andrewducker | I'm disgusted

This is one of the reasons why I delayed announcing my pregnancy to people at work. I didn't want some key people to think that I suddenly wouldn't be trying for a post-doc or needing their support for funding applications.

I despair at attitudes like that. As for Alan Sugar, I always wondered what the fuss was about with him anyway.

I do wonder how we'll ever reach equal pay across the sexes though. Even when an employer makes all the allowances that it should do for a woman to take time off for pregnancy, I still don't see salaries averaging out the same.

We have a working culture where getting ahead usually involves working bonkers amounts of hours at work - finishing at six or seven in the evening every night. This obviously leads to higher productivity levels for men (and women without children) who are willing to 'live for work' like this.

The only thing I can think of to rectify that would be to have much stricter controls on how much time anyone is legally allowed to work. With the political and cultural climate of the UK, I really don't see us ever reaching that. Hope for European legislation?

OK, wierd thing that isn't mentioned in the article at all - *actual* effects of pregnancy, potential pregnancy, or motherhood on a woman's effectiveness in the workplace. I mean, come on, surely someone's done a study. Everyone's either assuming that it has a dreadful effect (Alan Sugar) or assuming it has no effect at all - surely there must be some, you know, at least semi-concrete statistics to add to the argument?

Given the statistics on diminishing efficiency with increasing working hours beyond 40, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many mothers who can't work 60-hour weeks are actually more efficient.

As a sometime employer, my first thought were "well, what do the numbers say?".

You've certainly got a point about the relative efficiency of a burn-out worker in their 60th hour of work being reduced, but on the other hand a role like project manager is difficult to split between more than one person.

And overall, it's not about numbers, it's about the principle. Even if the numbers said pregnant women and mothers were less efficient hour by hour, it still wouldn't be grounds for allowing employers to discriminate.

We had three project managers on my last project - one was nominally in charge, but all three could make major decisions, and the work was split between them. It can be done.

OK, devil's advocate moment here, and please, please believe I'm not advocating for discrimination against mothers or pregnant women:

Why not?

We don't have a choice about our sex, fair enough. We also don't have a choice about our mathmatical ability, but I'm allowed to explicitly discriminate on that basis - if I'm hiring someone for a position requiring mathematical knowledge, I can totally say "you just don't have the maths aptitude. Sorry. Goodbye."

I can discriminate based on social aptitude (and we don't have a lot of choice about that either). I can discriminate based on random chance ("Oh, you worked with Bob? Cool. You're hired.").

What's the key difference here?

In your "acceptable" disciminations about say, mathematical ability, or social aptitude, or random chance, these can probably apply to anyone - male or female.

With pregnancy, this is a female-only thing. That alone makes the playing field instantly unbalanced. Since that's the starting point, it makes every other comparison moot, with the sole exception that you can choose to look at every male candidate from age 16 to 99 as having the potential to become a father to a child at any point. Most employers don't do that, though, from what I can gather.

The discrimination is based on a perception of biology. It strips away the possibility that some women *can* work through their pregnancies, some will want to come back to work asap, etc. It discriminates against all women of child-bearing age, even if they have no intention (or even the ability - don't forget many are infertile) to have a child, simply because they are the part of the species that is supposed to handle that particular job.

In short, it's wrong. It's damaging to society as a whole. I honestly believe there are more benefits to an employer who is willing to work with female employees around the issue of childcare and pregnancy than there are disincentives.

Well, hence my earlier question about whether there are any hard facts on how pregnancy or the possibility therof affects work output. It's kinda seeming like there isn't any evidence that it *doesn't*, which would in turn, given that the intuitive belief is "yep, that's going to have an effect", makes employers' concerns seem more reasonable.

Having said that,

autopope's comments below are very sensible.

I think that the wider picture of health concerns in employing someone would suffice as a general comparison.

Can you assume that every person suitable to be hired won't at some point fall ill and need significant time off work? Can you assume that every person won't require leave for family or compassionate reasons, or that their situation won't change where something happens that requires more flexibility with their position?

