted mostly “girls” behind the bar. Men who worked as servers at the restaurants were generally denied promotion to bartender because of their gender. The few men who were promoted to bartender weren’t allowed to work lucrative “girls-only” bartending events.

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The driving force behind Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in Grafton, West Virginia, and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, she asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honor mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
Here are some statistics about U.S. mothers from the U.S. Census Bureau:

• There were an estimated 82.8 million mothers in the United States in 2004.
• There were 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in 2006.
• Among mothers with infants in 2004, 55 percent were in the labor force, down from a record high of 59 percent in 1998.
• There were 751,322 child care centers across the country in 2005. These include more than 73,000 centers employing more than 800,000 workers and another 678,000 self-employed people or other businesses without paid employees. Many mothers turn to these centers to help juggle motherhood and careers.
• Of women who gave birth for the first time between 2001 and 2003, 67 percent worked during their pregnancy. This compares with 44 percent who gave birth for the first time between 1961 and 1965.
• Eighty percent of first-time mothers worked one month or less before giving birth.
• Fifty-five percent of first-time mothers in the early part of this decade were working by the sixth month after they gave birth. In the early 1960s, the corresponding percentage was 14 percent.
• Of mothers who went back to work within a year of their child’s birth, 83 percent returned to the same employer. Seven in 10 of these women returned to jobs at the same pay, skill level, and hours worked per week.

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The driving force behind Mother’s Day was Anna Jarvis, who organized observances in Grafton, West Virginia, and Philadelphia on May 10, 1908. As the annual celebration became popular around the country, she asked members of Congress to set aside a day to honor mothers. She finally succeeded in 1914, when Congress designated the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
Here are some statistics about U.S. mothers from the U.S. Census Bureau:

• There were an estimated 82.8 million mothers in the United States in 2004.
• There were 5.6 million stay-at-home moms in 2006.
• Among mothers with infants in 2004, 55 percent were in the labor force, down from a record high of 59 percent in 1998.
• There were 751,322 child care centers across the country in 2005. These include more than 73,000 centers employing more than 800,000 workers and another 678,000 self-employed people or other businesses without paid employees. Many mothers turn to these centers to help juggle motherhood and careers.
• Of women who gave birth for the first time between 2001 and 2003, 67 percent worked during their pregnancy. This compares with 44 percent who gave birth for the first time between 1961 and 1965.
• Eighty percent of first-time mothers worked one month or less before giving birth.
• Fifty-five percent of first-time mothers in the early part of this decade were working by the sixth month after they gave birth. In the early 1960s, the corresponding percentage was 14 percent.
• Of mothers who went back to work within a year of their child’s birth, 83 percent returned to the same employer. Seven in 10 of these women returned to jobs at the same pay, skill level, and hours worked per week.

read more…