One up for equality???

If a couple want to have children, isnt it a fact of life that the woman HAS to have them- therefore how can anyone say its a choice?
 
Vanilla said:
If a couple want to have children, isnt it a fact of life that the woman HAS to have them- therefore how can anyone say its a choice?
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It's a choice the couple make. Women have to take this time off but in the interest of equality shouldn't the state cover the costs to her employer as well as paying her benefit? The fact that a woman does take time off to have children will be taken into account when she is being considered for senior position. That may not be fair but it is how the world works.
 
Podge&Rodge said


My point is that the choice is not the same for women and men. A man can decide to have a child within the context of a relationship without it affecting his career, a woman cannot.

And DaltonR said

This may be so, but only Mary MUST take 4 months off to have a child, John will never have to do this in normal circumstances. And having a child is something I would imagine that most couples would do - all the other events are unexpected ( apart from the travelling the world bit, which is discretionary).

My experience as an employee has been that employers will discriminate against female employees in terms of salary and promotional prospects because of a realistic fear that the woman will take maternity leave ( at least once and probably more than once) and secondly that once a woman has children she will no longer work the same hours, and will need more time off because of childcare issues. There is also an underlying idea that women do not need to earn as much as they are not the main earner of the household - i.e. what I call the ' hubby is working' syndrome. I have heard this from colleagues who are employers and from some of my own past employers - this is the idea that somehow, because your husband or partner is a full time worker, that you do not need to earn as much. This is just my experience and perhaps an isolated thing?

I think its also naive for anyone to say that once a couple has children that child care can be shared equally. In my experience one person generally takes the lions share of the childcare needs- of all my family and friends, there is only one couple where the woman is the main earner, and her husband does take on more childcare. In all the rest where both are working full time, it is the woman who leaves work on time to pick up the children, it is the woman who takes time off to go to parent teacher meetings, or when the children are sick or when they need to go for a check up etc etc. So this obviously has a detrimental affect on a womans career. I really don't know how much choice is involved. I think the only choice you have once you have children is whether you will put them before your career or not. Is that a choice? It's not for me. Why is it that in general women take on the childcare needs, and men don't? Is it because they want to? Or is it because for many reasons, they have limited choices. I genuinely believe it is the latter.
 
Actually the major impact on the womans career is not the having of children it's the time taken off after the child is born to look after it for a few months/a year. This could be done by the man. We're going to get into a whole debate about just how much/little time a woman MUST take off work.

Obviously you can't have a kid on Saturday and be back in work on monday, but I don't believe the few weeks in actualyl having the child is the major factor in the different careers.

As I've said before I believe the actual difference is more psychological, I don't believe women are as driven or aggressive in pursuit of either power or money.
But on this specific question yes Men have a slight advantage in terms of actually giving birth they can work more. But I don't accept that this accounts for the pay difference. Ultimately it's still a matter of choice.

Nobody is denying that there is a certain societal bias towards the woman being the carer, and the is a physical issue which means it's women that gives birth. Neither of these are the fault or the responsibility of the Employer. The religious among you might like to take the physical issues up with your creator.

What rarely gets discussed is how much a woman should be compensated for being the child bearer. What is the quantifiable impact of giving birth on ones career? Where a couple choose to have kids the woman has to have them, so some compensation is deserved, but why doesn't that compensation come from her husband?

As for the follow on care this is traditionally done by the woman, but is not neccearily so. This is a choice made by the family and again the employer has no obligation to compensate either partner for the impact on their career path.

Note. What we're talking about here is not who pays for the maternity leave/paternity leave. The employer may choose to pay something out of recognition of the value of the employee, but isn't obliged to.

What we're talking about is compensating people for the impact on their career
for taking time out to have kids, or be ill, or travel the world, or sit by the bedside of a family member. There should be no compensation for this. It happens.

Is it unfair that the childbearing reality impacts on some womens careers?
No it isn't. It's life, it's brutally fair. The childbearing reality also impacts in the relationship that the child has with each parent (usually closer to mother), and with the respective rights of the parents in the eyes of the law. There's swings and roundabouts.

-Rd
 
Daltonr: on a purely practical level- do you have children, and if so, did you take or even contemplate taking parental leave to take care of them after the birth? If you did, you're very much in the minority. Aside completely from the physical aspects ( and btw you havent taken into account breastfeeding - which WHO recommends should be done for a year, and all medical advice seems to be to do it for as long as possible or being up half the night with a newborn) how would your employer view your decision to take parental leave? I'd guess badly. In the same way your employer would most likely view repeated absences by you to take care of your children badly.

