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A former manager at Australia’s leading federally funded women’s safety organisation has accused the agency of denying her the right to return to her job after having a baby, exposing a stark loophole in the nation’s workplace protections.
Dr Elizabeth Watt, a former senior researcher at the Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), spent three years pursuing legal action after being told she could not return to her pre-parental leave role.
The dispute escalated to the Federal Court last year, with Watt filing a statement of claim prepared by barrister Philip Boncardo – who recently represented broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf in her high-profile unfair dismissal case against the ABC. While the matter reached mediation, negotiations have been protracted because of Watt’s requests for a carve-out in the confidentiality clauses to allow her to use her experiences for research and advocacy.
“I tried to resolve this quietly for years,” Watt said in an interview on June 3, days before signing a legal document. “But when I was forced into a public court process and realised I had no legal right to my job after having a baby, I couldn’t stay silent any longer.”
At the centre of the dispute is Australia’s National Employment Standards (NES), where under current law, employees must complete 12 months of continuous service before they qualify for parental leave and the guaranteed right to return to their position.
Watt joined ANROWS in 2021 in a senior role overseeing a major evidence project. Soon after starting, she unexpectedly became pregnant with her second child.
The dispute began when she sought to return to work on a part-time basis after the birth of her son.
Watt said she was told that a proposed job-sharing arrangement was too difficult to accommodate and that she was informed she was “only entitled to an equivalent role under the Fair Work Act”. She alleged that she was gradually excluded from the team she had managed and from the project she had led.
“The title came back, but the job didn’t,” she said.
Watt said concerns escalated after she sought union advice and challenged the organisation’s interpretation of her rights.
What followed, she said, was a years-long battle involving formal complaints, disputes over work responsibilities and a growing sense that her career had gone backwards because she had taken maternity leave.
The case is particularly sensitive given ANROWS’s mandate as a taxpayer-funded not-for-profit that was established to research gender inequality and violence against women.
At the time, ANROWS was led by Padma Raman, who now serves as executive director of the Office for Women within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The board was overseen by chair Sam Mostyn, who has since become Australia’s Governor-General. There is no suggestion that Mostyn was personally aware of the circumstances.
In court documents, ANROWS admitted that Watt did not return to her pre-parental leave position but denied any legal wrongdoing. The organisation argued that while it provided parental leave under an internal policy, company policies do not create binding contractual rights.
Employment law academics and industrial relations experts say Australia is an outlier globally for linking maternity protections to a service threshold that exceeds the length of a pregnancy.
Submissions to the federal government’s ongoing review of the NES show that in most developed nations, pregnant employees access return-to-work protections from day one.
While countries such as Britain, France, Ireland, Japan and South Korea impose qualifying periods for partners, mothers are guaranteed their jobs back regardless of tenure. Britain also recently expanded its “day one” parental leave rights.
“I’ve always felt lucky to be Australian, with our stable, centrist government,” Watt said. “But the only time I’ve ever needed to rely on our laws, they failed to protect me ... This experience has changed how I feel about my country.”
Watt also claimed that ANROWS refused to participate in mediation unless she agreed to confidentiality provisions – a move she claims flies in the face of the organisation’s public advocacy against the misuse of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).
“The agreement I need to sign to end this says ‘voluntary’, but my choices were incredibly limited,” Watt said. “I had a full-time job, two toddlers, and a mountain of legal debt. I wasn’t afraid of a trial, I just couldn’t sustain the fight.”
She said that support from a new employer and a successful workers’ compensation claim helped her recover from the fallout of the dispute, but she remained uneasy about signing an agreement that would silence her. Watt said she had hoped to use the period before the NDA took effect to campaign for changes to parental leave and discrimination laws.
“The threatening emails I’ve received since they found about this article suggest otherwise,” she said.
Watt and her husband Gordon, both Labor Party members, have written to federal MPs and Workplace Relations Minister Amanda Rishworth urging a change to the NES.
“My experience at a women’s rights organisation highlights that pregnancy discrimination is rife in Australia,” Watt said. “If white, middle-class employed feminists like me aren’t willing to speak about our experiences, then who will?”
Monash University socio-legal scholar Amanda Selvarajah said that current parental leave laws left some new parents vulnerable.
“If we have these gaps in protection, people fall through the cracks,” she said, arguing that the eligibility threshold should be scrapped so all employees returning from parental leave are guaranteed the right to return to their jobs.
She added that current options for workers if they lose their job after taking parental leave remain “inherently reactionary” and difficult to navigate, making stronger protections essential.
“The worker is having to wait to lose their job or have adverse action taken against them before they can pursue a claim,” Selvarajah said. “Pursuing a claim becomes complicated because they have, by definition, been out of the workforce for a certain period of time, so they’ve got limited access to evidence and so on.”
Sara Charlesworth, professor emerita at RMIT University, said Australia’s parental leave system still lagged comparable jurisdictions such as Britain and parts of Europe, particularly in how eligibility rules intersect with workplace protections for pregnant employees and returning parents.
She said that fragmented entitlements and service thresholds could leave gaps in legal protection at key points in early parenthood.
Charlesworth said attention had increasingly focused on non-disclosure agreements in sexual harassment cases, but far less scrutiny had been applied to their use in other forms of workplace dispute resolution, including pregnancy-related discrimination cases.
“What it does is make women feel it only happens to them instead of knowing this is frighteningly common,” she said. “And often people settle because they just want it finished, not because the outcome reflects a full sense of justice or vindication.”
Rishworth’s office did not respond to questions, while Raman was contacted for comment. A spokeswoman for Mostyn declined to comment.
In a statement, ANROWS said the wellbeing and safety of staff was “very important to us”.
“We take workplace concerns seriously and respond through appropriate internal processes, with care, procedural fairness and respect for the people involved,” it said. “This case relates to a confidential employment matter, and ANROWS intends to respect its obligations to confidentiality.”
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