It's tempting to believe that in an interview you can gauge all these things and come out with an employee that you can depend on, rain or shine, male or female. I just think that's the wrong attitude to take with the job interview process. Shit happens, people change, etc. To assume that a woman is going to be an unstable employee because she may become pregnant or may have a child is to undermine everything else that the woman may bring to the table: experience, hard work, loyalty, etc.

Edited 2008-04-25 12:27 (UTC)

No, no, I'm definitely not saying "Why can't employers discriminate against women?" That's just stupid.

The original post was about Alan Sugar saying that he should be free to ask if a woman plans to become pregnant. My devil's advocate position is "Well, why shouldn't he be allowed to discriminate against a women who is definitely planning to become pregnant?" not "Why shouldn't he be allowed to discriminate against a woman who might, by virtue of her sex, become pregnant?"

This isn't a "shit may happen" question, so much as a "well, shit definitely is going to happen. Now, is it actually right to be able to consider that in hiring?"

Continuing from the previous post:

"These data raise two alternative explanations. One explanation is that job performance actually increases during pregnancy and the ratings are accurate representations of work performance. A woman may overcompensate for her pregnant condition by working harder in an attempt to assuage any potential concerns by co-workers that her performance will decrease and result in an increased workload for them. Additionally, since a pregnant employee will eventually need to take a medical leave, she may be highly motivated to perform so that her contribution will be missed. In this way, she may demonstrate commitment to the organization and may believe it is more likely that she will be positively received upon her return from maternity leave.

The second explanation is that a leniency effect is at work. Supervisors may "overcompensate" for the work performance of pregnant subordinates in an effort to "assist" a pregnant employee. Both explanations are legitimate; thus, future research should investigate the bases for these observed differences."

Third explanation: Pregnant women may be experiencing hormonal changes to allow them to concentrate intensely on a very difficult task (raising young). This could have side benefits.

Very cool. I suspected that the *actual* results might not correspond with the intuited ones. Thanks.

What about post-childbirth, I wonder?

Also - thanks for the scholar.google.com link. Believe it or not, I'd not heard of it.

Edited 2008-04-25 12:50 (UTC)

How I love google scholar... <3 <3 <3

Depending on the access you can get through scholar.google.com (I'm using Edinburgh Uni's proxy service so I get access to most of the e-journals), you can do all kinds of research on your questions. Sometimes you may only get access to the abstracts though, which is better than nothing I suppose.

There is a lot of information kicking around about the effects of pregnancy in the workplace, almost all of it revolving around the perceptions made about pregnant employees. Very little of it seems to correspond to what actually occurs with pregnant employees. This may be because pregnancies vary from person to person (and a woman who had an 'easy' pregnancy may find herself with a difficult one at another point in time ), so the data is difficult to assess.

Also, I wonder about whether women are willing to be honest about how pregnancy affects their ability to do their jobs. Maybe even just admitting, in a small way, that it could make things harder, is just not allowed anymore. We're taught that we can have it all - a career and a family - so we should just suck up the pain and get on with it, right? Makes me wonder.

Well, can you ask someone if they have a history of mental health problems? I don't think you can. But if you could, then you'd start assessing that person based on that history, wondering if you're going to have to sign them off in the future for paid sick leave, right?

At the end of the day, the question is whether or not a pregnancy is going to prevent someone from being able to do their job well. As I said, this varies from woman to woman, from pregnancy to pregnancy. But pregnancy is only a short amount of time. The attitudes about the ability of a pregnant woman to perform well in the workplace are the problem first, in my mind, and the pregnancy symptoms / childcare juggling are firmly second.

In my experience, parents are willing to do absolutely everything they can to provide for their children. That means getting a good job and keeping it, come hell or high water. To me, that means having children becomes an incentive for doing well at a job, making family-oriented employees attractive for employers.

The more 'masculine' jobscenes are so much more difficult to convince because the very notion of femininity is an affront to the masculine battlefield. There's some studies about how some jobs will be more affected by pregnancy than others, for example a pregnant banking officer will receive less prejudice than a pregnant lawyer working in the City.

Doing a quick search on scholar.google.com yielded the following:

Hal G. Gueutal, Joan Luciano and Carole A. Michaels. 1995. "Pregnancy in the workplace: Does pregnancy affect performance appraisal ratings?" Journal of Business and Psychology, Volume 10, Number 2, December, 1995, 155-167.

