“The company had a policy that anyone who got pregnant should disclose immediately to HR,” Nelson, a scientist living in California, told me. “I was in middle management there, so I followed the policy.”

Melanie Nelson was working at a small biotech firm when she got pregnant with her second child in 2009. During her first pregnancy, Nelson was working at a contracting firm, and didn’t have much to worry about when it came to workplace safety. But this time she was working near chemicals she believed could pose a risk to her pregnancy.

Welcome to the first installment of the reboot of Design Bias , a Motherboard column in which writer Rose Eveleth explores the products, research programs, and conclusions made not because any designer or scientist or engineer sets out to discriminate, but because the "normal" user always looks exactly the same. The result is a world that's biased by design. -Editor

There are lots of conversations about the lack of diversity in science and tech these days. Along with them, people constantly ask, "So what? Why does it matter?" There are many ways to answer that question, but perhaps the easiest is this: because a homogenous team produces homogenous products for a very heterogeneous world.

Nelson hadn’t told anybody other than HR about her pregnancy, and she didn’t want to. But as a biochemist she knew that the compounds in question could be harmful, even lethal, to a developing fetus. In those committee meetings, she tried to argue that the chemicals should be treated more carefully than other people had suggested.

Nelson was extra worried, she said, because the company had just started working with some highly toxic anti-cancer compounds. And what's more, the safety guidelines hadn’t been updated. “I remember thinking that some of the other committee members were pretty cavalier about the worry,” said Nelson, speaking of the group (herself included) the firm tasked with writing those new procedures. “I don't think they meant to be, but they just didn't think about the fact that there might be pregnant people who could be exposed to the chemicals.”

Many people might balk at having to disclose a pregnancy as soon as they know about it, for all sorts of reasons. Nelson says that for her, that wasn’t the troubling part. “The nice thing was that HR then arranged for a consultation with our safety consultant,” as the firm was not of a size at the time to have that function in-house, she explained. “The less nice thing was that the consultant really couldn't tell me anything useful, because there wasn't any real reproductive toxicology data on any of the relevant chemicals.”

The problem is by no means confined to labs, of course. There is a dearth of research and data points on how all kinds of chemicals and drugs impact pregnant populations and fetuses generally. That’s in part because the ethics of experimenting on pregnant women are so fraught that it's difficult, if not impossible, to perform a large-scale controlled study on a pregnant population. This leaves tons of uncertainty about how various substances affect these people and fetal development. For even very widely used chemicals and drugs like over-the-counter painkillers, there just aren't a lot of good answers.

Nelson’s experience using her own expertise to evaluate safety concerns while pregnant is incredibly common. Pregnant people in labs across the country get conflicting information, if they get any at all. There’s very little good research on the reproductive risks of many lab chemicals. And sometimes what individuals are advised to do could harm their career.

Luckily for Nelson, she had an ally in the department head, who backed her up and suggested they take extra care with the new compounds, and she was happy with the safety guidelines they landed on—the child she was pregnant with at the time is now a happy, healthy eight-year-old. But the whole scenario was a stark reminder that without Nelson and her department head speaking up, the outcome could have been dangerously different.

In the lab setting, however, where people like Nelson are working with chemicals that most of us wouldn't interact with on a day-to-day basis, the problem is aggravated. And when it comes to reproductive health and safety in the lab, every research institution has its own policy.

Most universities I contacted for this story said they had some form of consultation system. Michael B. Blayney, research safety lead at Northwestern University, said that he encourages anybody who is pregnant or trying to get pregnant to meet with him to go over their risks. “What we always do is sit down with the individual and go through a list of the chemicals and materials and procedures that they are currently working with,” Blayney told me. From there, they formulate a plan for what the person should and shouldn’t do.

In an ideal world that would mean a pregnant person could contact their office of health and safety, talk to a professional, make a list of all the compounds they work with, check to see how dangerous they are for pregnant people, and come up with a clear plan for how to keep both parent and child safe.

I spoke with eight women who had gone through one or more pregnancies while working in a lab. Each of them described ways in which this ideal setup didn’t quite pan out.

“There’s very little research to look at whether these substances impact pregnancy.”

First, figuring out when and how you want to disclose your pregnancy can be a struggle unto itself. The first trimester is generally thought to be the one with the highest risk—about 80 percent of miscarriages happen in the first trimester, according to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Hazardous chemicals are a concern throughout the pregnancy, but could have an outsized effect at the very beginning, precisely when many people don’t want to disclose that they're pregnant. Blayney, for his part, emphasizes that the conversations he has with people are private; he says he does not inform an individual’s colleagues or bosses of their pregnancy or attempts to get pregnant.