Don’t forget to bring the X-Ray’s to the interview. That’s the only way they can be sure.
Brian has turned the crazy up to eleven today, this promises to be good.
He’d have to throw in a defense of rape for it to get any better.
Wait, should employers be considering the possibility of rape induced pregnancies in their hiring and promotion decisions?
Shit, I think I’m like a 6/10. Are my chances better the lower the number or do they middle out somewhere between “Will get knocked up definitely cause she’s hot” and “I don’t want to work with a walrus.”
Not if abortion is legal.
Yes. Yes I did. Just like a basketball player should have expensive surgery to fix his plantar fasciitis to keep playing basketball. I accept that abortion is just a medical procedure.
The best information I’ve been able to find suggests that in most cases, the baby marks the point at which forward progress ceases anyway in America, because, while it is perfectly acceptable for a father to be an absentee parent who spends fifty to a thousand hours a week doing his job and busting his ass because that’s what the idiots who live in this damned nation expect of people, it is…less so for women.
What would be really great would be if America could get rid of this stupid Puritan work ethic, but unfortunately I seem to have been shouted down at the last company meeting on THAT subject. Until then, yeah - now that we’ve made it so that pregnancy is essentially a voluntary state, women need to be responsible for managing that choice along with all the rest of their choices and factoring in the consequences of however they choose to make it.
I like moms. Moms are great. Moms can be great employees. Moms can also be lazy as all hell. It varies pretty much on an individual basis, like most things. That doesn’t change the fact that if we’re not going to do something to cover the cost that comes with protecting a particular class of people (in the way that maternity leave does in states that only protect maternity leave - when you factor in paternity leave, the whole discussion gets muddy and weird because you’re dealing with social norms at that point and statistical likelihoods and yadda yadda yadda), expecting a business to ignore the additional risk that comes from that class protection is…it just makes no sense to me. It is an additional risk. It exists. It’s there, and it’s not being paid for by the body that’s putting it in place. Pretending it’s not there is just weird.
Hold off on that until you read the full company policy. You might be able to get more promotions and spot award bonuses by getting annual abortions. Over the average length of employment, annual abortions will probably require less time off than a hysterectomy, thus making that the more responsible employee behavior, and any manager worth their salt will recognize that.
That depends; I know you have a PhD, but how are you at fetching coffee?
Why would you even say this? What is wrong with you?
As an employer you simply can’t mess with the right of a woman to take maternity leave (or a man to take paternity leave should your state allow it). Trying to make business decisions based around the probability that a woman might “get pregnant and need to disappear for 3 months” is patently ridiculous. You might as well start screening all employees for medical history and decide not to promote Ralph to management because his family has a history of testicular cancer and you don’t want to risk him being gone for six months and coming back a less agressive sales manager because he’s missing a nut now. Yet that’s exactly the assinine assumptions male management often makes about female employees. Oh, she’s in her early 30’s and married, kids can’t be far behind, and even if she does come back from maternity leave she’ll be half the employee she used to be because she’ll spend all day pining for her kids instead of kicking ass at the office.
I’ve worked with many women who are as capable if not more so than their male counterparts, and having children didn’t change that in the least. Right now I’d say 7 of the 10 most capable people in my office are women, and I respect the hell out of them for it. As someone who has to deal with practically every person in an organization at one point or another, I know who the best and the brightest are, and quite often they’re female. What’s more, they often don’t tend to think of themselves that way, which while it makes them far easier to work with, doesn’t end up doing them any favors come review or promotion time. Luckily we have a very observant and progressive management that recognizes talent and success even when the employee might not be blowing their own horn all the time.
I’m not sure. It occurred to me that an ugly chick would be more likely to agree not to use a condom so she can actually get laid at all and thus be more at risk for a pregnancy.
Lorini is right. X-Rays for sure.
Sad so sad. Do you really mean this or are you just trolling? You think only 100% healthy people should work and be promoted? Do you realize how many productive positive people could actually be unemployed then? In your world, FDR would never have been president. Should Meg Whitman, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein be forced to prove they are in menopause to run for election? How about Nancy Pelosi?
It’s this sick belief that keeps Americans back. That somehow you have to be perfect to be of value. That the workplace should demand perfection and perfect predictable information. That it’s ok to discriminate using ‘what if’ scenarios instead of being able to react to what happens.