Abstract:
Archival data were collected to examine bias effects in performance evaluation related to employee pregnancy. Prior survey research has suggested that many supervisors and co-workers hold negative views of pregnant employees. Performance appraisal ratings were collected before, during, and after pregnancy for employees taking maternity leave over a four year time frame. In addition, data was also collected from randomly selected control subjects, which were matched on job title and observation period. Contrary to expectations, performance appraisal ratings were found to increase during pregnancy when compared to before ratings and control group ratings. Potential explanations as well as suggestions for further research are discussed.

From page 164 of the study: "The results of this study are surprising in light of previous laboratory studies and field surveys. A great deal of discussion and concern has focused on the various ways women are discriminated against in the workplace. Indeed, the "glass ceiling" is sometimes cited as resulting from the discontinuity in work history associated with child bearing.

Since career progression is often based on performance evaluation, it is likely that discrimination would be found in these ratings. These data suggest otherwise. Both the within-subjects and between-subjects test were consistent and showed no discrimination against pregnant women. These results indicate that, at least in this organization, (1) pregnant
employees were rated as significantly better performers than non-pregnant employees, and (2) pregnant employees are rated higher when compared to their immediate past performance evaluation. This suggests that pregnancy and child bearing may not be a career negative.

When comparing the before pregnancy with the after pregnancy ratings, while they were not significantly different, the observed difference was in the direction of more positive ratings. However, it is possible that the after pregnancy rating is more positive than the before pregnancy rating because in some cases, it may have reflected both performance during
and after pregnancy. That is, there may have been a "spill-over" effect in the after ratings, as the supervisor might be reflecting on performance during pregnancy in making ratings of an employee recently returned from maternity leave. In this organization at least, child bearing does not appear to be negatively affect performance appraisal ratings. This finding does not appear to support the argument that maternity leave and child bearing have immediate negative career impacts."

(I'll continue in another post due to word count limit)

Let's look at the other things you're not allowed to discriminate on:

* Race. ("Sorry, I don't hire darkies, it'd annoy the other employees.")

* Age. ("30 is too old to be a programmer -- you can't possibly be flexible enough.")

* Religion. ("You're not Christian enough for me.")

* Sexual orientation. ("BDSM is against God's will. If I hired you I'd be subsidizing sin.")

...

In all of these cases, the reason for the ban is simple social engineering; it is deemed that people in a position of power will abuse it to the detriment of out-groups they feel they can discriminate against. It is also deemed to be a social ill to permit arbitrary exclusion on these bases.

The reason for including women of childbearing age in this basket of out-groups is that they are discriminated against; pregnancy/child rearing was frequently used as an excuse for firing them before they could acquire seniority, and still is. (In Japan, until relatively recently, respectable and large companies often fired their female employees when they married, "so they could devote themselves to their home life"). Seniority tends to accrue with age, but women have a relatively limited window of years in which to raise a family. By excluding women of child-bearing age from the workplace, women are prevented women rising to positions of significant social, corporate, or political status.

In Japan, until relatively recently, respectable and large companies often fired their female employees when they married
Also the case in Ireland thirty years ago - it was assumed that my mother would stop working when she got married. So she took her ring off every day on the way to work...

That makes sense, yep. Good explanation!

I'm really trying to come up with a crowbar to stick into the argument somewhere, but it does make sense.

Having said that - I thought the argument was about discriminating against people who are not just female, but who are both female and explicitly planning to have children soon? That's a different social group with voluntary inclusion, and not a significantly more out-group than women as a whole.

Edited 2008-04-25 12:24 (UTC)

OK sorry if this has ben covered, have tried to read all the other comments, but:

"Well, why shouldn't he be allowed to discriminate against a women who is definitely planning to become pregnant?"

Issue 1
* Employer asks potential employee whether she plans to become pregnant. Said potential knows that to say yes would be stupid, because the only person who would ask that would be someone who would discrimate on those grounds. So she says no.
*Firstly, this therefore makes it a stupid question to ask because no-one is going to say yes.
* Secondly: Employee becomes pregnant. Does this negate her contract because she lied at interview? Employer would have to prove she lied as opposed to changing her mind, but if he could do so he could fire her.

