I’m not saying there shouldn’t be some sort of support available if needed, I’m asking why the employer should be on the hook for it. What happens if a woman takes whatever amount of paid maternity leave, then up and decides to quit and be a stay-at-home parent?
That’s the presumption in the first place, which is why a lot of women are discriminated against when it comes to hiring and promotion decisions. So what if she leaves at the end. It’s no different than using all your PTO and then quitting at the end. Just because you can imagine somebody somewhere abusing the system doesn’t mean most will, and doesn’t negate the value in providing the benefit in the first place.
I guess this would be an issue if, in fact, someone could provide evidence that it actually happens in the real world.
Maternity leave in the USA is what, 5 weeks? Six? And the employer pays nothing, IIRC. Here in Canada a mother and father can split up to 52 weeks, but the employer is not obliged to pay a dime; you have to apply for unemployment insurance if you want an income.
And given the fact that there are many countries which do provide extended maternal and paternal leave periods, surely there would be some evidence about rampant abuse of the system in place by now. It doesn’t seem to be a widespread problem, at least not that I can find evidence of. It seems that if you give people adequate leave in the first place, they’d be less likely to leave their jobs in the end. The kid’s gotten sufficient time with new parents, all medical issues should be taken care of, and things are calming down. No need to quit your job once things are starting to get settled.
I’d say cross-dressing is still a huge one. Most people wouldn’t bat an eye if a woman wore properly fitting men’s pants or shirt to work. If a man decided to wear a dress or skirt or high heels, well, they’d be noticed at a minimum.
Now you do. I’ve had custody of my daughter for 9 years and her mother hasn’t paid a dime.
When can also show more skin then men at beaches and public pools then men. I work in an office; nobody’s allowed to wear shorts, but women can wear skirts (knee length) without having to wear stocking or panyhose. Usually it’s the same women who are constantly complaining about how cold it is. :smack:
It’s certainly been the attitude pushed by most of the feminists I’ve heard in my life.
No, crimes against women, period. Black women are worse off than white women true; but black men you can pretty much hunt for sport and probably get away with it.
Most obviously, accuse him of child molestation. I recall reading some years ago how it had even become common practice among attorneys for women for them to recommend that women talk their husband/boyfriend into helping bathe the kids, and take pictures of him doing so, so she could use those photos later as ammunition for accusations of child molestation later in any divorce.
Or she can just pick up a sledgehammer and cripple or kill him; odds are the court will accept that it was self defense without any need for tedious things like evidence.
Do you have some more, ahem, persuasive evidence of this than your obviously distorted personal worldview?
What, you think I photocopied everything I’ve read for the last thirty-plus years? Of course not. But it’s amusing that you think that attorneys giving people amoral, selfish advice is somehow wildly unrealistic.
In general, no it’s not unrealistic to imagine lawyers giving their clients advice to do ruthless, immoral things.
Your particular claim goes a bit beyond that, though. It’s not unreasonable for us to request a cite stronger than “I read something this one time.”
I am questioning the idea that men are discriminated against in nursing. Having attended nursing school in the late 90s and knowing many nurses I would say that at least in my experience this is not the case. Approximately one quarter of my class was men. Maybe my experience was different, I also had several male teachers in nursing school. (It was a small school of nursing, so 3 men in the faculty out of about 8 seems to be significant, I do not know about other schools of nursing) Men may receive some ribbing socially if they announce going into nursing, but with the exception of L&D nursing, I as a nurse know of no area where men are discriminated. In fact, I have more often seen blatant favouritism for male nurses. Particularly in areas like the ER, ICU, neurosurgery and psychiatric nursing. I know some very good skilled male nurses who are highly regarded by co workers and management alike, but I also know many who were not skilled but pushed up the ladder regardless. I would also say male nurses are over represented in leadership roles compared to the actual number of male nurses.