You say 'ultimately its still a matter of choice' , but I don't agree. My point is that for most women, if they want to have children, there is no choice. Thats a fact of life. However I do agree that an employer has no obligation to compensate because of the effect this will have on a womans career, nor should they. It is perhaps understandable that an employer will prefer a male employee to a female because of the possible detrimental effect having a child will have on their work.

Being a woman, however, you will excuse the fact that I am not happy about it. I am not happy that in a job application, a man of equal experience and sometimes less, would be likely to be preferred. I am not happy that it is likely that a man would be paid more. I'm not saying I dont understand the reasons why, but I don't have to be happy about it. I'm not happy that I will have to let my career suffer to take care of my child because it would be much harder for my husband to take parental leave. However I am not prepared to let my child suffer in any way, so I will have to sacrifice my career. Thats life, but I don't have to like it.
 
on a purely practical level- do you have children, and if so, did you take or even contemplate taking parental leave to take care of them after the birth?
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No, although I've seen the phenomenon close up, so I'm familiar with it. To answer your question I have discussed the possibility of being the one who stays at home should the situation present itself. I don't dispute for one second that that would put me in the minority. And I accept that due to lots of factors stay at home men will always be the minority.

and btw you havent taken into account breastfeeding
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Actually I have taken this into account. Again there are choices here. The choices suit different people. From not breastfeeding at all to using a pump etc. Let's not get into this in too much detail. Let's stick to big picture.

how would your employer view your decision to take parental leave? I'd guess badly. In the same way your employer would most likely view repeated absences by you to take care of your children badly.
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I'm my own employer but whether it's me or another employee I'd interpret the decision to take parental leave as a decision to prioritise family over work. A very wise piece of prioritisation in my view. I wouldn't punish a worker for such a decision, but I'd also not expect such an employee to continue to advance their career while they are off pursuing their other priority. When they return they'd have fallen slightly behind someone who hadn't taken time off. 'd expect nothing less if I was the employee.


I fully understand your position. It's one I'm very familiar with, I've heard this story many many times. I've seen it from the perspective of the employee and the employer.

The problem is muddied a bit. We need to pin down what we're talking about here. There are perhaps half a dozen different issues that get rolled into this discussion that need to be teased apart and discussed in isolation before trying to put them all together. Here are a few...

Isssue 1. Will employers in general prefer a man to a woman when hiring or
promoting due to the possibility that the woman may take more time off?

My opinion. Possibly. Certainly in small business I can see this might happen. It's far from universal, but it's probably right that steps be taken to tackle it. Simply legislating that it isn't allowed isn't enough, a small employer won't care about the legislation, they'll act in the interests of their firm and come up with a plausable excuse as to why the woman wasn't hired.

Perhaps compensating small businesses for time lost so as to make such a hire less risky might be a more proactive way of dealing with the issue.
For example if employers PRSI was lower for women of childbearing age, or for people who are likely to need time off work due to illness or disability, this might go someway to redressing the balance.

Business is business and risk must be rewarded or the money will go elsewhere. No business will take on risk unless there is a payback. If you can hire a man for the same price you will. Money has no emotion on these matters.

If someone has to pick up the tab for engineering a more equal society then it should be government. They're in the business of engineering society. Businesses are in the business of making money.

Issue 2. Do women in general make more compromises in work in order to prioritise family than men?
My Opinion. Yes, I think that's fair to say. I don't ever see a time when this will be 50/50 or the men will take the lead. Perhaps there's something deep inside us that cause this difference, or perhaps it's societal. but it's true.

Issue 3. Given that women compromise on work and prioritise family, and men do the opposite (in the main). Should women who make this compromise be entitled to stay on the work conveyor at the same speed as someone (male or female) who does not make these trade offs.

My Opinion. No. Anyone who prioritises anything over their work give up something to those who put work first. In some cases the compromise is forced on us, and yes women are more likely to have the compromise forced on them than men. It's not ideal, but it's life. You don't get to choose whether or not you deal with a serious illness either.

You may be able to get a soft hearted government to ease the burden of the forced compromises, but your beef shouldn't be with employers.

Issue 4. Will an employer in general pay a woman less than a man for no other reason than the fact that she's a woman.

My Opinion. No. There may be pay differences but I firmly believe that is a symptom of many issues. Simple straight forward discrimination on the basis of gender is not a credible explanation for such a widespread phenomenon.