Issue 2
* A potential employee is open about the fact she plans to have children. On that basis, she finds it hard to get work of the standard/pay/hours she would otherwise get. She goes on to discover that she can't have children, or has difficulty doing so (deciding you want a child does not mean you will instantly become pregnant). It takes her several years to finally become a mother. In the intermittent time, she hs lost out on furthering her career and salary, and the workforce has lost out on what she could give.

That's what I think.

Lxxx

Also this is somewhat more left wing earth mother-ish, but if a woman is having a baby, perhaps she should be supported. If she temporarily is unable to give as much to her career, so what? She's bringing a child into the world. Many companies have CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) policies. Perhaps emplying mothers should come under this heading and companies, as part of society as whole, should accept that they are givign a little towards the life of a new person. If she can't get a job, she'll only have to claim beneftis and in fact be a much bigger cost on society through taxes.

Lxxx

Apologies for typing errors x

That's actually one of the arguments I'd use if I was on the other side of this debate.

It's a bit of a band-aid, though. What we really need is more support for mothers as people fulfilling a valid role in themselves - tacking this onto employment law is an odd fit. F'r example, it takes no account of the ability of the employer to afford this CSR liability, nor provides any support toward that. Some companies are very small and on a very tight budget, wheras others are huge and highly profitable - seems odd to assign this responsibility almost arbitrarily.

Yup, there's a certain level of "just don't go there, it'll get complicated and horrible" that is certainly applicable to this argument - by which I mean that it's reasonable to say "look, don't ask this at interview, there's no way it will end well, and it's kinda government's responsibility to avoid lots of civil lawsuits if possible."

Issue 2's a problem too. Neither of them are knock-out counters to my devil's advocate argument, but they do present some pretty big and reasonable problems.

Ok, I thought of one.

Here's another out-group: stupid people. People who don't have the intellectual capacity that others may have.

They're definitely a vulnerable minority.

Why are we, then, allowed to discriminate against them by administering IQ tests, Google-esque questions, and so on?

Because stupidity affects competence. Race, religion, gender, age (with some exceptions, though even in physically demanding professions it's often the case that experience compensates for physical deterioration), and sexual orientation don't.

And while it's possible to make the argument that becoming pregnant and taking time off to care for a new baby affect competence, there's no getting around the fact that in a fair society, that burden (excepting the actual biological business of pregnancy) would be shared fairly between both parents. Someone has to take care of that baby - it's in all our interests, in fact, that it be well cared for - and it's only because our society still places the bulk of that burden of care on the mother's shoulders that her choice to have a baby affects her ability to work as dramatically as it does. It's wrong to penalize her yet again by discriminating against her when she interviews for a job.

Interestingly it's actually very, very difficult, having hired someone, to fire them for stupidity.

In Japan, it's still alive and well. I know from bitter bitter experience (30 interviews, and counting) that people don't hire 30 something married women in Japan. Full stop.

It's very annoying (I had a 100% interview success rate before I lived in Tokyo) and even more when women who have transferred in with companies start claiming that no such prejudice exists.

Companies here love to interview me, when they see my CV and don't know my gender. When they meet me? (and I can't lie about being married, I have a dependent visa) Not so much.

With my married female Japanese friends, only one works. She is fully aware of what an outlier she is, suffers lots of prejudice because of it, and is basically only doing it because the family financial situation demands it. If they were richer, she'd give up in a heartbeat, to get away from the censure.

Christ. That just. Christ. *gobsmacked*

Admittedly, I have a *lot* of counts against me (gaijin, and female, and could get pregnant, and need to have company support work visa, and not sufficient business Japanese - I was told to go learn Japanese, so I did, and now I get asked why I have this big gap in my CV because going to a juku to cram Japanese doesn't count, and I'm only applying to companies where the operating language is English anyway). But I was actually extremely good at what I did before I came to Japan, and my CV I know is really really strong.

Gah. It's very frustrating.

You might find this article interesting:
http://metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/638/feature.asp

Note to people coming here from Andrew's LJ post - please read my comment above too (outwith this threaded view).

Edited 2008-04-25 12:26 (UTC)

The key difference is whether you can do the job or not. It's to the detriment of society and the economy if employers hire on the basis of characteristics which have nothing to do with whether you can do the job.

