Stephanie Stewart, an honors student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College on an academic scholarship, was due to deliver her son before the end of the spring semester in 2012. She needed some accommodations because she would not be able to attend every session of her women’s studies class. Stewart figured her professor would be understanding—it was a women’s studies class. But she wasn’t. The professor told Stewart that she wouldn’t be able to make up any tests or assignments she missed due to doctor’s appointments or labor and delivery. “When I received a backlash from her, and no support from her I was extremely stunned. I felt disrespected,” Stewart says.

Stewart was also being discriminated against. Title IX prohibits schools from disciplining pregnant students for medically related absences. When she appealed to the deans at BMCC, they told her to drop the class instead of intervening on her behalf. “At that given moment, I didn’t know such a thing [Title IX] existed, I was extremely angry, and in my gut, I knew it was wrong. But I didn’t have a word or policy to back me up,” Stewart says. Her husband was the one who encouraged her to research the matter. Title IX came up in her search, and so did the National Women’s Law Center.

The NWLC took her case, and as a result the CUNY system reimbursed her for the expenses she racked up when she had to take an extra class this semester so she could graduate on time, and is now adopting a system-wide policy to address the rights of pregnant students and parents who attend the CUNYs. Stewart is graduating this spring and will attend NYU in the fall. Her son will turn one on Saturday.

Though the outcome is a good one for Stewart, the NWLC has seen more and more complaints like hers, says Lara Kaufmann, NWLC’s senior counsel and director of education policy for at-risk students. They started seeing an uptick in complaints when a popular blogger called The Feminist Breeder wrote about her own experience with pregnancy discrimination, and the NWLC reached out to her and helped her advocate for herself, which she also wrote about.

That the Feminist Breeder’s experience was searchable online raised awareness in a big way. “What we notice at the post-secondary level a lot, school administrators want to give professors the discretion to set their own absence policies and makeup work policies,” Kaufmann says “And either those professors aren’t aware or don’t care that they have to comply with Title IX and its regulations.”

In some ways, these instances of pregnancy discrimination in schools are much easier to resolve than the instances of pregnancy discrimination in the workplace, because Title IX is pretty clear on this—schools must let pregnant students reschedule exams. Liz Watson, a senior advisor to the Education and Employment Team at NWLC, says the employment related laws are not so clear-cut. Though the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is meant to protect the jobs of pregnant women, it doesn’t always work out that way.

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