Can a Year-End Bonus Be Docked If You Took Maternity Leave?

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Letters may be edited.Maternity-Leave MoolaMy wife is a clinical social worker and therapist at an integrated health clinic in Massachusetts.This year, like other years, the staff recently received their year-end bonus.

This bonus is a relatively paltry $1,000 and is standard across the staff, with no fluctuations based on merit.Everyone gets $1,000 (minus taxes).

However, this year my wife took short-term medical leave.Her bonus was prorated to account for the time that she was on leave.

Another woman, who was on maternity leave for part of the year, also received a prorated bonus.Is this discriminatory on the part of their employer or just unfair? Both these types of leave are perfectly legal and necessary and, speaking for my wife, enabled her to provide the best care that she could for her patients upon her return.

Do these hardworking, dedicated women have any recourse to recoup the rest of their well-deserved bonuses?— Disgruntled Husband, MassachusettsIt’s unfair, in my opinion, but in this case my opinion carries little weight.This is a legal question, and a very interesting — albeit complicated — one.I spoke to Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization, to get her take.

Ms.Chettiar says that if there’s a prorated bonus and it’s clearly based on performance, then what your wife and her colleague experienced was legal.But what does “performance” mean? Does going on medical or maternity leave mean a person has demonstrated a lesser performance than, say, someone who didn’t? The additional wrinkle here is that you say in general everyone gets the same bonus, so it’s unclear that it is in fact a performance-based bonus.This is one of those gray-area examples where it comes down to interpretation of the law and the individual circum...