My Fault, I'm Female

Yes it is.

Those are called employment contracts, and they exist, and the Family and Medical Leave Act supersedes them anyway.

The 25 year old broken armed skater uses up his sick days, doesn’t show up to work and gets fired.

The 45 year old triple bypass loses his job because he needs to take 9 months to recover from the operation.

The jewish guy (orthodox, I’m guessing) doesn’t even get hired for the 24/7 on call job.

The mother who asks for half days to go pick up the kids, and misses out on work finds her job being taken away from her, and passed over for promotion.

All that shit happens. And the business decisions are influenced by the likelihood of anything like those cases happening. Should business be more caring? Yes. Should things be more equal? Yes. The simple matter is scale. 50% of women are expected to be a mother. So they get attention, rather than the cases you bring.

Increasingly Fathers are demanding more parental rights (especially when it comes to divorces) and increasingly the dominant area of the workforce, men, will have to be considered along with those previously ignored, women. Which is good.

The problem a lot of men have with all that is that there are loads of other problems as well. Disability rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, racial rights, etc. all have to be considered, and they’re things they don’t feel disparaged/guilty about (right thinking men anyway.) And most men when asked agree that women should be and are equal to men. But when men aren’t expected to do heavy lifting, when men aren’t asked to fix an engine, when men aren’t derided for looking after children, when men aren’t portrayed as sex crazed louts it’ll actually change. Machismo and it’s associations are just as much as a barrier to men as to women. I’d argue that there are just as many bad role models for men as there are slights against women. And all of that needs to change.

Basically, what I’m saying is that not all men are assholes. And it’s a societal issue more so than a work issue. And while the problems may be more obvious for women, there are problems for men as well. And they’re two sides of the same coin.

So Brian, what happens to your contract when the guy has a heart attack? Should he show up to work with his oxygen tank?

So, it’s bad, then, that most elementary schools discriminate against pedophiles in their hiring practices?

And I’m saying that it shouldn’t, at least as far as foreseeable planned leave goes.

If we want to live in a world where women expect to be treated exactly the same as men then WOMEN NEED TO BE TREATED EXACTLY THE SAME AS MEN. That’s the problem. There IS an inherent risk to hiring any number of people in protected classes, and it’s not just limited to women, though they are obviously the biggest class that’s so affected. Disabled people, for instance, face the same sort of problem, albeit from a different angle (essentially, the ADA puts you at significant risk for any number of lawsuits if you employ a disabled person - that’s a disincentive to employing disabled people). Asking the business to shoulder the cost and not expecting them to factor that into the risk assessment when hiring or promoting is naive.

Keep on truckin’, Demon. WOW.

The…front page of metafilter? Obscure, I know.

I think it’s irresponsible not to promote managers without psychic powers, then. Sounds like they need telepathy and precognition to do their job right. The precog is so they know if someone who’s signing the contract has a heart attack or accidentally gets pregnant but doesn’t want to abort.

Most heart attacks aren’t foreseeable. Most pregnancies are. All maternity leave certainly is, since even if you DO become pregnant, you can get un-that-way. I probably also wouldn’t put a fragile diabetic in a position where he’s exclusively responsible to a lot of people either, and I say that AS A GUY IN THAT POSITION. It’s just a dumb business decision.

Woah. You seem to be reading a lot into what I said there. There is some truth that women are more likely than men to take leave because of having a baby. That’s all I said. I didn’t say it was OK to discriminate on that basis. In fact, I specifically said the opposite. You took that quote right out of context. It is simply a fact that a woman is statistically more likely to take maternity leave than a man is to take paternity leave. That’s all I meant. I didn’t say women are less productive or less valuable as workers or anything else. But taking a vacation is not the same thing. In fact, both women and men get vacations. This is an extra time off. It makes sense that it would be a consideration. However, it needs to be set aside, in order to avoid discrimination.

Also, as I was posting this thread, I thought “will Brian Seiler arrive and shit it up?”

I wasn’t even intending a P&R angle, I just thought the stories were so awful they were FML hilarious.

I’m not a lawyer, but I think you’d have trouble drafting an employment contract where the ‘reasonable notice’ period is six months rather than a few weeks, if you want to try to actually enforce someone sticking around for that long. If you can’t enforce it then it’s meaningless, but a duration that long is rather excessive.

You’re deliberately overlooking the FORESEEABLE part of the equation. You have to figure about the same risk of a catastrophic stroke or winning lottery ticket for all people. If Dick Cheney shows up looking for a CEO spot and I see him filling out a bulk order from the pork plant in the lobby, I’m going to factor that into my decision-making process if there’s a viable alternative.

Oh, that is not going to go over well.

In a world of progressive dudes like Demon and Brian, it’s amazing bitches still got shit to complain about.

Did… did you just suggest that women should have abortions to further their careers?

I think Brian and me agree on most things. Society should be equal, and people should be treated equally. He just thinks that businesses (and society, maybe) should get away with being less considerate. I think business should be forced to, and society encouraged to be more considerate.

I’m pretty sure Brian just won the internets!

Now where do I sign up for my hysterectomy so that I won’t be a liability to my workplace?

I dunno. Are you ugly? Then you’re probably less of a risk than a hot girl because guys will be more willing to put their dick in you and get a baby all up in there.

Women are more likely to quit their jobs for family. Although this is equalizing it has a long history (which has impacted our perceptions) and it continues to be no where near equal.

Because of this the concern of a family causing a company to lose a valued female worker is higher than it is for the same thing happening to a male worker. This is not discrimination (discrimination is not simply differences, it is differences with a negative impact).

Companies are also concerned about losing valued male and female workers to their competition and may makes decisions based on minimizing this risk. The difference here is that this is a professional situation, not a personal one.

The big difference with Brian’s “Not all discrimination is bad. If I owned a company, I would want an agreement from anybody that I promoted into a position of responsibility that they wouldn’t be going anywhere for at least six months.” Is the realization that employees are people and one of the goals of a company (at least a good company) is to run well while still allowing their employees their personal lives. Because of that his contract is ridiculous (if not illegal) and ignores the wide range of controllable and uncontrollable situations that can occur. “Sorry about that cancer, but you did sign a contract saying you wouldn’t go anywhere for six months… so 3-4 months to live isn’t going to work for us.” I certainly wouldn’t work for a company that didn’t place some value in its employees personal lives.

And as mmalloy said hiring or promoting based on maternity is illegal (and stupid).

Oy. I think I’m gonna bite my tongue, rather than diving in deeper ;).

They’re definitely that. It’s the kind of laughter that turns into shake-your-head sighs of bitterness.