Hence my question above about hard stats on the effects of pregnancy and motherhood on job performance.

Intuition says that a mood-altering, tiring hormonal and physical change, followed by a period of time off work, followed by considerably increased non-work commitments, would have an effect on job performance.

Hence, again, why should employers be forbidden to discriminate on that basis?

Please note - I'm not actively arguing for this. I'm now mildly terrified of being pigeonholed as some anti-women's rights idiot. My intuition is that it's probably correct to not allow employers to ask about pregnancy plans. I just see some other-side arguments on that front, and don't trust unprobed intuitive answers.

No, no. I think sometimes it's useful to face the issue full on. You mention stats. Let me give you an example, to explain why I don't think that is the right approach. I have a friend (female) who works for Wisden, the cricket publication. Now stats would tell you (correctly) that very few women know much about cricket. But my friend is at the highest level of expertise. Therefore it doesn't make sense to appoint on the basis of stats (this is leaving aside the entire issue of whether the stats are accurate, whether they reflect mutable or immutable characteristics etc.) It only takes on exception to render the stats useless as a tool for hiring.

There's another issue which I think is important. Capitalism isn't very good at directing resources at crucial social functions. Raising children is crucial to the survival of society, and yet there is no reliable mechanism in modern capitalism for ensuring resources are directed to it. I think the stresses and strains shouldered by women are caused by this deep societal flaw, and the legislation you describe is an attempt to deal inadequately with this strain.

I personally was in a lot of pain for a long time after child birth and I didn't want to go out to work. However I had to in order to live. I did a damn good job, so the disadvantage was all to me not my employer, but in a more rational economy there would be space for people to recuperate from major medical trauma.

In what ways is capitalism worse than other economic systems for raising children?

We've had several hundred years of capitalism, and as far as I can see children are still raised successfully enough for society to survive, even if the false needs those children are inculcated to have are perhaps not ideal from a non-capitalist perspective.

Gosh where to start. Society survives because people do non-capitalist things, and give money and time away: the system doesn't support them for it, but they do it anyway. There are however strains which we paper over with legislation. Before welfare systems were developed to ameliorate capitalism many children starved and many mothers worked as prostitutes (in Victorian times, something like one in ten).

Even now 80% of retired women don't have a pension, because they 'irrationally' gave their time for free to their children. If they hadn't done it, our society would have collapsed, but they get no reward, in fact they get penalised.

In the third world, which is a vital part of our economic system, billions of children do die, and women and children are forced to prostitute themselves in order to eat.

I'm confused: do you think welfare systems are a good or a bad thing in principle? Are they good because they prevent people from starving to death, or bad because they prevent people from realising how bad really capitalism is?

Don't forget that there were people starving and prostitution before modern capitalism as well - I think the the difference is perhaps more one of degree, as in whether it's the priest or the bourgeois who makes the decision on whether someone's poverty is their own fault or deserving of charity.

The clue is in the word 'ameliorate'. Capitalism directs resources at certain behaviours, but these are not the full range of behaviours needed for human survival. We need to ameliorate it in order for human beings to survive. Religion was indeed a way of ameliorating earlier societies and societies where other solutions are weak (such as the USA).

So you're saying capitalism needs to be constantly kept in check, but not necessarily advocating doing away with it?

"Piecemeal social engineering," rather than some idealised post-capitalist utopia as it were?

I could agree with that.

Me too :->

Capitalism won't be affected by anything I do, let alone anythign I say on the Internet, but it probably won't last much longer than 50-100 years tops. Whether what comes after is better or worse, I don't know. I would guess it will either be a world wide population collapse and fragmentation, or a highly restrictive and formalised system of social control. And then that too will change to something else, and so on.

Thankfully, I find both of those unlikely :->

Me three.

On a somewhat related note I worry that the reason the current bipartisan system of gov is working so badly (to my mind) at the moment is directly due to a left-wing, originally pretty socialist party coming into power way back when in the first place. It seems to me as though the ideal situation sees a hard-core pro-capitalism party in majority being constantly checked and balanced and limited and second-guessed by their left-wing pro-socialism opposition, and we just don't have that anymore.

