Pregnant wimmens

In My Humble Opinion
1

So our office just hired 13 new attorneys. 2 guys and 11 women. This a.m. I noticed one of the women who came on board last week was wearing a maternity dress. Instead of being filled with joy for her upcoming blessed event, I thought, “Oh great, I’ll get a chance to pick up my share of her work when she goes on maternity leave” (the job permits up to 6 months including LWOP).

Now I like to think of myself as not being chauvinist. But I must admit that as far as my workload goes, I would have preferred if they had hired only men or post-menopausal women.

Oink!

2

As far as my work load goes I wish they didn’t allow stupid people into my classes. Makes group projects difficult when I have to come up with all the ideas.

I also wish they didn’t allow people who think girls shouldn’t be engineers into my classes. (Or engineering. Or life) Makes my road more dificult.

But we were discussing your problems. Maybe only high school students or barefoot and in the kitchen women should have kids. High school is easy enough and kids are resiliant, better sutied for having kids anyway. And if you screw up and get preggers on the job, mandetory abortion. That would help this whole problem of maternity leave.

Or you could just do away with maternity leave for the whiners who actually want kids. They can make sure they have the kid on a Friday afternoon so they can be freash and spiffy for work on Monday.

Or maybe just limit women to certain jobs or companies. That way honest hardworking men wouldn’t have to deal with it and the stupid child bearing women could cover for each other.

Any of these solutions to your fancy? Just trying to be helpful, nuturing, you know, all that girly stuff. My bad.

3

Oink, indeed. Why don’t you give the woman a little credit for being a professional until she proves otherwise. A lot of people have to balance family and work responsibilities. People with lives don’t, on the whole tend to be poorer workers for it.

And if she can afford to take six months off without pay, more power to her. Family leave policies in American stink.

4

Bottomline, when she is out of the office, I and the other folk in the office are going to have to pick up her caseload. I’m supposed to be happy about that? Guess I’m just too self-centered. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be allowed or even encouraged. But I’m saying that I don’t have to be thrilled about my role in it.

Man and woman get hired at same time. Over next three years, woman takes two extended leaves of absence for childbirth. Guy does not. Yet woman is treated equally as far as seniority, promotions, etc. are concerned. Yeah, she did a fine job when she was in the office, but she was only in the office 2/3 of the time the guy was.

Sorry, but you make your own choices, and shouldn’t feel as though you are entitled to have your preferences subsidized by others.

5

Dinsdale,
You can wait until you are in your 50s and exact some revenge on these women by taking 6 months off for your prostrate surgery. Make sure you leave a bunch of work to do beforehand.

6

Yea. You’re pretty self centered.

Personally, I’d rather have the people who are hard working, intellegent and caring raising children (you know, improving humanity through training) than the crackheads and deliquents. And I’d really, really rather not punish these talented individuals for choosing to do so. Subsidize? To the point of allowing them to actually give birth to a child and see it through its first couple of weeks in a state of not quite stressed, I find fine. I’m also in favor of paternity leave. My whole “what’s best for society” thing.

People who have the strength and ability to ‘do it all’ shouldn’t be punished. (Though they are probably used to it, the amount it happens.) You are free to join in muttering about people working hard to develop society in as many ways as they can. If your workload is your only priority with your life, I wish you well with it, and I apologise for anything that gets between you and it. Go have a heart attack, you get time off for that and then the wimmins will have to work.

7

What?!? RFLAO <pant, pant> wipes brow OK now… that was a good one. You were kidding about that, right? Otherwise, I want a job at your office. They need any good tech people?

Most women I know are struggling just to keep up with men who have equal experience - ie, if a woman took off a total of 6 months for child rearing over a 5 year span, she’s usually struggling to keep up pay-wise & promotion-wise with the guys with only 4 years of experience. I’m hardly a bleeding heart feminist nazi type, but I can’t believe you haven’t seen those statistics that constantly are coming out saying “Hey! Them wimmenz have closed the salary gap all the way up to 61%! That’s right, for equal experience and degree, the average woman makes 61% of what a man makes!” Even if you factor in 6 months leave per child, I highly doubt the gap in salary is equal to the gap in experience.

I’m not complaining (well, maybe I am…), but there are men out there who flat out don’t believe that women are as good as there jobs as a man is (regardless of time off for childrearing), and those men do affect a woman’s pay and promotions. There’s one guy here where I work who has flat out said that he’s not planning on paying for his daughters to go to college, but his sons - “the breadwinners” as he puts it - will have a free ride. Just this morning in a meeting, he refused to believe what a female engineer was telling him about a particular bug, but accepted the same exact explanation when a male engineer parroted it back to him.

People like this man is by no means rare, either - every place I’ve worked have one or two as bad as he is, and at least 4-6 others who are unsure of the whole “should women be working?” question. So if I were you, I’d take a second look at the “woman is treated equally as far as seniority, promotions, etc. are concerned” statement. If they are, then you work in a very rare workplace indeed.

8

Seeing statistics and believing them (or interpreting them correctly) are two different things. http://www.aei.org/ct/ctdfr.htm

(Just attempting to fight some apparent ignorance.)

