NTEU member stands up! Deakin Uni faces tribunal over alleged pregnancy discrimination

Reported in The Age (19 January 2022), NTEU member, academic and mother, Cameo Dalley, alleges Deakin discriminated against her due to her pregnancy.

From the article:

A senior researcher who is taking Deakin University to VCAT over pregnancy discrimination believes the issue is more widespread but difficult for women to fight.

Senior researcher in Indigenous studies Cameo Dalley, who was on a three-year contract at the Alfred Deakin Institute, claims she lost a contract and was discriminated against because she was pregnant.

Dalley, 41, worked in a team that won a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous grant. She had participated in about 500 emails about the project, and was named in the grant application about 10 times as the senior research associate and as the “ideal candidate” for the anthropological fieldwork. She says she was verbally offered the role.

But on November 2, less than a week after the team won the grant, she told an influential senior female professor she was pregnant and the tone of their meeting changed.

“She made all these comments about, ‘How do you plan to do your job and have a baby?’ ” Dalley said.

Then, on November 10, she said, “a wall went up” and she was told she would no longer be offered a contract to work on the project.

“I couldn’t even fathom it was happening. It was shock. It was wild,” Dalley said.

She said she was given no explanation for the change of heart and was told a one-year contract would be advertised instead.

The Deakin Branch stands in solidarity with Cameo and calls for an end to prgenancy discrimation, which is all to common in higher education, particularly in research roles.