It’s always been an inconvenience to employers...
Ask anyone old enough, many young and married women were asked flat out if they planned to become pregnant anytime soon in job interviews, because employers didn’t want to invest the money training them for them to have kids and quit.
This was pretty common practice before such questions were outlawed.
It gets asked anyway, outlawed or not. My niece has (and is) working for a company here in Texas, and has for at least 8 years. She is up for a promotion, and her interview included exactly the question "do you plan to have any more children"?
First, I NEVER was advised, tacitly or otherwise, to avoid hiring women.
Second, when women announced they were expecting, there wasn't some smoky, backroom meeting about how to muscle out Mary. If anything, it was simply another HR matter requiring changes to workflow and assignments... and assembling an in-office baby shower.
Third, we NEVER asked "are you coming back?" Indeed, the female employee frequently offered up the question AND answer after announcing her pregnancy - "I'll be taking some time off then coming back." More often than not, that happened. There were a few instances where the woman voluntarily left the workforce to care for her child, and in all of those cases it was because she WANTD to do so. Nature, you know.
Fourth, after taking over departments, I observed "apparent" pay disparity instances. Upon deeper investigation, many of these disparities were explained by experience, hiring dates (people hired more recently tended to have higher/market-adjusted base pay), and performance.
Notwithstanding all of this analysis, there were absolutely a few places over the years where the disparity boiled down to the prior hiring manager being a POS. In those cases, I called HR and they had ninja-like skills in finding funding pools to correct the disparity. Parenthetically, I never saw a guy getting the pay shaft in my analyses.
During the pandemic I saw men AND women rise to the occasion. For every guy I saw work harder, there was a woman who thought harder. And visa versa. Differences in talent I've observed, was solely based on the individual and not their XX or XY pattern.
One last salient point: I've had MANY women confide in me, that women can be the worst bosses to other women. "oh yea...it's a thing" I was told. That's not to say guys can't be terrible bosses - I've had quite a few - but as one female told me "women can be our own worst enemies."
Your mileage may vary.
One last thing....one of those POS hiring managers had a big boss that was über-wokey: talked the talk, but failed to walk the walk.