andrewducker | I'm disgusted

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'm disgusted

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