If it were related to gender bias then the employees of women managers would display the opposite, men would be paid the same or less than women, but we find similar pay differentials regardless of the gender of the person writing the cheque.

The reasons for the Pay rates accross entire industries may relate to differences in ambition, differences in aggressiveness, differences in life goals and priorities, differences in the way children are taught to think about themselves as they grow up.

There may also be a factor that men are more willing to jack in a job that they don't feel pays enough and move on. I have seen women underpaid (relative to the industry, not relative to a coworker) who have stayed in the job regardless.

I lectured for a while and I can say with certainty that gender was not a reliable way of picking out who in the class would be a good programmer and who would not.

If some of the females I taught are on less money than their male counterparts for no other reason than that they are women, that would annoy me as much as you and I'd like to hear about it.

-Rd
 
I think its fairly obvious that an employer will favour a man over a woman because of the possibility of maternity leave and the fact that women in general will take the burden of childcare in the main, and similarly men will be paid more than women for the same reason. And as whether any particular woman will actually have children or not, or take on that burden or not is impossible to predict, then it follows that women will be more likely to be on a lower pay and less likely to get promoted for no other reason than they are women.

And getting back to the physical aspects, you say you have taken into account breastfeeding- I agree there is the choice to not do it, I don't necessarily agree that you can always choose to pump. But thats a side matter.
 
I know you can't always use a pump it isn't for everyone and it can't start immediately. I know a little more about such matters than I'd care to know to be honest.

As I said there are lots of choices, and then there are situations that are forced upon us. I also agree that women get more choices made for them in this area than men. On the other hand the flipside is that that women or men who end up staying at home with kids get more time with their kids. You'd sometimes think that this was a bad thing. What it is is their compensation for prioritising family over work.

My sympathy would be with the woman who chooses to devote herself fully to work and get's discriminated agaisnt on the grounds that she *might* become pregnant. Her choice to prioritise work is not rewarded as it should be. That is unacceptable.
It's understandable why an employer might discriminate, but it's unacceptable. I think my Employers PRSI idea might help such women.

Some will say that we shouldn't reward anyone who puts work before family. Well business will reward them. Business doesn't care if you have kids. Government, the State cares about having kids to pay for pensions etc in the future, but business doesn't really care.

So, let the state reward you for having kids, and let business reward you for doing work.

Women or men who prioritise family over work should suffer somewhat in the work area, but they are compensated with a better (hopefully) homelife. Those who prioritise work over family will probably suffer in terms of family life but will be rewarded with a better career.

Our goal should be to create a society where both men and women are given equal opportuniy to make the work/family, not to compensate people for the loss that results from making the choice.

-Rd
 
Oh thank goodness for that.

It usually takes days of debate, and often bribery with skittles and alcohol before people start to agree with me.

-Rd
 
Eh yes - I would definitely need some more googling to be convinced, given that study in question is based on 155 tree-planters in Canada in 1994. Hardly representative or exhaustive. And based on my quick scan of the study, it refers to different male/female responsive to an incentive scheme rather than base productivity. So a lot more googling is required to show that men are more productive than women.

For the record, I'd be quite happy to accept that men are better than women on hard, physical labour (no childbirth-related pun intended) like unskilled building work, mining etc, but I'm a long way from being convinced that men are generally more productive than women in knowledge-worker roles.

I'd be more worried about how you managed to get 5 racists onto your staff. Wouldn't say much for your hiring practices to me.
Flimsy arguements at best. Don't you have somebody trained in to provide holiday cover, or sick leave cover, or parental leave (which applies equally to both men & women) cover, or employee might leave/get heart attack/get fired cover. Excessive dependancy on key individuals is jut bad business. And let's not be so quick to assume that temp rates are always higher than FTE rates. Are you really looking at the fully-burdened FTE rates will all the overheads thrown in?

Apologies for the broken link - [broken link removed]
 

Actually the study found that men planted 11% more trees than women and sought to find out why. It ruled out discrimination and tried to see if men and women react differently to incentives. It concluded that they didn't.

The final conclusion is that the difference in productivity was down to ability. I agree that this qualifies as a physical job, although hardly hard labour. Trees are small when you plant them.

You could well be right that women are just as productive in knowledge based jobs. That wuold be my observation in the main, but it's interesting that that is the very type of job in which direct comparison of pay levels is not possible, since no two knowledge jobs are the same.