9

BlackKnight, I admit, I drew the 61% number out of my head. I thought about getting a reference, but I knew that if I went looking, I’d find about a thousand different references, all quoting different figures. Your link disputes the wage gap, the following links support it:

http://www.ssri.niu.edu/wei.html
http://womensissues.about.com/newsissues/womensissues/library/reference/blr_wgmensocc.htm
http://www.bpwusa.org/content/FairPay/Wage_Gap_Analysis/WageGapComp.html

There’s plenty more like it. And there’s quite a few more that support your view. When it comes right down to it, I don’t believe you can use statistics as a sole basis to support a position on this issue (or on very many others, for that matter.)

However, in my own experience, in general the women I work with are paid less than the men, and to some extent, are treated differently than the men. Yes, there are exceptions - I’m one of them. I’m the highest paid of all the engineers in my classification (Engineer 3, on a scale of 1-5) in my workplace. All others are men. But I’ve also been one of the very few women I know who’ve achieved this. In general, the women I know tend to be lower paid than men. Is your experience different?

[Edited by Eutychus55 on 04-19-2001 at 03:04 AM]

10

[bangs head on desk] Preview! Preview! Preview! Would one of you kind moderators please fix the middle link in my last post?

11

16 years ago, I was pregnant, but the extra weight I carry hid it, so I got a job I needed badly. I worked from March to Sept 4th, my daughter was born in the wee hours of Sept 5, and I was back on the job before October. I had no leave and I couldn’t afford to be off my $7.41 job without pay. Yeah, my coworkers had to pick up the slack for 3 1/2 weeks - much as I had to when one had surgery and was out for a month, or days here and there when another decided to take an unannounced vacation day. That’s life. We dealt with it.

One of my coworkers is pregnant now - she’s due in June and she’s taking 3 months off. More power to her. I’ll deal with whatever is assigned to me, and I know she’ll bust her ass when she gets back, same as she’s busting her ass right now. I think that’s what professionals do…

12

Bwahahahahaha. Oh, that’s damned funny. All I gotta say since I’m not even old enough to work. Didn’t you love those days? Muhahahahahahahaha.

::can feel the hot red eyes burning into him::

13

xizor, I think I’ll do that. Of course, I don’t really buy the analogy. Don’t believe most prostate troubles (whether they develop in the 50s or much later) are exactly planned, not to mention a 2d or 3d). Even if we put maternity leave in the same category as all other short-term disabilities, I would be interested in seeing a statistical comparison across genders. How long is an employee, especially fresh from school, expected to stay with an employer? How long does it take to train the new employee before they become productive? In the first 3, 5, 10, 30 years of employment what percentage of female employees will take maternity leaves? As opposed to men taking disability leave?

And don’t give me that crap about “Society” expecting the mom to play a more active role in caring for the kiddies. Hey! Wife and hubby get to decide among themselves how to divvy up responsibility. Make your choices as you will. But don’t expect your co-workers or anyone else to be happy to pick up your slack. And you feel the both of you have to work to support your kids? Again, that is your choice. Bear the consequences yourselves.

Athena, sorry your experience has differed, but what I explained is the case for all employees in the huge federal agency I work in (and I believe for all federal civilian employees), and was the case with Mrs. D’s private employer (except significantly less maternity leave was allowed.) From the employer’s position, Mrs. D and a guy are hired at the same time. Over the next 5 years, Mrs. D takes 3 maternity leaves, and quits after the third to stay home with the kids. The other guy has just been working. Who was the more valuable employee?

Medea, yeah, I guess I am pretty self centered. I’m not saying working women should not be encouraged and/or enabled to have families. I am merely saying their co-workers don’t have to be happy about picking up the slack. Guess what? With maybe 2 exceptions, my co-workers are not my friends. And I really couldn’t give a shit what goes on in their lives. Nor do I expect the to care about my life. My only interest is that they do their jobs and not interfere with me doing mine. I’ve worked here 15 years, and only asked a buddy to pick up a couple of cases from me when my dad died a month after my mom. Then when he developed myasthenia gravis and had to have his chest cracked, I did the same for him. Neither of us just dumped our work on the office as a whole. Our office has a certain amount of work. If we have 50 workers, please explain to me why, if they are earning money according to the same pay grade, they should not each do their proportionate share of the work?

The office hired 13 new bodies. I don’t want any friends out of them. All I want is 13 people doing their fair share of their work. And if one or more of them are out of the office birthing babies, they aren’t doing their share. If you want me to do their work as well as mine, well, pay me their salary.

I freely admit my personal experience makes it difficult for me to appreciate the “gender pay gap” stats. We have 47 staff attorneys, 30 women, 17 men. And all are paid strictly according to seniority with minimal bonuses available. And I am lower in seniority than a couple of women who, although they were hired briefly before me, have been out of the office for extended periods twice each for their families. More power to them for using the job in whatever way best suits their personal lives. But I repeat my very limited opinion, I don’t have to be happy about it.

