James' World 2

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Maternity-Leave Moola

My wife is a clinical social worker and therapist at an integrated health clinic in Massachusetts. This year, like other years, the staff recently received their year-end bonus. This bonus is a relatively paltry $1,000 and is standard across the staff, with no fluctuations based on merit. Everyone gets $1,000 (minus taxes). However, this year my wife took short-term medical leave. Her bonus was prorated to account for the time that she was on leave. Another woman, who was on maternity leave for part of the year, also received a prorated bonus. Is this discriminatory on the part of their employer or just unfair? Both these types of leave are perfectly legal and necessary and, speaking for my wife, enabled her to provide the best care that she could for her patients upon her return. Do these hardworking, dedicated women have any recourse to recoup the rest of their well-deserved bonuses?

— Disgruntled Husband, Massachusetts

It’s unfair, in my opinion, but in this case my opinion carries little weight. This is a legal question, and a very interesting — albeit complicated — one.

I spoke to Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, to get her take. Ms. Chettiar says that if there’s a prorated bonus and it’s clearly based on performance, then what your wife and her colleague experienced was legal.

But what does “performance” mean? Does going on medical or maternity leave mean a person has demonstrated a lesser performance than, say, someone who didn’t? The additional wrinkle here is that you say in general everyone gets the same bonus, so it’s unclear that it is in fact a performance-based bonus.

This is one of those gray-area examples where it comes down to interpretation of the law and the individual circumstance, and whether your wife is being treated the same as other people who took leave. For example, if workers who took leave for something other than disability or medical reasons did NOT have their bonuses prorated, Ms. Chettiar says, that would clearly be discrimination under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which make it illegal to retaliate against workers for being pregnant or because of pregnancy-related needs. In this case, however, it seems that your wife is being treated the same as her nonpregnant colleague.

Marylou Fabbo, an employment lawyer in Massachusetts, your home state, said it was important to know that there’s also the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal statute that entitles

employees to take unpaid leave for specific medical or family-related reasons, which include a birth, a relative with health issues that require employee care or, as the website of Department of Labor says, “a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform the essential functions of his or her job.” Massachusetts has a fairly new paid-leave law that is similar to that federal law, Ms. Fabbo added.

In this circumstance, she said, while the prorated bonus didn’t sound strictly discriminatory, it didn’t sound particularly fair.

She suggested that it would probably in your wife’s best interest to consult an employment lawyer just to be sure. A statute like the Family and Medical Leave Act would probably require an employer “to pay the full amount, depending on the laws that are applicable to the particular employee,” Ms. Fabbo said.

And if you’re worried that the legal fees would exceed the bonus amount, she pointed out that many employment statutes, including those related to discrimination or failure to pay wages, required the employer to pay the employee’s legal fees if the employee won the case.

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Credit…Photo illustration by Margeaux Walter for The New York Times

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CLIMATEWIRE | Congress’ oversight arm has issued an unprecedented warning about the risks facing federal disaster aid.

The Government Accountability Office said staffing levels and other workforce issues at the Federal Emergency Management Agency “has limited its capacity to provide effective disaster assistance.” It added that FEMA “needs to strengthen its disaster workforce by addressing staffing gaps.”

A staffing shortage that persisted from 2019 to 2022 “continues to grow” and left the agency with minimal staffing when Hurricane Milton hit Florida in October, days after Hurricane Helene deluged the state and large parts of the Southeast, GAO found.

The warning coincides with President Donald Trump’s threats to shutter FEMA, and it came two weeks after his administration fired at least 200 people from the agency.

The report marks the first time GAO put disaster aid on its annual “High-Risk List,” which highlights areas of the federal government that are “seriously vulnerable” to waste, fraud and abuse or need transformation. In addition to FEMA’s staffing problems, the report noted that “natural disasters have become costlier and more frequent.”

The GAO did not mention Trump or the FEMA firings that were carried out by his administration.

Trump, who has assailed FEMA’s response to flooding caused by Helene in western North Carolina, created a council to review whether the agency should be disbanded. It’s led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

FEMA staffing is only one problem the GAO found with disaster response. Others include the fragmentation of federal disaster response across more than 30 entities and a complex process for individuals to get emergency help after a disaster.

“Survivors face numerous challenges receiving needed aid, including lengthy and complex application review processes,” the GAO said, echoing a concern that has been raised for years. “Reforming the federal government’s approach to disaster recovery and reducing fragmentation could improve service delivery to disaster survivors.”

Numerous federal entities provide disaster aid, including the departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and the Small Business Administration.

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When I was 17 in the late 1980s, I fell in love with a boy from work. He was 19 and from another country and when our work time was over, he had to fly home. What followed were many love letters (international phone calls were far too expensive then), every one of which I saw as fiercely romantic.

One day about six months into the relationship, a letter was waiting for me at home. My long-distance boyfriend often addressed letters with silly names or in-jokes. This time, he addressed the letter to “Mrs. [his last name].” My mother got very serious. She told me that this was possessive and too serious for our age, and that I had to write him a letter to break up with him immediately. I did, but I was still in love. Secretly, I kept writing the letters. I thought being “Mrs.” was romantic, and my mom was overreacting.

At age 21, after five years of separation by an ocean, I started an in-person relationship with him. It was deep and real love—or so I thought. By 24, I was being so emotionally abused and physically threatened, I barely knew my own name. This is how it happens. I was frozen and couldn’t seem to reconcile the dichotomy of my own life. I was deeply in love but was very confused by these behaviors because he would tell me how much he loved me while he was doing them. I was smart and educated. I knew about domestic violence, and I knew what he was doing was wrong, but no one had told me how to actually handle it—the frozenness, the confusion, and the gaslighting. Mostly, what I’d learned from a society that blames women for staying is that, if I stayed or still loved him, the abuse was my own fault.

Intimate partner violence is the number one cause of serious injury or death of women ages 18 to 24 in America, according to a 2018 statement released by the American College of Surgeons, and homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S. If it’s shocking to you to hear that, then it’s time to pay attention. This trend also applies to adolescent girls, who are being murdered by their intimate partners in increasingly dangerous numbers. A study from 2019 looked at homicide rates for teens and 7% were murdered by their partner, whether current or former.

Adolescence is a critical developmental time when young people are more vulnerable to societal pressures. A rise in misogyny (such as the recent explosion of “your body, my choice” as a slogan boys and men say), a marked increase in forced and violent sex for girls, and a culture that views rape prevention as a girls’ issue versus a boys’ issue is setting the stage for the already-large teen mental health epidemic to worsen.

Teen dating violence (TDV) is a type of intimate partner violence (IPV) that includes behaviors such as “physical violence, sexual violence and coercion, psychological aggression, and stalking” and is associated with an increased risk for further intimate partner violence, depression and anxiety, mental and physical illness, substance use, and suicidal ideation. In 2025, at least 1 in 3 girls in the U.S. have experienced teen dating violence according to the organization Love Is Respect, and it’s affecting them at dangerously high levels.

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