Here's an equally logical statement: If you only have 10 fingers, you can usually also get by with 9. Even a healthy finger consumes a non-trivial amount of oxygen from your blood and has a nail that must be trimmed so it's not a big deal if you accidentally chop one of them off. If the loss of a finger would endanger your livelihood, you probably shouldn't be in that profession in the first place.
If you're trying to suggest that you should hire if you had 1M/yr revenue and 9 employees making 100k each, go ahead and try doing the accounting math for a new hire and see how that goes, vs if you were making 2M/yr.
I'm suggesting that your blanket statement about the triviality of hiring or not hiring a 10th employee is patently absurd on multiple levels. Even the dichotomy you posed in your reply is nonsensical - why is your assumption that the 2 options for revenue are 1M vs 2M? What if it's 1.3M, and your 9 employees are barely able to handle the workload?
Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach. At 1M/yr, the risk is you hire a salesperson who gets you no new accounts after a year, existing revenue drops for other reasons and then you are forced to fire someone productive to make ends meet because you're 100k in the hole. At 1.3M/yr, maybe it'll be extremely stressful, but there's a least a fighting chance that you won't be in the red at the end of the year. At 2M/yr, the worst case will still suck, but it won't put your business anywhere near danger of extinction because you have a rainy day bank.
Revenue is often not directly tied to headcount. Even if your 9 employees can barely keep up, your revenue should still be rising over time until a time you can financially support another hire. If your revenue is not increasing, then increasing your headcount is likely going to make things worse, and more importantly, you should be questioning the viability of the business.
> Then you do your risk analysis and determine if the risk of the person not working out is something you can stomach
Yeah, duh. Apparently you do realize this tautologically obvious point despite your churlish and contrarian argumentation against it. The need to do risk analysis as it relates to potential pregnancy was the main thrust of the post that you dismissively replied to by saying that any business can do equally well with 9 employees as with 10 as if it were some kind of fundamental truth - despite that assertion being trivially easily disproven even by your own logic.
I said "get by", not "do equally well". My point is that if you can't handle the risk of a new hire going on mat leave two months into employment, then the reason you're discriminating is likely because you're in no financial shape to hire in the first place, not because the candidate wants to have a family, or has cancer surgery scheduled, or a family sickness or any of N number of reason someone might need to miss work.
Risk analysis is not the same thing as "hire based on pregnancy status". The former is accounting and math. The latter is discrimination and illegal.
In this thread, there seems to be this perverse line of thinking that the ends justify the means ("can't afford to hire a pregnant person but a man will surely help me grow my business!"). If you're one of the people already doing this and trying to make excuses, fine, keep making excuses and doing illegal things, but realize you're part of the problem.
