Men's rights.

Post Reply New Topic

It becomes very difficult, because regardless of if the employer has to pay directly or through increased taxes, they are still the ones who bear the brunt of the cost. From a business perspective, this can be problematic, since you first have to cover training costs of the employee, then sick pay, then the training of a substitute while the woman is on maternity.

^

It's not fair to discriminate against women because they didn't ask to be given a womb. What assurances would you want to see from us, if you were an employer? Crew cuts? Sterilisation certificates? Women paying fines for having kids they agreed not to have? Compensation for business from the government when an employee gets pregnant? All women to go back to the kitchen and get you a sammich?

If I didn't work at the same college as my bf, I would pretend I didn't have a bf and that I was a complete homosexual in order to get ahead at work. Unless I was working in a very female-dominated environment, in which case, that would not work.

In which case, the employer ends up paying for them another way.

It's not fair to charge everyone else for their personal choice in having a child either. It's a choice between lesser evils really and as I am a man who doesn't want children, I tend to prefer my money.

As I alluded to, it's a difficult dilemma, because you have multiple issues at the same time. I'm all in favor of women working, but at the same time a majority of women do end up having children between the ages of 20 and 35, and women have to accept that this is a biological difference which does greatly impact their work life.

I hate the notion of "fair" by the way, "fair" is a manipulative way of saying "in accordance with my valuation".

I am kind of hungry though, so if you're offering I wouldn't mind a sammich.



We all have our crosses to bear.

^
So in other words, you don't really give a s**t if women get discriminated against for having wombs? It's just something they've got to put up with. Nice.

I think this is a case of you not really being able to empathise. Imagine you have a womb and you don't want a baby in it, but you want a good career. Can you imagine that?

The glaring obviousness is that Capitalism is not fit for purpose.

I would suggest a child-strike. A self made Children of Men scenario. Drive the contradictions home.

Capitalism wants new consumers and workers, it just wants to outsource the costs.

The conservatives are the worst for this. Wanting a stable society and family environment, yet handing over policymaking to pro-business sorts who do their best to undermine those very things.

From a statistical perspective 78% of American women will end up having children, so it becomes very hard to figure out who the 22% that won't are. When you add to it that many people end up changing their minds about it at some point, it becomes even harder.



I know it's a lot easier to think "he doesn't give a s**t" or "he is unable to empathize" but most of the time I do get where you're coming from, but can't see a good solution outside of the ones that are currently being complained about.

Based on an objective analysis here is how it breaks down:

out of 100 American women, 78 will have children.

The average age at first child is 25.1 years old.

"Pregnancy is also a leading cause of disability and turnover for most companies." (http://www.businessgrouphealth.org/bene ... d%20Health)

The average maternity leave was 10.3 weeks and was taken by 70% of women giving birth.

Does it bug me that 22% of American women may find themselves discriminated against based on having a womb? Yes it does, do I have any solution to fix it no, do I realize that a pregnancy is a cost that falls disproportionately on the employer? Yes.



The biggest contradiction by far is that we're overpopulated already on this planet, yet people keep screaming that we need to have more children.

Many states have 'Romeo and Juliet' clauses to their statutory rape laws that prevent abuses like you're suggesting; where they don't exist, I absolutely agree that they should. The whole point of statutory rape laws is to prevent an adult from taking advantage of someone much younger.

Last edited by LKL on 13 Oct 2012, 6:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The reason for this is that women often won't use shelters that are open to men, because they tend to get raped both in shelters and (if the general-entry shelter is full) on the street.
http://www.wickedlocal.com/cambridge/ne ... z29Dt2rk92
http://www.havredailynews.com/news/story-423621.html
http://jamaica-star.com/thestar/2011022 ... news2.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/nyreg ... elter.html
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/ ... st29m.html
http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research- ... doc_id=558
http://jacksonville.com/community/shore ... less_women
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1495443/
http://www.independent.com/news/2010/ma ... revention/

Mr. Carroll links to the original.


What?
Why is status illegitimate if it is held by women? And how do a few outlying exceptions disprove the rule?


I agree.

