When it comes to pregnancy within the workplace, discrimination is something that we can all agree is unacceptable.
Whilst figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics indicate a positive shift in women returning to the same workplace post-birth, with the same roles and responsibilities, data from the Australian Human Rights Commission shows that still 18% of women have lost their job during pregnancy, when they requested or took parental leave, or when they returned to work. For those who have lived through this experience with their employer, the barriers of time, cost, effort, and complexity sometimes feel unsurmountable.
It is from this ever-present issue, that Bumpd was born, as Co-founder and Managing Director Daniel Yim explains, “I had my first child around three years’ ago. During conversations with other first-time parents around that time, I started hearing story after story of people who had become pregnant or taken parental leave, and then lost their job. Often the employer would dress this up by saying the job had become redundant, but when you looked at the circumstances it was obvious that these were blatant cases of discrimination.”
Daniel alongside his Co-founder and Director of Legal Technology, Erin Kanygin, saw this issue as the perfect candidate for an automated solution.
Fighting back against discrimination
Daniel, a corporate lawyer for over 10 years, has worked for a number of firms both within Australia and overseas. Whereas Erin, having moved from her home country of Canada in 2017, has built a strong background working within the legal innovation space with some of Australia’s top law firms. The pair met and formed a firm friendship at Gilbert + Tobin in early 2020, bonding over a shared passion for legal innovation. It was this interest and a unified mission to rectify blatant discrimination that helped them to formulate the concept of Bumpd.
“I have always had a passion advocating for equality and access to justice. Working with legal technology has inspired me to experiment with how tech can open doors and level the playing field so that the justice system is easily accessible to everyone”, states Erin.
Empowering people
As a not-for-profit organisation, Bumpd is run by a team of volunteers with a passion for justice. Behind Daniel and Erin is a group of experienced and passionate lawyers, legal designers, technologists, social justice practitioners and digital marketers. This group work together under one holistic objective - to provide a safe, accessible, and robust legal assistance tool for people who have lost their job because of pregnancy or parenting-related discrimination.
When it comes to these types of cases, often a complainant won’t pursue any recourse due to issues of affordability and timely access to legal services. This is where Bumpd steps in, automating the preparation of an unfair dismissal claim to the Fair Work Commission. Erin explains, “Our website provides easy to understand information for anybody who finds themselves in this situation, and the potential options. They can then decide what course of action is best for them. If they want to use Bumpd, the app can be accessed through a link on our website. Nothing needs to be downloaded as it’s all run on the web browser. The app will take the user through a series of questions, explaining why certain information is needed and suggesting possible answers along the way. After all the questions have been answered, Bumpd will use that information to generate a draft unfair dismissal application in the correct legal form, presented in a legally professional way. This document can be downloaded and edited by the user, and then re-uploaded to Bumpd, for us to file it with the Fair Work Commission.”
At its heart, Bumpd is about helping people within the community when they are at their most vulnerable. This is why the application itself is free to use, excluding the Fair Work Commission fee, with a number of valuable online resources provided, such as a blog and links to support services.
Looking to the future
Whilst Bumpd has only recently been launched and is still in its beta testing phase, the response from its release has been overwhelmingly positive.
“We’ve had quite a bit of media attention which has been great, but more pertinently is the large number of people I’ve spoken to who have said, “Hey, this happened to me.” It’s so interesting because I had no idea this was even an issue until it started happening to my friends. It seems that people have historically just accepted that this is a bad thing that happens but there’s not much you can do about it. That has got to change” affirms Daniel.
Whilst Erin and Daniel are currently focussed on expanding the awareness of Bumpd within the community, they also have goals to expand the scope of the app in future, “We’d love to cover legal claims other than unfair dismissal, such as general protections or claims under anti-discrimination legislation. We can also see ourselves tackling parenting-related discrimination complaints more broadly beyond job loss”, says Erin.
For the moment, Bumpd continues to champion their mission and be at the forefront of legal tech start-ups that are utilizing new ways of resolving injustices and creating social change.
If you would like to learn more about Bumpd and the great work they are doing within the legal tech space, please visit their website or follow them on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.
