'I got quiet fired two days before my wedding': Employees discover their boss fires female coworkers when they get married, HR fiasco ensues

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Ben Weiss • Writer and Editor
Apr 29, 2024 8:00 AM EDT

Imagine having to clean up this boss's mess! 

This employee compared notes with some of the other women on her team and realized that something strange was afoot. Essentially, 13 female employees either quit or were fired as they were approaching their late 20s. All of them were newly engaged, recently married, are about to start a family. 

The way HR attempted to get away with this nonsense was to give these women "disciplinary action" months in advance and to accuse them of not pulling their weight. Meanwhile, the women were not being given any more projects or responsibilities, so the accusations were frankly empty. Eventually, the Redditor, who chose to share this story on r/antiwork, decided to take matters into her own hands.

Keep scrolling below to see what happened as her wedding day approached and her tolerance for this nonsense was getting thinner and thinner. For more stories like this, check out this post about bosses who came to regret their newest hires.

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  • 01
    PINATA "The paranoia was insane in the office."
    via Dan Burton
  • 02
    I got quiet fired two days before my wedding.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 03
    By the time I left my (now previous) company, I was the 13th young woman to quit. 13 girls all in their mid to late 20s. All under the same VP, a woman and the company owner's daughter. All women who recently got engaged/married/newly pregnant.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 04
    After comparing notes, some of the girls and I realized these connections. A few weeks before the first girl left, we all were asked to provide our hourly breakdowns of our work week - completely unprompted. None of the men were asked nor the women who were single or 35+. Then we were given non-formal disciplinary action with a brand new (unrelated) HR rep in the room. We all worked under the HR umbrella so it wasn't entirely uncalled for, but we were all in specialized roles of communication, t
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 05
    recruiting, etc. Why the need for an HR generalist? They kept saying we needed to improve our productivity or focus or output when simultaneously no new major projects were being given to us.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 06
    My "disciplinary" meeting happened two days before my wedding. My now- husband told me to quit there and then but I let it drag on for a bit, convincing myself that I could pull it together and keep my job
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 07
    even though I didn't really need to. This VP was heartless. When my mother-in-law died, she pulled me into her office a week later to talk about my department "slipping" in my absence like it was my fault I did all the work.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 08
    The paranoia was insane in the office. Nobody knew who we could trust. One girl made a comment about having a lighter day waiting on recruiting responses and offered to take something off of someone else's plate.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 09
    That same comment got snaked back to the VP as her saying she had nothing to do.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 10
    Once the first girl left, we all fell like dominoes. All of us were either not replaced at all or replaced with men. I felt so alone in this until I spoke with one of the girls
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 11
    who left and found out she had an identical experience. People began flooding Glassdoor and the HR team flooded it right back with fake, peppy reviews.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 12
    There is no way that should have been legal. We know we were targeted because of our age, gender, and life status. Just yesterday, I learned through the grapevine that the VP's husband moved out the very same week we were all asked for our hourly schedules. Sometimes my husband and I would speculate about what kind of wrongful termination
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 13
    lawsuit us ladies could have formed had we all kept going and waited for them to fire us. If only.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 14
    EDIT: holy cow I didn't expect this to get the response that it did! Let me clarify a few things (hopefully to help get some advice and to ensure that young women don't experience this same thing):
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 15
    - Most (not all) of us were decently fresh out of college, maybe 1st or 2nd job. For me, it was my 2nd and I had just left ANOTHER company that had the same blueprint issue (director of the charity was 50+ and never married, so she hated every woman with kids and husbands - one of her old friends even admitted as such). 5 of the 13 women
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 16
    from this company were coming from environments like that so we were all so worried that WE were the problems. When we finally compared notes months down the line, THEN we saw the consistencies. Most of us had babies, other jobs, or had completely moved out of the city by then.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 17
    Λ Expanding on that, none of us had the experience to know that we should have stuck around for them to fire us. Honestly, it was on earth there and I didn't want to risk my new marriage and put my peace of mind in any more hardship than it needed to be. Survival was the goal at the time.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 18
    - I don't plan on outing the company because they are RIGOROUS with their cleanup online. Glassdoor is hilariously sad to watch because of their obvious falsified reviews and cheap attempts to remedy the exposure. I also am still using a manager there as a reference and I don't want that to come into jeopardy should I ever look into working again. Hate that these are the rules but sometimes we can't afford not to play the game.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 19
    - There was minimal evidence of these occurrences on paper. I've written down things in my personal notes from the time, but all of these behaviors, requests for hours, etc. all went undocumented. We theorize that she never put any of us on a formal performance plan because then there would be some semblance of evidence that she was doing this to all of us at the same time.
    via u/SemperIgni
  • 20
    - I am so sorry so many of you have experienced something similar. Let this story be a lesson to management or potential future management!! Young women: don't be afraid to tell someone you trust what's going on.
    via u/SemperIgni

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