Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is standing firm in the face of scrutiny, and so are her supporters, who are sharing their own stories on Twitter of when they faced discrimination because of pregnancy.
The 2020 presidential candidate tweeted Tuesday to reiterate that she had been edged out of her first teaching job when she became pregnant. She had been responding to unsubstantiated accusations that she had actually voluntarily resigned. “We can fight back by telling our stories. I tell mine on the campaign trail, and I hope to hear yours,” she added.
The conservative website Washington Free Beacon on Monday surfaced the minutes from an April 1971 board of education meeting showing a unanimous vote to extend Warren’s teaching contract, two months before her exit in June.
This does not necessarily contradict Warren’s story, which is that her contract was renewed in April but that by June, when she was six months’ pregnant, the principal “showed her the door.”
“When someone calls you in and says the job that you’ve been hired for for the next year is no longer yours ― ‘We’re giving it to someone else’ ― I think that’s being shown the door,” Warren told CBS News on Monday.
The Washington Free Beacon also cast doubt on Warren’s account by noting she had once described her exit from the job differently in a 2007 interview, when she said: “[I] said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me.’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.”
When asked to explain this, Warren told CBS she wasn’t comfortable delving into the discrimination aspect publicly until later in her career.
On Tuesday, after Warren’s tweets, people on Twitter shared their own experiences of job discrimination due to pregnancy, or those of their friends and family.
Here are some of those stories:
Do you have a similar story of job discrimination due to pregnancy? Get in touch with HuffPost’s Amanda Terkel.