Reason for leaving: mother

This is an absurd and illegal reason for dismissal, against which you can sue in labor court. But it would cause you months of stress, especially since you would have to sue for reinstatement – a success you probably wouldn’t want to achieve.

What you have experienced is structural sexism, i.e., a deeply rooted mental attitude that demeans and excludes women, and in particular mothers, and makes supposedly logical arguments in its favor. In your case, the probability of missing out is twice as high due to a second child.

The tricky part is that this probability is actually now 100 percent higher. But the real problem is that it’s even considered a problem. The child is not to blame if he is sick, and the mother is not to blame if she has to stay at home. To accuse you of this, even hypothetically, is to accuse you of being a mother.

Management that does not agree with the fact that women have children and should take care of them is sexist management. As I said, this applies not only to your former employer, but to practically the entire Swiss economy, which asks women during an interview about planning a child, which creates too few jobs for part-time mothers who stubbornly refuse to include in the labor force. contracts breastfeeding breaks, integrate and do not understand that the baby is sick from time to time.

And this refers to a policy that does not change anything regarding these abuses, which would be easily possible with appropriate changes in the law – for example, by explicitly granting mothers sick leave. Unfortunately, we still have a lot of feminist work ahead of us.