Quote:
Originally Posted by JonInMiddleGA
Right off the bat, how many men have taken a year (or much more) away from their careers to have & raise a child
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One of the biggest arguments I've ever had with my wife revolved around this. It was one of those "someone taking the argument a lot more personally than the other" situations and I learned quite a bit from it. Anyways, here's how it went:
If everything else is equal- you have 2 qualified candidates, one a male and one a female and can statistically prove they are equally efficient, then there will be a problem. If one gender is granted protections to "take leave" from work for long periods of time while the other isn't, then, as an employer, you would be predisposed to hire the one without protections or hire the one with protection at a lower rate.
Let's just assume the average 2 kids with a simple 6 months of leave to make the example round with 1 year off. Each employee works 50 years for you* - but one actually puts in 40 years of work while the other only 49 because she takes off 1 year for kids. So, should women be paid at 98% the wage of men? No? Well, then if not, you're penalizing the guy as he has to do 102% of the work to get the same wage as a woman. Or how about the employer? Why not hire all men as you'd get 100% productivity from them as opposed to 99% from you competitor who hires men and women?
Yeah, about this time, things fell off the track. But you can see what I'm getting at here. I realize there are some assumptions, but again, the system is set up to perfectly illustrate how this is a problem either way. I'm not sure how to rectify this difference.
SI
*again a fallacy in this day and age but my counterargument was "ok, fine, then if you're female and around family-starting age, say 25-35, then you can just expect to not be hired since the company is worried you might want to start a family soon