On the other hand, I was a manager in a clinic environment (I didn’t manage nurses though) and I found myself favouring (but mainly in a mental rather than actual way) my (two) male) staff, partly because they were actually very competent but also they tended to not contribute to the drama around the workplace. Actually I “favoured” all the staff who came to work, did their job well, and kept a professional working relationship with their peers. In a conversation with my boss about fixing the interpersonal issues in the clinic my (behind closed doors, tongue in cheek, not to be taken seriously by ANYONE) was to hire more men. Of course I couldn’t get approval to hire ANYONE when we seriously needed one extra part timer…
I think many excellent examples have been raised, so I’ll just offer some tidbits from my own experience:
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As Lynn Bodoni already mentioned: men’s toilets. My father’s lifelong struggle is to get baby changing facilities to be separate to the ladies’. When I was a baby he was once followed into the ladies’ toilets by security. Obviously, when they then saw he was in fact changing a baby’s nappy they quickly left. But he will write or see the manager every time he goes somewhere that doesn’t have facilities that men can use, even now. I think he is secretly hoping that by the time he has grandchildren he will have it all sorted
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I worked for some time with children with extreme behavioural problems. The girls had often been receiving attention for exhibiting sexual behaviour towards men. It would be the most heartbreaking thing to see a 7 y/o girl trying to give one of my colleagues a lap dance. Our solution for a time was to make it a rule that the girls could not sit on the laps of men or be cuddled by them. It was awful, the guys I worked with cared so much for these children. And they are just children. When they do something like that, it breaks your heart, you want to put your arms around them and tell them to stop, that they don’t need to do that to get love and attention. Instead these guys had to get up and walk away. It was really hard, and seemed to me to treat the men unfairly simply for being men. They had the same caring instincts that we all had, but were forced to react differently. Eventually we found different ways of dealing with these situations with the help of a psychologist.
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I think men can sometimes be inhibited from expressing certain things in society. That can be many different things and obviously differs per setting. But there still seems to be a lot of stigma attached to heterosexual men expressing their attraction to other men, in some cases to expressing forms of sensitivity. It’s not really quantifiable, but I think steps have been made wrt similar issues for women, while men are being left behind.
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My SO works in primary education, he is one among very few men. He says it is entirely acceptable where he works for women to discuss the evils of men, how they’re all pigs etc. Obviously, the same would never in a million years be ok in reverse. It would never even enter his mind. He would be very angry if anyone made misogynist comments.
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The norm is still for women to stay at home or work part-time, while I know many of my male friends say that when they have children they would like to share the responsibility more equally. I guess I’ll have to see how that pans out. I’m not sure it will be all that easy.
Those were just some things springing to mind.
You know, if someone took 6-12 weeks off unpaid to take care of their sick mother, no one would make snide comments about “must be nice”. A newborn is a sick family member: they need constant care and it has to be provided by someone. Daycare centers generally don’t take newborns and they can’t breastfeed.
Not to mention the fact that mom is recovering from her own medical procedure. Its really hard to say how quickly one could recover from birth alone: generally there is a baby and the sleepless nights are compromising your own recovery. But at the absolute minimum, the first 3-4 weeks of maternity leave are very much personal medical leave for even a text-book perfect labor/delivery for a healthy mom.
Again, cite?
Also, I think we can all agree that [temporary] restraining orders are often exploited for tactical reasons in a divorce, and the woman doesn’t even need to lie about her unviolent male partner. So I ask you this, why would they go to entrap the man, when they have a much easier weapon to use.
Off-topic, but the lack of paid maternity provision in the US astounds me. Why American mums-to-be aren’t storming the White House to demand it I don’t know.
It’s especially weird in a country that’s so insistent on women giving birth to babies whether they actually want them or not - apparently once you do, you’re on your own.
I come from one of those countries and you hear of people abusing the system all the time.
For instance a relative hired a girl, she worked a few weeks of her probation (enough to get her entitled), she announced she was pregnant, took the full maternity leave and then quit after - thankfully the government picked up the cheque.
Another example is a teacher I had for 5th year.
Now, to put this in context, the Leaving Cert is the secondary school final set of exams - it determines what college you get, where you go in life - it’s crucial. You sit the exams at the end of 6th year, but it is a two-year course.
The teacher in question was teaching a group of 6th years also.
She got pregnant at the start of the year, left, leaving us with an absolutely useless replacement, then timed her return so that she was just in time to get paid for the Summer break.
She screwed over about a 100 students by timing her pregnancy for the most beneficial period for her.
These kinds of abuses and fiddles are just par for the course when you have these kinds of benefits - we’re still the better for having them though.
How’d that work out for you?
Timing a pregnancy on purpose like that sounds…somewhat unlikely. It may be that it didn’t pan out well for you and she benefitted from the system. But people get pregnant when they get pregnant, I don’t think you should automatically fault the person who gets pregnant and then makes decisions based on that. If you start a new job and then get pregnant that may well just change life decisions in terms of job/house/finance/etc.
Of course it is possible that she knew she gets pregnant very easily, she was using contraception all the time except the small window in which getting pregnant would be most inconvenient to you, and then had sex & got pregnant right that moment. It just sounds a little implausible. Most people I know who want to get pregnant just want a baby. They have sex. If they’re lucky they end up with a baby. No sneaky scheming to screw over students involved.
It’s quite common practice for teachers in Ireland - the timing of their pregnancy is the difference of an extra 3 months pay for the year, as well as not having to actually work for those three months.
I’m only mentioning that one because the timing was so inconvenient for me - there was another one in primary school and a teacher who I didn’t have in my secondary school.