These types of firings, where the employee was given no negative feedback, there is no paper trail, evidence, etc. creates the type of gray areas that can easily lead to findings in favor of the employee if she were to file something for say sex discrimination. Cloudflare may have to go and find other instances where they fired non-protected class employees in a similar fashion. At the very least, it's going to be a PITA for their HR/legal team and may cost them some fines as well.
More evidence that we need to dismantle much of the federal government, I don't want my tax dollars funding crap like this.
The government should build bridges, highways, manage defense, control the border, manage trade policy etc. All of this extra stuff is scope creep to the extreme.
Never change, America
Employees can be 100% layed off during maternity or paternity leave. The second part is the problem, making it about gender/sex.
Layoffs are “supposed to be” non-performance based. “Our widget didn’t sell so we’re laying off the widget makers”. That’s the generally accepted idea.
In the US you totally can sue if they fire you for a protected reason (“we noticed you were missing meetings on maternity leave, men would never do that”). Some people would sue over anything I’m sure.
If you’re a salesperson and you didn’t sell anything for 5 months, that’s performance based and it’s “reasonable” to fire them. They’d probably not sue. You can tell someone they were a poor performer without legal repercussions, assuming you’re not being shady. Typically HR and legal put together some sort of evidence just in case.
It’s just mean, but maybe fair, to lay off the entire sales team and call each person and tell them they were a bad performer. Bad look to do it after the Cloudflare CEO went around a press tour last year bragging about how they won’t do layoffs and now’s the time to invest in talent.