I'm disgusted

[andrewducker]

If you are a woman, know one, or are related to one then you'll almost certainly be as sickened as I am by this article on discrimination against pregnant mothers.  But not terribly surprised by most of it.  The bit that gets to me is that an advisor to the government is saying it, and nobody is speaking out to contradict him...

Comments

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

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...

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

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.