Office of Student Ombuds intern Shivani Kapur connecting her studies with life and building skills for her career. (Photo: Gurveer Choan)
Despite growing up in a traditional family in India, a culture in which women traditionally raise families and don't work outside the house, Shivani Kapur credits her father for instilling in her a sense of autonomy and a desire to pursue a career as a lawyer.
Working as a judicial clerk within the Indian legal system, she saw social inequality first-hand. She saw how difficult it could be for women to advance in the workplace-especially if they were pregnant or trying to raise a family. She witnessed the accepted practice of forcing women to sacrifice their career aspirations as both male and female employees would compromise a pregnant woman's ability to work in their environment, or to return after maternity leave.
But Kapur saw the law as a way of reducing those inequalities and resolving the conflicts women face in the workplace. It was in the pursuit of her own career that she realized the need to change attitudes toward working women, especially those who are having a family, and to create environments in which conflicts for these women can be resolved lawfully. She decided to apply her life experiences to her master's studies in law at the University of Alberta asking the question: Do we discriminate against pregnant women in the workplace in Canada?
To find the answers, Kapur came to the U of A to study with Professor Eric Adams. She says his research and real-world interests meshed with hers, and that he's guided and motivated her to view discrimination from different perspectives to develop the most realistic and accurate view of the issue.
Using Canadian case law on pregnancy discrimination, she's now examining the issue of women maintaining their rights, status and position in their workplace. What she's finding is that, although there is no overt discrimination against women and pregnancy-for example, it is unlawful to ask women about their family plans in an interview-even the thought of a woman considering raising a family may create negative attitudes. An employer may choose to overlook a female candidate in favour of either a man or another female who isn't interested in raising a family. These attitudes may also affect women's ability to advance in an organization, or return to their original position following maternity leave. There is little recourse for women to resolve these types of conflicts.
To improve her skills in conflict resolution, Kapur is an intern in the Office of Student Ombuds at the U of A, a position she found through the university's Graduate Student Internship Program.
"Interns help their clients explore options to resolve personal and academic crises and dilemmas," says Natalie Sharpe, Ombuds director. "Interns learn life-building skills: resolving conflicts, navigating complex policies and procedures, writing appeals, presenting position papers and treating others with respect and intentional fairness."
Kapur notes that as she helps students resolve their academic conflicts, she's becoming a better negotiator and a better problem solver. And maybe most important, she's becoming a better communicator-better at listening, expressing her ideas and offering advice.
Adams, her thesis supervisor, says those kinds of experiences are valuable for helping students connect law with life. "Internships for our graduate student researchers-in virtually any field of work-help to make visible the essential webs of connection between law in books and law in action. Experience in the world is not, in that sense, a break from legal research; it is simply another site of learning about the various ways that law operates in the lives of people, institutions and workplaces."
Kapur will complete her thesis work by the end of 2016 and will graduate in 2017. After that, she plans on continuing her advocacy for social change by pursuing her PhD at the U of A.
In the meantime, she has already had keen interest and support for her research at conferences in Ottawa and Toronto. And the issue is raising public discussion-a female Edmonton city councillor recently voiced her concerns over the employment barriers that a pregnant woman might face in pursuing public office.
"Conflicts in the workplace do arise, even in what many see as a very progressive Canadian work culture," Kapur says, "and those conflicts need to be resolved to allow pregnant women or those who want to raise a family to continue to pursue their employment dreams."