The problem is that, certainly down south, the left-wing party only came to power because it promised to move the the centre. Without both that _and_ the opposition behaving really shittily, they never would have been elected.

The very fact that you're equating "being of childbearing age and female" with "being stupid" is problematic.

Okay, you say you're looking for hard data: why? As far as I can tell, because the question is asked. And the question is asked because discrimination exists. It's only valid to argue that you ought to have data on X thing if you also have data on every other possible thing, particularly if X is something only affecting a group who are already subject to systematic discrimination. And I would argue that data on every possible thing that might affect job performance isn't available, and that it's systematically more likely that questions will be asked and data acquired about groups subject to discrimination. Very little is published on the causes of heterosexuality, for example.

It also occurs to me that you ought to be able to ask if a potential employee has a terminally ill relative. My mother's death definitely had an impact on my ability to work; I'm less sure whether my pregnancies did.

He didn't. He offered another, alternative example - the two are vastly different things.

Thank you.

Hard data - Because there's clearly an intuitive connection between pregnancy/maternal leave/motherhood and diminished ability to work, at least for some people, and this debate becomes a non-issue if it turns out that there is, in fact, no reported reduction in productivity. Provably no reduction in productivity from getting pregnant = no reason to ask about plans so to do.

Terminally ill relative - yes, that seems like a reasonable example in the same ballpark.

First sentence - see John's comment.

I'm not sure of the research - though I'm sure it exists - but it seems likely that if pregnancy *does* affect job performance, it's not going to affect every woman's performance in the same way. Discriminating on that basis means discriminating on assumptions that probably aren't true. Judging each case on an individual basis, where the actual employee's productivity and performance are evaluated? Seems okay to me. But saying it's the same across the board and not allowing a woman to prove that she is capable of the job? That should be forbidden.

Aww, look at you, debating on Andy's journal! Socuuute. *Pets*

Shuttup. This are serious thread. I are serious LJer.

That's true of almost anything. For example, if both Andrew Ducker and I go for a job requiring a programming language we don't know, this will affect us in different ways. We'll have different learning speeds and so on.

Nonetheless, it clearly may have an effect, and so employers should be able to consider it, along with mitigating and aggravating circumstances.

Just because something may affect people differently is no reason to exclude it from consideration.

I got the email response at lunchtime and have been pondering a response while at work. Now it seems every bugger 'an their dog has jumped in in front of me!

But anyway, I still have something to add.

Yes, we discriminate all the time - it's an essential human behaviour. When it comes to your taste in flavour of cream cake, your discrimination is your own affair. But when it comes to how people in society are treated, we require discrimination to only be allowed on reasonable and fair grounds.

So for example, racial discrimination isn't just wrong because it's seated in hate, it's also wrong because it is not reasonable or fair to discriminate on grounds of skin colour, irrespective of statistics. To expand on this, it's not reasonable to discriminate by statistical generalisations to predict future behaviour of an individual. Even if there were a statistic that suggested black men were more likely to be criminal, you cannot use such data to predict the future behaviour of the black man applying to be a police officer. It's not a valid deduction (literally) to go from such generalisations to the individual.

So when you're interviewing a woman and a man for the same position, qualifications, past experience and how they present themselves are valid grounds to discriminate between them. It's not valid to favour the man on the assumption that he will perform better than the woman would while she is pregnant or being a mother. It's not a valid assumption.

And then there are all the other reasons you've been bombarded with also...

1) I'm specifically not talking about discrimination on grounds of sex, and I'm not sure how many people seem to have gotten the idea that's what this discussion is about. I'm talking, specifically, about whether hiring decisions should be allowed to be made and questions should be allowed to be asked about future plans to have children. I'm perfectly happy to allow that as a gender-neutral thing - ie, let's include men who are intending to have kids too.

2) Ok, so, for example, is it not reasonable or fair to increase health insurance premiums for smokers, for example? Or car insurance premiums for people under 25 or with less than a year's driving experience? In both cases these premium increases are based on "statistical generalisations", as you put it - there's no way to show that an individual driver will definitely crash just because he's young and inexperienced.

We don't have a choice about our sex

Oh yeah?

