Don Draper of "Mad Men" might have readily agreed that it is fair game to cross-examine female job applicants on whether and when they plan to start a family, but in 2017, such statements would be shocking. Yet two former students of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch have alleged that in a "Legal Ethics and Professionalism" course last year, Gorsuch criticized female attorneys who become pregnant after accepting employment at law firms.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, former student Jennifer Sisk stated that Gorsuch claimed many women use their companies for maternity benefits and then quit after their babies are born. She wrote, "Judge Gorsuch's comments implied that women intentionally manipulate companies and plan to disadvantage their companies starting from the first interview. … Judge Gorsuch told the class that not only could a future employer ask female interviewees about their pregnancy and family plans, companies must ask females about their family and pregnancy plans to protect the company." A second former student from the same class has submitted an anonymous declaration to the Judiciary Committee, agreeing that Gorsuch "said that many female lawyers became pregnant, and questioned whether they should do so on their law firms' dime."

If Gorsuch in fact made these statements – and Sisk has provided documents showing she complained of these comments at the time, long before he was ever nominated to the Supreme Court – they are disqualifying in their disregard for women's equal treatment at work. If Gorsuch is elevated to the Supreme Court, critical precedents protecting women employees from sex discrimination would be at risk.

The idea that pregnant women and mothers are undesirable employees – and that all female applicants and employees should be assumed to be guilty of an intent to procreate until proven innocent – has been at the root of much of the sex discrimination women face in the workplace. Indeed, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist – a deeply conservative justice – recognized 14 years ago that "[h]istorically, denial or curtailment of women's employment opportunities has been traceable directly to the pervasive presumption that women are mothers first, and workers second." He also recognized that the stereotype that men did not have family care responsibilities led to "a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination that forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver, and fostered employers' stereotypical views about women's commitment to work and their value to employees."

For these very reasons, Congress, the Supreme Court and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have been clear: Title VII, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex – specifically including discrimination on the basis of pregnancy – prevents companies from probing women's pregnancy plans and making employment decisions on that basis. The EEOC has explicitly rejected the approach Gorsuch is said to have endorsed: "Because Title VII prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy, employers should not make inquiries into whether an applicant or employee intends to become pregnant. The EEOC will generally regard such an inquiry as evidence of pregnancy discrimination where the employer subsequently makes an unfavorable job decision affecting a pregnant worker."

In fact, the very first Title VII sex discrimination case ever decided by the Supreme Court, in 1971, found that an employer that denied employment to women with preschool-age children, but not men with preschool-age children, committed unlawful sex discrimination. And in 1991, the Supreme Court affirmed, "Women as capable of doing their jobs as their male counterparts may not be forced to choose between having a child and having a job."

The statements Gorsuch is said to have made ignore these key anti-discrimination principles and precedents, swapping them out for a concern for the corporate bottom line. First, this concern is misguided as a factual matter. Census bureau data show that providing paid family leave, for example, makes it more likely that women will return to work after giving birth, and analyses by such respected voices as McKinsey & Company show that businesses profit when their policies support women's advancement and leadership. After all, arbitrarily depriving yourself of the talents of half the population isn't good for the bottom line.

Second, and most critically given the position Gorsuch seeks to hold, these statements betray a fundamental disregard for the letter and the spirit of the laws protecting women's workplace rights. Women have fought for generations to be judged at work based on their job performance, not on their family roles. Title VII promises that employers will be held to this standard, as do other important legal protections such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, which prohibits employers from retaliating against employees for taking leave to care for a newborn. But a hostile court can weaken those protections. Imagine a Justice Gorsuch reasoning, for example, that when employers demonstrate that they are motivated by perceived financial interests in disfavoring certain candidates, they do not violate Title VII, because they are motivated not by discriminatory animus against pregnant women, mothers or women more broadly, but just by dollars and cents. Gorsuch, after all, has a record of deference to employers in discrimination cases, ruling for the employer outright in 9 of the 12 published employment discrimination cases he authored, and partially for the employer in two more.

Late Sunday night, another student in Gorsuch's class submitted a letter to the Judiciary Committee disputing the recollections of his classmates. He states that in fact Gorsuch was merely exploring "the tension between building a career in a time-intensive profession and starting a family and raising children – especially for women."