-Rd
 
I'd be more worried about how you managed to get 5 racists onto your staff. Wouldn't say much for your hiring practices to me.
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You know well that the situation in question was a hypothetical one. That sort of comment contributes nothing to a discussion. If you hired workers from poorer areas of north Dublin for manual work you would have a better idea of where a large minority of Dublin people stand on working with Black people.

Flimsy arguements at best. Don't you have somebody trained in to provide holiday cover, or sick leave cover, or parental leave (which applies equally to both men & women) cover, or employee might leave/get heart attack/get fired cover.
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I assume you are joking here? Are you really saying that in a small company of 5-10 people it is possible to train a person in to fill a role for a period of three to four months at no disruption or cost or another person will be available to fit into that role for three or four months with no disruption or cost to the company?

Would you care to share your own opinions here and make a constructive contribution to this thread rather than just deconstructing other people’s comments?
 

I have to admit the naivete of that comment coming from someone like Rainyday took me a bit by surprise. I thought I read on a previous thread that he had some involvement in a small company in the past.

Any small business I've ever been involved with (5 at this count) works around these issues, it isn't possible to have someone who can fill in, if such a person existed they'd already be on the staff doing their own work.

Holidays are usually 2 weeks, often less and you live with it. Being an industry of relatively young people you disregard the risk of death because it if happens the project is going to be the least of your concerns.

Redundancies only usually occur when there's a slow down so a replacement by definition is not required.

Perhaps Rainyday's experience of small businesses is different. I'd be very curious to see how a small (1 to 10 employee) knowledge based company manages to have standby staff ready to provide cover.

Obviously in jobs where people are interchangeable, e.g. conveyor belt manufacturing jobs then it may be possible. Although we won't have to worry about such jobs for long, they'll all be in China or India by the end of the decade.

-Rd
 
Obviously in jobs where people are interchangeable, e.g. conveyor belt manufacturing jobs then it may be possible. Although we won't have to worry about such jobs for long, they'll all be in China or India by the end of the decade.
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I agree, and so will a lot of the IT job! (but I digress)
 
Yep, some of the coding jobs may go abroad, but I think the vast majority of bespoke software (the kind that is most knowledge intensive) will always remain close to the end user when it comes to development.

I can see a lot of the big off the shelf coding being moved abroad, the Microsoft style companies etc. But it certainly won't happen soon.

But we digress.

-Rd
 
To digress again, most of the "conveyor belt manufacturing jobs" have been in eastern Europe, south east Asia and China since the end of the last decade. For example Dell may employ more people than ever directly in this country but they provided more jobs in the economy 6-8 years ago. To tie in to the subject at hand the companies that have gone under/ overseas have had an equal opportunity policy when letting their staff go.
 
Using costs of training a replacement for maternity cover as an arguement in proving lower productivity for women is taking the narrowest possible view. You might as well blame the costs of the soap in the ladies loo. Sure if you didn't have any women on staff, you wouldn't need the ladies loo at all at all.

I notice that neither Purp nor RD answered the point about training staff to provide cover for parental leave? Or cover for critical employees simply leaving? I've worked with a number of small companies in my time. The smart ones made a concerted to provide cover for key employees by cross-training, with varying degrees of success.
 
I notice that neither Purp nor RD answered the point about training staff to provide cover for parental leave?
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I thought we both answered it. I certainly did. I mentioned being involved in various capacities with 5 (perhaps 4) small companies. I said that from what I could gather no special plan was in place for absenses due to parental leave. If/when it happened it was dealt with. That usually meant cutting back on the amount of work that was taken on.

There was of course an element of cross training of all staff, but the net result is your still down a staff member. You can't do your own job and someone elses.

In 2 of the companies there were/are no key female employees.

I'm not saying this is good. I'm just saying it's life. You can try to legislate for it but in the kind of jobs we do today it is virtually impossible to compare two workers.
We need new and imaginative ways to tackle discrimination where it exists.

I don't hear imagination in the comments on this thread. I hear a stubborn clinging to the belief that you can pass a law and everything will be ok. I don't hear any recognition of the fact that small businesses are often surviving rather than thriving. Many have no training of key staff, much less cross training to cover for absent staff.

Are they smart? Are they dumb? if their busieness keeps them in the lifestyle they desire then they are smart. You'll have to do more than pass a law or appeal to their decency to get them to use their busienss as a tool to tackle discrimination.
In simple terms if you want them to take on extra risk, you'll have to reward them with cool hard cash.

-Rd
 
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