Which is to say most choices in that kind of situation are arbitary.

In this case, not so much, unless medical science is a lot more advanced than I thought. To the best of my knowledge, there's no medical procedure that can allow a currently biologically male person to get pregnant.

I'm not incredibly up with TG terminology, but I deliberately used "sex" not "gender" there.

I should apologise a little - through one thing and another I'm in bolshy militant TS mode right now.

There was an incident about five years ago of a woman getting pregnant after a hysterectomy. Apparently the egg was fertilised as normal in the fallopian tube, but there was no womb for it to go to. Instead the embryo attached itself to a point somewhere in the womans digestive system, developed normally and was delivered by c-section.

It's interesting to speculate that a similar embryo introduced into a genetic male could theoretically develop in a similar way. I guess hormonal queues would be the stumbling block and it would probably therefore be simpler to have a female rather than male child.

The other example I know of is a bit of a cheat, but with the possibilities of stem-cell therapies could be possible. In China two TS's (A MTF and FTM) had successful surgery that effectively swapped their sex organs. From there it's easy to postulate a circumstance where stem-cells have the y chromosone replaced with a duplicated x chromosone and are triggered to develop into ovaries...

The thing to my eyes is that this is just another form of gender reassignment surgery, but on a micro rather than macro scale...

I'm going to defend Alan Sugar as that question is always taken out of context. Kate was a single mum, separated from her husband, with two young kids, applying for a job based 250 miles from her home and her parents who were also her primary childcare givers. He was asking her what her childcare arrangements would be - not saying she wasn't a worthy contender just bringing her down to earth.

Yes mothers are discriminated against - even in our own company, I'm happy to discuss this with you offline - myself and other mothers have _never_ been passed over for promotion etc. but we also never get asked to travel for work purposes - even when we are the most suitable person for the job.

That was her own business, not his. It's reasonable to assume that if someone's applying for, and subsequently accepting, a job, they are in a position to do that job. You don't get to second-guess them based on their age, gender, parental or marital status or any other damn thing. If they can't do the job, fire them. Don't refuse to hire them because you assume they're not capable of finding a childminder.

am i right in thinking that companies pay maternity pay (and not the govt)? if so, while morally icky, there is a business case against risking the cost of having to pay that plus the second salary of a stand-in...

Edited 2008-04-23 18:16 (UTC)

But that's the point - the government steps in to tell you that you can't do that, so as to make things fairer.

Fairer for who? As Sugar points out, some employers who are prohibited from asking the question are just going to mark down any woman of childbearing age who is in a long term relationship. This'll be especially acute for smaller companies who can't afford to train someone up and then have them disappear for months. That's less fair on the women who aren't actually planning on having kids.

It's illegal for them to mark down all women of childbearing age too...

And companies never do anything illegal ... yeah, right.

One of the problems with hidden discrimination, is that it is hidden, and so hard to prove.

If you're asked "how will you arrange your job so you can do it and raise a family/run a convention/look after your disabled mother/have your kidney dialysis/handle your depressive episodes/run for city council/be a union rep" then you can reply and the prospective employer can choose to hire you based on full disclosure. But if you are potentially hiding something that will affect the company, then only the potentially pregnant are given legal protection for the hiring process (as I understand things).

And eventually, whatever is said about fairness, it usually comes down to a human making a decision based on "feeling" (predicting how well this person will do their job, how they will work with other members of their team, how quickly they will become productive, how likely they are to leave again quickly etc.) so leaving some factors to be hidden, makes it easier for the hirer to say "oh, no, I never gave that any thought at all, I just figured she wouldn't fit in with the current team and so hired the middle class white male instead")

But I don't have any answers ... it's one of those things where there's an obvious right answer in aggregate but it gets much more difficult when you try to apply that to small individual circumstances.

Oh, I agree. I think that the laws, in this case, are largely there for normative effect - to make it clear that some things are not acceptable. And for more egregious cases to be used as a public sign to that effect.

companies pay maternity pay

Not really, they pay it initially but claim it back from the Govt. The bigger issue for most employers is paying someone to cover combined with lower return rates.

You hire a temp, don't advertise for a full replacement to train up, then the new mother doesn't come back or wants to go part time. Of course they have to have the right, but it can really mess things up (and even those that plan to return sometimes don't).