Ridiculous.
And there is a long way between forcing a woman to have an abortion and offering it as a choice. A large corporation telling a woman she has to have an abortion to continue employment or to be considered for promotion would make headlines across every news agency in the country if not the world. And they would feel it in their pocketbook if the public could make it so. And I say that as a woman who is pro-CHOICE, not pro-FORCE.
Well Brian you’ve sunk to Dirt levels here.
Oh come on, Brian HAS to be trolling. This:
Yes. Yes I did. Just like a basketball player should have expensive surgery to fix his plantar fasciitis to keep playing basketball. I accept that abortion is just a medical procedure.
…is just flat out “holy fucking shit” territory. He’s managed to outshine Demon by a long shot, so DGS will really have to step up his game if he hopes to compete here today.
But surely it should be up to the people who it will affect, i.e. the employer. All those people you mentioned were elected, so people did make a value decision on whether it was worth hiring them despite whatever eventualities. People knew FDR could drop, but they hired him because his worth was more than that risk.
If the basketball player didn’t want to get injured he shouldn’t have played basketball. If the women didn’t want to get pregnant she shouldn’t have had sex. The basketball player did get injured and he wanted to recover and play again so he had the operation. The women did have sex, (which is a lot less likely to cause pregnancy than basketball causes injuries), she did get pregnant, so now she should have the abortion if she wants to keep her job in hypothetical land.
Brian is arguing from a purely egalitarian standpoint, that’s firmly based in corporate dominance over personal pursuits. (Plus it’s handy that he approves of abortion as not morally abhorrent as it’s a medical procedure and not a “murder”, like a lot of you do.) The problem is that the world isn’t egalitarian and men and women aren’t equal. And if you accept that then you have to make other concessions between business’ privileges and personal privileges. It’s just a matter of where you draw the line on what level of equality should be enforced.
Maternity leave in the UK is 1 year.
Discuss.
So the unaddressed question is: What does Skeptoid say about women in the workplace?
I honestly don’t see how it’s crazy. I really, really don’t. The whole subject stinks of this weird attitude that we want to cultivate where men and women should be treated equally all the time, even when they are completely different. Women present a specific additional risk that men do not. They just do. No amount of law or talk will change that fundamental biological fact. What I’m saying is that just like anybody else who presents a specific risk, they should be treated the same, and the way I’d treat them is to ask them to minimize what they could about that specific risk. If I thought that it was a concern of any kind, I’d also ask a paraplegic to please not go skiing on a triple black hill during the transition period while he takes over responsibility in his new position. I’d look at a guy who decided to take his five weeks of vacation immediately after he was awarded an important vice presidency in a company as an idiot.
There are all sorts of controversial issues wrapped up in this that I fully expect any and everybody to have fun poking fun at me for, but for me, it goes down like this:
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In America, and I hate this, but it’s true, you are expected to be able to work an absolute shit ton. That is the presumption going in. It’s possible for that not to be the case, but those are the exceptions to the norm. Trust me when I say that I do what I can to fight to keep my own work week down to forty hours and claim as much time as I can, but most people just go along with that assumption.
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Pregnancy is voluntary, as it should be.
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It takes an amount of time X to transition a position from one person to another person.
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From 1 and 3, it follows that when you are promoted, it is assumed that you will be able to dedicate whatever ridiculous amount of time is necessary to transition all of the positional responsibilities of whatever it is we’re looking at upon being hired or promoted into a position.
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In most states, women are afforded a special protected right to be absent from their work (in contravention to the presumption in 1) as a result of pregnancy.
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From 2 and 5, it follows that unless a woman that you are putting into a position agrees not to exercise her specifically protected special right, she presents an additional risk above and beyond another individual who is not afforded that special right.
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From my own personal experience, this risk actually DOES come with some cost. It is possible for maternity leave to be badly timed with promotion in such a way that it holds back an entire group of people.
This is all very obvious to me. I’m legitimately unclear on why it’s not obvious to anybody else. I get that we wish that the world were a nicer, friendlier, happier place where taking time off to have your baby and recover didn’t interfere with anything, but that’s not the way the world works. I go out of my way to let people know that I’m diabetic and I’m going to miss a little bit more time than average with doctor crap and blood sugar nonsense because I don’t want anybody to expect anything from me that I’m not able to give them, and from 1, the basic expectation appears to be that I’m going to give them just about damn anything they want.