14

I understand your concerns about your workload (BTW, why doesn’t your office get 6-mo. temps for maternity leave coverage?).
I hope you will also understand that the world is not a fair and perfectly balanced place and that your suggestion that, because I have the ability to bear children, I not be given work between the ages of (say) 16 and 45 does nothing to achieve equilibrium. “Preferred if they had hired only men or post-menopausal women…” Arrrrrgh!
[rant]This is such a firkin’ no-win situation. Women who don’t have children are seen as selfish. Women who have children are called self-centered. Because we give birth and because paternity leave hasn’t caught on, we cannot be professionals or have careers. We most certainly cannot have the respect of our business peers.[/rant]
moi catches her breath and focuses
Okay. looks around We’re not in the Pit. I’m just gonna take a deep breath and ask that you reconsider how ridiculous/inconsiderate/rude/hurtful it is to suggest that women aged 16-45 are unemployable. I’m gonna go take my little rageball out for a walk…

15

Naw, maybe they could hire lesbians as well, as long as they had no intention of adopting. Oh yeah - and if they’re cute!

So you plan on popping out a baby every year from age 16 to 45? This is somehow beyond your control? Or should you have to make some choices. Waah! I want a nice happy family, AND I want every promotion/recognition available to any other worker. And I want to live according to a standard that we cannot afford on one salary!

Maybe you decide to devote yourself to your job for some period. Maybe you decide to devote yourself to your family at some other time. But should you have the option of choosing to do both, and not bear any of the costs of doing a worse job at either than someone who chose to focus on one or the other? IMO, a woman who is taking considerable time off and consequently producing less work during a certain period to birth and raise children is a less valuable employee than a man or woman who is in the office consistently throughout that period. I’m sot sure anyone posting here has disproven that assumption. Instead, the talk is of social engineering.

Here’s another way to let you know what a great guy I am. We hired a blind guy. He works as hard as he can, and I don’t for a moment envy his position. But the bottomline as far as work is concerned is that on a good month he does maybe a quarter of the work I do and the quality of his work sucks. Yet, he gets paid according to exactly the same pay scale as everyone else. Oh, plus the job pays for a fulltime reader, and supplies voice recognition software and other technology. Good thing we are the government and don’t have to meet any bottomline. But if I were a private employer, my interpretation of “reasonable accommodations” for disabled folks would undoubtably differ from theirs.

I don’t make decisions concerning hiring temps. It certainly has not been the office practice. Of course it would involve costs and inefficiencies, but I agree that it would be a possible partial solution. Another would be to enable people (women/men/parents or not) to work at home. I suspect a number of women would welcome shorter maternity leaves if they were able to resume working at home and on flexible schedules.

But if they say we are expecting a workload increase such that we need 13 additional workers, I want to see 13 people who I expect will be doing the job.

16

My point was not to question your exact figure, but to cast doubt on the implication that the “wage gap” is some sort of bad thing. If women are being paid less for the same work with the same experience, etc., then there is a problem. However, that is something completely different from the oft-mentioned wage gap.

The wage gap is merely a comparison of the average amount of money women make compared to the average amount of money men make. In other words, it is comparing wage earning across jobs of all sorts. The gap means that, on average, men have higher paying jobs. This is not a bad thing unless there was actual discrimination, which is another matter entirely. My hunch is that the gap is caused by some combination of: (1) Since in the past not nearly as many women worked as work today, there are more men in the work force with more experience. This will (hopefully) diminish in the future. (2) Women are less likely to choose dangerous or “icky” jobs. (Think: garbage collector, custodian, factory worker, full-time military, etc.) Many of these jobs pay quite well. (3) There are a handful of super-rich men who skew the scale somewhat.

It is my experience that women on average do get paid lower wages than men. This may occassionally be because of discrimination, but is much more likely the result of the woman’s career choices. I don’t see a problem with this. Women are free to choose lower-paying jobs (for whatever reason they darn well please) or to take time off of those jobs (for whatever reason they darn well please). They simply shouldn’t expect to be paid the same as someone who took a higher paying job or someone who doesn’t take off nearly as much work.

17

<sighing heavily> I see the women’s movement still has a lot of work to do. The WM can cheerfully disband, its purposes achieved, when the issues raised in the OP cease to be issues.

If you value the perpetuation of your species and the continuity of the society you live in, somebody’s gotta have the babies and somebody’s gotta take care of them. There’s a price we all pay for that, men and women both, and we should do it gladly and cheerfully. So your workload increases because one of your coworkers has a baby. So what? What do you think’s just happened to her workload?

Get some perspective, Dinsdale. What if that pregnant lawyer were your wife? How would you want her co-workers to treat her? You might like to think of yourself as not being chauvinistic, but you’re fooling yourself if you do. No question, the women’s movement, like all social movements, has a lunatic fringe, and those are the noisy people you hear from the most. They’re the people who helped create affirmative action programs, which I really have a hard time with. Special status based only on membership in a group seems fundamentally wrong to me, especially when the only group excluded from affirmative action happens to be the group I belong to: healthy white guys. But the very basic grievances that created the women’s movement in the first place are essentially true and correct. Read some Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, and try putting yourself in their shoes. They’re not always right, but they’re very bright and usually make good sense. I especially recommend Gloria Steinem, because she’s that rare creature, a serious feminist with a sense of humour.