Then there are things like evening/weekend availability, ability to travel at short notice, etc. SB is at work now, I'm providing childcare as I work from home, but if I were to get an office job we'd have some serious rejigging to do, and I'd still be less flexible than a single bloke.

One of the things that Sugar is right on is that not being able to ask and discuss at all does sometimes mean that you can decide not to hire. And sometimes it's essential you don't do so. Once hired a temp for a 6 month contract who was three months pregnant but didn't say—there was no way she could complete the contract, but the last three months were the stressful all-hands-all-hours time. Legally she was covered, but it meant me and my deputy doing 80 hour weeks.

The laws need to reflect what's needed, and that includes ensuring families and mothers can work effectively, that employers frequently think they can't is partially due to outdated attitudes, and unfortunately partially due to overly idealistic regulations.

Horrible minefield to try to sort out though :-( (and sorry I started rambling, long day)

One of the things that Sugar is right on is that not being able to ask and discuss at all does sometimes mean that you can decide not to hire.

I don't get this at all. You can ask them if they're ok with long hours, weekend work, travel, where do you see yourself in 5 years time, etc. There are all sorts of reasons why they might not be ok, of which kids are only one. Why pick on mothers?
If they strike you as the sort of person who's only going to realise on the first day of work that it interferes with picking up the kids from school then you've got a much better reason not to hire them than the fact that they're a mother.

Yes it sucks to be the employer when you employee changes their mind or has something unexpected come up, or lies in the interview, but that also happens for many reasons. I've never worked more than 3 years at any job despite having no kids, and I still usually outlast most of my (mostly male) colleagues. Had a contractor once who announced a few weeks in that actually, he'd had a better offer elsewhere, so was burning his bridges and out of here. It's what you have to put up with when hiring humans. Some of them suck. Most of them have a life outside work.
Maybe she'll get pregnant, maybe he'll suddenly decide it's time to achieve his dream of sailing around the world. You try to get their measure in the interview then take your chances.

Now that was sickening. I knew there was something about the Katie thing in the last Apprentice that didn't seem quite right...

Though I suspect that it doesn't matter if the big question is or isn't asked. As long as it is or isn't asked of both sexes:

"So Mr Smith, your CV is outstanding. We'd like to employ you, but it says here you'd like a family before you're forty. Would you care to reconsider before we make a decision...".

Though in my devious mind, the answer seems to be getting a contraceptive pellet injected into your arm and then (truthfully) telling a prospective employer you are incapable of having children in a very, very sad voice.

Wow. There's a premise for a novel/rpg. Slaves to the corporation, no kids till you retire.

It could form the basis for a fantastic case for early retirement :)

And another reason to quit working after I have kids. I hate the fact that this sort of sexist crap makes me feel this way. Although I'd love to be a strong independent woman and still to my guns, it'd be easier just not to have to risk putting myself through this...

In my office, overtime is a fact of life. It's not constant but there will be periods (usually twice a year) when you will either have to do overtime or else other people on the team will have to pick up parts of your work along with things that make them do overtime. Even on the teams who have perfectly balanced workloads, there are two periods a year when externally-controlled timescales mean this happens.

Some people with children have problems doing this overtime and, for those that aren't used to structuring things in that way (or without family/friends to look after children), they can't do it.

This overtime is made clear when you're interviewed so if someone says "I'm a mother and that comes first", the company's situation is pretty clear. Either you discriminate, or you hire someone who may not be able to do the job as it stands.

Similar, for the accountants I used to work with - it was made clear to them that if they took the job, here was the chart of when they couldn't be off work. At all. Yes, some of it was school holidays - tough luck, their job was to be in the office at those periods, no matter what. Someone who said "I couldn't do that, but I still want the job" isn't going to get it because, quite simply, they can't do the job.

That said, discriminating against people because they might get pregnant is ridiculous. Discriminating against people who have children is fair, as long as you've had an open discussion with them. If the demands of the job and their choices/necessities of their family situation can't be reconciled then they're not the right person... just as I wouldn't be the right person for a job which demanded periodic travel to the middle east if I refused to leave home for more than a day at a time.

I'm disgusted

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