The central problem here may very well be the weird ass, backwards American work ethic (though I think Lorini is overblowing it a little bit - my personal experience tells me that workplaces don’t demand perfection, though they do try their hardest to ask for exceptionalism), but you can’t fix THAT with law. I don’t know how you can fix that outside of setting everybody over the age of thirty who doesn’t answer a specific psychological test a certain way on fire. The world I’d prefer is different form the world I live in.
On a different note, but still related to the topic at hand (My Fault, I’m Female):
I have a female friend who is attractive and also (for lack of a better description) well endowed. She doesn’t flaunt it, in fact she takes pains to try and hide it as much as possible, but she’s also petite so it’s pretty obvious no matter what she does to make it less so. Recently when we were out to lunch together she remarked about how nice it was not to have to hear the constant comments. I asked what she was talking about, and she said that when she walks alone downtown to and from work to her garage or to go get some lunch she’s constantly catcalled and hassled by guys on the street making comments or trying to get her to talk to them. This despite the fact that she very clearly has a wedding ring on her finger. When she’s with a guy though, no comments.
I have to admit that while it seems pretty obvious in retrospect, this astonished me at the time. I had no idea how bad it can be for women just doing something they have to do every day, like walking to work from a parking garage. She said bus stops are the worst, and she tries to avoid them when possible but has to pass by one every day outside her office. After thinking about this for awhile I’m frankly amazed that women can deal with this from day to day without snapping and pepper-spraying the first asshole at the bus stop that makes a comment. It’s shit like this that most guys don’t even think about but women have to put up with daily that creates sites like “My Fault, I’m Female”. So rather than call them bitches looking for an excuse to get pissed I’d think about how pissed you’d be if you had to deal with such shit on a daily basis.
Brian you are leaving out the human aspect of this. By that I mean that people are more than just some statistics, a woman is more than just a uterus, a man is more than just a person without a uterus. Sure men and women are not the same but they can bring the same skills to the workplace.
A year is not that long in the length of a business and the work will go on. Companies can adjust to and should be expected to adjust to absences among their staff and management. This is why there are anti-discrimination laws in place because a temporary loss of a person should not result in their termination. No matter what the medical reason. People bring value to a work environment. What businesses/organizations/agencies want and need are good, competent, skilled people to do the jobs that need to be done. There is no need for discrimination at the level you are discussing because not everyone can do every job.
Hiring a second best person because he doesn’t have a uterus is just plain stupid from a business point of view. “Let’s see, I can have the Harvard graduate or the community college graduate for my business management team. I’ll take the community college graduate because he’s male”. There are probably businesses who would make that decision but they’ll never be at the top of the game because they don’t choose people based on their merit.
Your world Brian would not be pretty and the US would be much less of a country for it. I hope you can see this one day and reconsider your position.
Alright, back to basics. Women deal with a lot of shit from men, but that’s the price you pay for the ability to get fucked whenever you want. Know this. We would gladly fucking trade you. We don’t get to wear dress shoes that aren’t black or brown without people thinking that we’re coke dealers. At bars, you can call us any name that you want, and we can’t pop you in the face, not even if you’re six inches taller and weigh fifty pounds more than us. If we say something less than artful about the shirt that you bought special just to show off your tits, which you also bought, you are legally allowed to throw water on us and kick us in the balls.
Furthermore, it is difficult for men to sort out what the motherfuck is going on with women, given the fact that the same woman can alternately embrace and reject stereotypes about females depending on the social situation and context. It’s Friday, I am going to wear pink and refuse to lift anything heavy. Now it’s two hours later, and I want to talk about politics. I’m a strong, independent woman, but you pay for dinner. Now it is an hour after that, and I have lost the argument about Tim Pawlenty, so I will not fuck you unless you apologize to me even though we both know I am wrong.
All those rude, stupid things people are saying? Those aren’t because you’re a woman. Those are because people are rude and stupid, and they say things like that all the time. The truth is, you don’t even get the half of it. If you want equality, you are going to have to accept that you don’t get to run the conversation with the rest of us the way you do with your boyfriend. Because most of the things you are saying, most of the time? We are about as interested as a Playboy Playmate hearing about someone’s top twenty-five favorite D&D characters.