There's a lot of innovation coming from particle physics/quantum mechanics, too
Biology is widely derided by physicists and chemists as a 'soft' science because, in dealing with more complex systems, we use statistics instead of straight calculus. If you go back to para-science literature from 50 or 60 years ago, you don't see that label being applied to it, and you see more respect given to (largely male) biologists.


*********************
Wrt. Maternity leave: the solution, of course, is for men to get equal amounts of paternity leave (which may or may not overlap with the mother's) in order to bond with and care for a new child. Fatherhood is important to society, too.

Never had you down as an environmentalist.

This is a capitalist contradiction, too.

The talk I hear of 'more children' is to do with needing to support the ageing (it's also in the same vein that 'immigration is actually necessary' comes up). It is expected as a society we will look after those who've worked and now want to - need to - rest. If you rule out redistribution of wealth, let alone restructuring society, it's 'more people of working age' or 'let's cull them'.



Damn right.

This policy is actually in place in Norway where the dad gets a quota of 12 weeks, the mother must take 3 weeks prior to the birth and 6 weeks immediately after. The rest can be shared between the two as they see fit. You should keep in mind that total leave is 48 - 52 weeks.

The result is that males do take more parental leave unless they work in high pressure private sectors or are business owners. Quite a few are actually demanding that the "daddy quota" be made transferable to the mother as it is lost if the dad is unable to use it. It will only really work if it's made compulsory to do, and no government is really willing to do that.

A recent study investigated the policy and found that


The full report can be found here http://www.ssb.no/publikasjoner/DP/pdf/dp657.pdf in English.

One of the more peculiar results was that it did not impact wages, and in fact lead to women working less.

Denmark did practice it for a few years but got rid of the policy in 2002.

I didn't notice that. I've read the full article article now and yes, it's disappointing that there appears to be some gender bias. However, the experiment described by the article does address the other reasons for women not entering STEM fields and even says so.



No, I think you misunderstood me. I did not say that status was illegitimate when held by women, I just said that there was also bias dependent on status, regardless of gender and then gave some examples of high status women in physics. It's just that there are less women than men in the field generally. Also, a lot of women have trouble balancing family life with the work they have to do in research and publishing papers as opposed to men. I have a female friend who works at CERN and she's able to focus on more on the work due to her husband being a stay at home dad.



Thanks. I'm not sure that I agree with that. Physicists have always seen their field as being more fundamental than other fields because it does essentially form a basis that undercuts all other natural sciences. While biology describes more complex systems, if you look at life at it's most basic level (say the molecular level), it is mostly explained by physics and chemistry. I've never heard of it being called a "soft" science though and I don't think it's derided more than before because there are more women in the field. I think that the subfields in biology that deal with things like genetics, molecular biology, including the area that deals with proteins etc, and phylogenetics still get respect generally.

And yet biology and chemistry are thoroughly intertwined because modern biology is molecular. I've never heard physicists deriding biology but they are seriously misinformed. I've always viewed biology as being a branch of physics, TBH.

.....which means that the employer in question is just going to have to suck it up and stop whining about having to shed a few dollars for employee costs.

You have to pay people to work for you. If you don't want to pay people, you don't get employees. If there are no more employees, there is no consumerism; therefore, no economy. Employers don't "create jobs," in fact, employers have never "created jobs." Consumer demand creates jobs. If you doubt it, go try to market a cool new $500.00 smart phone in Somalia. Let me know when you get rich, okay?

As for not hiring women on the basis they might get pregnant........uh-huh. Sure. It's not a matter of "fairness" because, if it was, posters wouldn't be blubbering that it's not "fair" that women get more time off, or that employers have to pay for people's "personal choices." Crying over matters of "fairness" goes both ways. It's about the general idiocy of hiring, or not hiring, someone based on arbitrary physical characteristics, and on what "might" happen.

If you don't want to compete with women in the job market because they might get pregnant, I don't want to have to compete with men because they're statistically less likely to be educated (as per this thread), and more likely to be violent criminals and perverts.

And it's not fair for women to assume that all men are rapists just because they have a penis.