Courtesy of The Washington Post, a report on a case which a WNBA team traded a player after she told her team she was pregnant:

She asked her coach twice, she says, just to be sure.

“You’re trading me because I’m pregnant?”

It was January. Dearica Hamby had just come off a championship-winning and all-star 2022 season with the Las Vegas Aces, her first as a regular starter. She had a good relationship with her team and with her coach, former WNBA star Becky Hammon.

But that summer, Hamby had told Hammon she was pregnant. That’s when everything changed, Hamby said in an interview last week with The Washington Post and in a federal discrimination complaint she recently filed.

The storied coach grilled her player about whether she had planned the pregnancy, Hamby said, and even remarked about Hamby’s use of birth control. According to Hamby, Hammon told her she wasn’t “holding up her end of the bargain” after signing a two-year contract extension that summer: “We didn’t expect you to get pregnant in the next two years,” Hamby says Hammon told her.

WNBA player files discrimination claim over treatment during pregnancy

So when the coach called Hamby early this year to tell her she was being traded away from Las Vegas, where she had twice won the league’s sixth player of the year award, Hamby says she asked Hammon explicitly if it was happening because of her pregnancy.

Hammon’s response, Hamby says, made the situation clear: “What do you want me to do?”

Earlier this month, Hamby took the extraordinary step of filing a gender and pregnancy discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Hammon, the Aces and the WNBA, taking aim at a league that has promoted itself as an engine of gender diversity, particularly when it comes to maternity benefits for its athletes.

“I felt like the league didn’t do a good job of protecting me and protecting other players,” Hamby said.

The EEOC has become a vehicle in recent years for athletes to attempt to force change from their employers and teams. The U.S. women’s national soccer team first turned to the EEOC in 2016 to allege its employer, the U.S. Soccer Federation, was paying female players less because of their gender; the commission later backed the team in a lawsuit against U.S. Soccer, filing a brief in support of the women. And last year, the EEOC began to investigate a complaint that colleges were discriminating against Black athletes by limiting compensation.

A spokesperson for the Aces did not respond to requests for comment. Hammon has denied any allegations of wrongdoing, saying Hamby had been traded because of “math and business,” not her pregnancy. The coach said she “handled Dearica with care from Day 1 when she told me” that she was pregnant. When the WNBA suspended Hammon, the Aces were critical of the league’s investigation and said they stood behind their coach.

In a statement this month, a WNBA spokesperson told The Post that the league conducted “a thorough investigation of the allegations and levied appropriate discipline based on its findings.”

In her complaint, Hamby argues that after she presented the WNBA with a clear-cut case of pregnancy discrimination, the league responded “inadequately” — handing down just a two-game suspension for Hammon for violating “respect in the workplace” policies.

“It was a slap on the wrist for the things that happened to me,” Hamby said. The WNBA’s characterization of the issue as one of workplace “respect,” she said, obscures the more serious truth: that Hammon and the Aces traded her to the Los Angeles Sparks because she was pregnant, a move she claims followed months of mistreatment.

Other prominent female athletes have spoken up about pregnancy discrimination. A group of prominent runners including Allyson Felix alleged that Nike cut their pay and bonuses when they were pregnant, a practice the company vowed to end.

From the archives: As a runner, Allyson Felix didn’t want to speak out. As a mom, she felt she had to.

Federal anti-discrimination and disability laws forbid employers not just from firing employees because of pregnancy or potential pregnancy but also from changing other terms and conditions of employment, such as job assignments. Hamby and her attorneys argue that by trading her to the Sparks, the Aces violated the law — which also forbids “harassing” an employee because of pregnancy.

“A player can be traded or transferred for any reason or no reason at all,” said Dana Sniegocki, one of Hamby’s attorneys. “Except for a particular, specified class of reasons, and pregnancy is one of those.”

The reality of the trade, and its motivations, could be complex. Hamby’s trade was called a “heist” for the Sparks when it was announced in January, but the Aces’ motivations were also financial: The team needed to clear salary cap room for two-time MVP Candace Parker, whom it later signed. The Aces sent Hamby and their 2024 first-round draft pick in exchange for Amanda Zahui B. and a second-round pick; they eventually traded Zahui B. to the Washington Mystics for multiple second-round picks.

Hamby spoke publicly about alleged mistreatment by the Aces shortly after the trade, writing on Instagram that she was “discriminated against” in her trade to the Sparks and calling their treatment of her “unethical and unprofessional.”

She calls the choice to post about her experiences, sparking the WNBA’s investigation, a “turning point in my life.”

“It’s not the kind of person I am — I don’t like conflict, I don’t like confrontation, I’ve always taken less in order to be a part of something bigger,” Hamby told The Post. She spent the week before she spoke publicly “shaking and crying” and even throwing up from anxiety, she said. But that changed the moment she published her statement.

“As soon as I did it, the anxiety left my body. It felt like it’s bigger than me.”

The league and her former team’s reaction to her initial public allegations, Hamby said, has been as painful as anything that came before it. After the suspension, Hammon continued to deny the allegations, telling ESPN that any allegations of wrongdoing were “adamantly false and not true from any person in this organization.”

“This is why people don’t speak up — because they’re never believed,” Hamby said. “In that moment I really just wanted an apology, and it still to this day hasn’t happened. It’s just been denial.”

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The trade, Hamby said, has also had painful consequences for her 6-year-old daughter, who grew up alongside Aces players and staff and had become a fixture on the sidelines of games. She knows some of why Hamby believes she was traded, Hamby said. “But I haven’t been able to explain to her why she can’t go play with certain staff members’ kids now, why she can’t go to such-and-such’s house. It’s heartbreaking for her.”

When her daughter asked to go to an Aces game with friends this year, Hamby agreed, but said she cried as she watched her daughter walk in with her friends. “This is home for her,” Hamby said. When the videoboard, which always used to linger on her dancing daughter, cut away this time and panned to the crowd, Hamby said alarm bells went off. She said she reached out to an Aces staff member who said they had been told not to show her daughter on the videoboard.

“That felt personal,” Hamby said.

Hamby still wants an apology first and foremost, she said, as well as an acknowledgment of what happened from the league, which didn’t release specific findings from the investigation. But she is also calling for significant change to the WNBA’s handling of players’ pregnancy and maternity.

In 2020, a collective bargaining agreement between players and the league was widely praised for offering maternity leave for players at their full salaries and stipends for child care. But there are still many gaps remaining, Hamby says, and pregnancy can put teams “in a tough situation.” She wants the league to adjust rules around the salary cap that make it difficult to replace highly paid players when they are pregnant.

The Aces, Hamby alleges in her complaint, asserted that by signing a two-year contract extension, she had effectively given up the right to become pregnant.

“Players shouldn’t be afraid to start families,” she said.