The Interview Question Nobody's Allowed to Ask (But Everyone Still Does)

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/australia today about pregnancy discrimination pushing women out of the workforce, and the comments underneath it are the kind of reading that makes you put your coffee down and stare at the wall for a bit. Woman after woman describing the same scene: a job interview, a question that’s been illegal since the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984, and an interviewer who asks it anyway because what’s she going to do, sue them from the unemployment line.

The question, in its various costumes, is always some version of “are you planning to have kids.” Sometimes it’s blunt. Sometimes it’s dressed up as small talk about a recent engagement. One commenter said a manager flat-out told colleagues not to hire a woman because she’d just got married, too much risk of pregnancy. Another watched an entire team survive a round of redundancies except the two women on maternity leave, who didn’t. These aren’t stories from the 1970s. These are this year, this industry, people you’d probably recognise if named.

What gets me isn’t that this happens. I’ve worked in enough offices over enough decades to know that laws on paper and behaviour in practice are different beasts, and HR departments exist as much to protect the company as the employee. What gets me is how openly people will admit to doing it, like it’s just prudent risk management rather than, you know, breaking the law. One comment in that thread laid it out as plainly as I’ve ever seen it: it’s not about quality of work, it’s about “potential time away from work in the future,” and anyone who thinks that’s not a factor is naive. Said completely matter-of-fact, like discussing a supply chain risk.

And that’s the uncomfortable bit, because there’s a kernel of cold logic in it even though the conclusion is rotten. Hiring is expensive, training takes months, a gap in a small team hurts. None of that makes it legal or decent, but pretending employers don’t think this way doesn’t help anyone either. The honest problem is structural: we’ve built workplaces where twelve months away from a job is treated as a liability to be managed around rather than a normal, expected part of a career, and until that changes, individual managers will keep making grubby little calculations in interview rooms where nobody’s taking notes.

My wife went through a version of this almost twenty years ago, before our daughter was born. Nothing as blatant as the stories in that thread, nobody asked her outright, but she always suspected a promotion got quietly handed to someone else around the same time she and I got married. No proof, nothing in writing, just a feeling and a timeline that lined up too neatly. That’s the other thing that comes through in the comments: almost nobody has a paper trail. It’s all inference and bad luck and “funny that.” Which is exactly how discrimination survives, by being just deniable enough.

I don’t have a tidy fix for this. More funding for the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Human Rights Commission would help people who do have evidence actually pursue it, and some countries have had decent results with anonymised early-stage applications to strip out the stuff that invites bias in the first place. But the deeper issue is cultural, and culture doesn’t move because of a press release. It moves slowly, through workplaces where men take parental leave too so it stops being coded as a “women’s issue,” and through enough lawsuits and enough bad press that the cold calculation stops looking so cheap.

My daughter’s not far off entering that workforce herself. I’d like to tell her the rules have caught up with reality by the time she’s sitting in one of those interview rooms. I’m not holding my breath, but the fact that this thread had hundreds of people trading stories and naming the problem for what it is, rather than shrugging it off, feels like a small, stubborn kind of progress. Not enough. But something.