Conversations about pregnancy in the workplace have been missing an important topic for years. They often orbit around the length of parental leave, whether it’s paid or unpaid, whether it’s job-protected or not, and then stop there — as if the legal and practical challenges of pregnancy begin and end with time away from work. But the WNBA’s newly ratified tentative collective bargaining agreement suggests a different and more nuanced way of thinking about the subject. While the full CBA text is not yet available to the public, the WNBA and the Union have made the key elements of the tentative CBA available, along with a more detailed version.
As we discussed in our earlier post on Dearica Hamby’s federal pregnancy discrimination lawsuit, pregnancy discrimination rarely looks like a clean termination decision. It is more often structural, such as a shift in opportunity or a change in role; a sudden loss of stability at precisely the moment that stability matters most. The new CBA appears to respond to that reality, not just by expanding benefits, but by reworking the underlying incentives that can make pregnancy professionally costly.
Moving Beyond “Leave” as the Only Protection
Baseline legal protections around pregnancy in the workplace already exist. Federal law prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy and requires reasonable accommodations for pregnancy-related limitations, as articulated in the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
Illinois takes protective measures further. The Illinois Human Rights Act requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, and related conditions, including things like more frequent breaks, modified duties, or leave, unless the employer can show undue hardship. Critically, Illinois law prohibits forcing an employee to accept an accommodation they did not request if another reasonable option is available. Even so, these statutes operate at a high level. They prohibit discrimination and mandate accommodation. They do not, and realistically cannot, map onto every way pregnancy can collide with how a job is actually structured.
That gap between legal principle and workplace reality is where the WNBA’s new agreement shines:
- Trade Consent: One of the most significant CBA provisions requires teams to obtain a pregnant player’s consent before trading them. This is not just a sports-specific tweak. It targets a familiar problem in a more direct way than most statutes can. A trade is a disruption of several key aspects of a player’s life: geographic, medical, logistical, and financial. In a traditional workplace, the analogue might be a sudden transfer, reassignment, or restructuring that makes the job materially harder to perform during and after pregnancy. Those decisions are often difficult to challenge cleanly. They live in the gray space where “not fired” can still mean meaningfully disadvantaged. The consent requirement takes a high-impact decision off the table unless the employee agrees.
- Salary Caps: The CBA also includes salary cap exceptions for injured or pregnant players. While the fine print is not public yet, the WNBA’s announcement introduced the concept. Pregnancy can create real operational strain in certain roles. When that strain is left unaddressed, it can quietly shape decision-making, leading to fewer opportunities and slower advancement for pregnant employees. In the professional sports context, a salary cap exception may neutralize that pressure by recognizing that if pregnancy carries structural “costs,” those costs should not be allowed to distort employment decisions.
- Family Formation: The tentative CBA’s official term sheet states that it expands family-planning benefits for players and their spouses or partners, although the term sheet itself does not publicly enumerate the covered services. Public reporting has described those benefits as covering costs related to adoption, surrogacy, egg freezing, and fertility treatments, while also extending eligibility beyond the prior service-based limit.
- Parental Leave: The tentative CBA also addresses the period after childbirth, where workplace friction often reappears, even in more traditional workplaces. Reporting on the negotiations indicates the agreement includes paid leave for non-birthing parents, an expansion from prior terms. According to reporting, the agreement also incorporates policies allowing young children (and caregivers) to travel with players and receive additional accommodations on the road, directly targeting the logistical strain that can follow a return to work. Taken together, these provisions extend support beyond formal leave into the day-to-day realities of working parenthood.
A Blueprint with Limits
The full CBA is not yet public, and in practice, the implementation is where these protections either hold or quietly fall apart. Details around the pregnancy-related salary cap exception will determine how much these provisions shift real-world behavior.
Still, the WNBA is not asking only whether pregnant employees are treated “the same.” It goes beyond that to ask where pregnancy creates vulnerability and then adjusts the structure of the job to reduce that vulnerability in advance. The human concern is top of mind as opposed to the workplace.
For Illinois employers, that framing is useful. Compliance with federal law and the more expansive Illinois Human Rights Act is necessary, but it is not always sufficient to prevent the more subtle forms of pregnancy-related disadvantage that arise from transfers, role changes, or incentive structures. For employees, the takeaway is equally practical. Discrimination does not always announce itself. Sometimes it looks like instability, lost opportunity, or a decision that is technically permissible but materially disruptive at the worst possible time.
Stepping back, the point the tentative agreement makes is a practical one. When workplaces account for the realities of pregnancy and early parenthood, they tend to function better for employees and employers alike.
