The variable on which he's trying to discriminate for hiring is not, strictly speaking, gender. He wants to discriminate on the likelihood of an employee missi

The variable on which he's trying to discriminate for hiring is not, strictly speaking, gender. He wants to discriminate on the likelihood of an employee missing an extended amount of work time in the wake of a voluntary* personal choice. For a company to want to avoid that is quite reasonable. But of course, pregnancy correlates very highly to gender, so the execution of such a policy ends up functionally indistinguishable from actual gender discrimination. (*we're not here to debate the fine points of when contraception measures fail.)