From: russ@alliant.com (Russell McFatter)
Subject: Re: gender "data-hiding" (vs. discrimination)
Organization: Alliant Computer Systems
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 20:02:51 GMT


In article <909@armltd.uucp> hwatters@armltd.uucp (Helen Watters) writes:
>
>Not all women who are married have children and not all unmarried women don't.
>I have been married 8 years and I haven't yet had kids. I know other
>couples who have married and stayed married because it is nice to be
>with another person.

Correct. I already commented on this; not all "recently-married women"
become pregnant and leave; and not all other potential employees stay.
There is strong temptation, however, to go with the "odds" in a case where
other qualities are identical.  I favor this treatment no more than you
do, by the way; this part of my post is just stating facts, not opinions.

>Some of the guys on the net have talked about women being able to opt out,
>if the going gets tough, men have to keep going. But if a man is raising kids
>on his own, most people thinks he is wonderful.  Ask him how he copes and
>if there is anything they can do.  A women well it is her duty. Anyway why
>should we help her, she has no right to be in the workplace anyway, she is
>depriving her kids by working.  Rises in crime, vandalism, you name it,
>are ALL blamed at some time or other on the irresponsibilty of women
>who work. Their selfishnes, etc.

I disagree, then, with "Some of the guys on the net."  Women really only
have the opportunity to leave work for child-rearing if they can
financially support that.  The same, of course, goes for men. 

>Also it stinks, if the women really is the better person for the job
>and she does not get it because she might have kids in the future.

That's a rare case.  If a woman is really the better person for the job,
chances are that she'll get it regardless of her childbearing potential.
Employers ultimately seek the best players they can get; and if they
were to deny a clearly more-qualified female employee because of her
sex, they'd be exposing themselves to a possible discrimination lawsuit--
and, again, any H.R. person with any experience/intelligence knows that.
My hypothetical example was with two EQUALLY-qualified applicants.  Equal
qualification is a fairly rare case.

>Until the current recession, most engineers 
>were mobile. Women have to work 2 years to gain maternity rights 
>(ok there are severly reduced rights for those who have worked six months). 

This is a good point.  But I will correct you on one item:  Anybody, male
or female, has an equal likelihood of leaving work for a different/better
job.  Companies ALWAYS have incentive devices to discourage turnover, since
employee turnover is very costly.  They also have devices to prevent abuse
of benefits, which ALWAYS include restrictions on paid/unpaid leave time
and other benefits on new employees.

Your first year at a new job is by far the most expensive as far as your
employer is concerned, ESPECIALLY if you were hired through an employment
agency (which can charge up to 100% of your first year's salary as a
commission).  Even without this, training time and other expenses make
employers want to keep the people they have.  Thus there are incentives
to stay beyond the "average" turnover period: Longer vacations, better
"perks", paid/unpaid "leaves", and such, offered purely on the basis of
your employment time.

I don't see a 6 month "waiting period" for maternity leave benefits to
be a device intended along these lines, though.  This is to prevent abuse
of the system (a woman who is already pregnant gets a job, works for
a a few months, rakes in a paid leave, and quits).  Unfortunately, this
kind of thing DOES happen, and company policy is developed to protect
the employer.

>> o  Women are permitted paid Maternity Leave for the shorter
>>    of two weeks after the birth of a child (or longer if
>>    medically necessary, at the advice of your physician) plus
>>    an additional two weeks.  This may be followed by an unpaid
>>    leave of up to six months.  There is no limit on the number
>>    of such leaves that may be taken during ones employment
>>    period.
>
>I wish guys would stop looking on maternity leave as a kind of holiday. 
>Babies are HARD work, or so everyone keeps telling me. Having a baby
>is a very physical experience.  Some women need time off to rest before
>having the baby. The time off is ESSENTIAL for the health of the mother 
>and baby, not a fun time.  I am sure a medical person can expand on this.
>2 weeks off before the baby is born is inadequate and should be
>extended for sake of the mother's and the baby's health. 
>But then who cares it is only women who physically suffer, a few extra
>babies are born handicapped, so it does not really matter.

Disagreed on several points.  In many cases, babies are "hard work" for
24 hours at most, followed by possibly 2-5 days of rest.  Obviously, the
kind of job makes a difference; most of today's more sedentary jobs involve
no more physical effort than staying home.  Most pregnant women maintain
a fairly normal routine right up to the week or so before labor begins
(they don't simply lounge in bed for the last month!), with obvious
restrictions.

Read the policy above again.  It grants women paid leave for ALL of the
"medically necessary" time, PLUS an extra two weeks.  If your OB/GYN says
that you have complications due to the pregnancy and need to stay home for
6 weeks, you get paid for eight.  The two "bonus weeks" amount to ALL of
what a new male employee gets for _vacation_ for the whole year; if Mom and
Dad work for the same employer, and the pregnancy is typical, she's
out of commission for less than a week, but gets four weeks off.  Dad exhausts
his vacation to be with his new children for only half that time; Mom
still has her entire 2 week vacation remaining.

>What seem to be happening now is that only, the very rich can afford kids,
>it is so expensive, or the very poor, because they get to do something
>worthwhile(raise a kid) or get extra benefits etc.  Most ordinary average
>middle class couples are having either no kids or one.
>The rich have kids, but there are not many superrich people, the poor have kids
>they are more of them, but the middle class is not procreating.
>Noone is supporting the average couple to have kids.

In some ways, I don't think that people should "support the average couple
to have kids" unless society as a whole decides that this is best for our
future.  But you raise yet another good question:  Why can only the
very rich afford to have kids?

My theory:  Competition for limited resources.  We have, as a society and
as a planetary ecology, limited water, food, housing space, educational
capacity, and fundamental assets.  Any baby you might have will ultimately
DISPLACE some other woman's child in competition for all of these
resources; yours might be the one that keeps another child out of a
particular college, or a particular job.  Not too long ago, the "average"
family could comfortably afford to raise several (3 or more) children on
a single income.  But as our resources are exhausted, the price of basic
necessities (primarily housing and fuel) skyrockets; making, within the
span of a single generation, a second income a necessity, instead of just
a luxury.  Additional tax bite, due to increased demand for government
services, hurts the two-income family immensely (people in my business
typically find that the simple act of getting married causes EACH partner
to pay an average of $5,000/year MORE in taxes (about $480/month) than they
did before!  Thanks to overcrowding, public schools (especially in big
cities) are less and less a viable option for children; medical costs of
childbearing and child care have skyrocketed, and this leaves us with only
two ways to have kids:  Have the government pay for it (i.e. AFDC), or
be rich (or have a good financial plan).

Imagine four people-- two men, two women-- living in a tiny "Biosphere"
capable of supporting six people.  Food, water, living space is plentiful.
One couple decides to have a baby.  This is no problem, as there's still
more than enough resources for five people.  Then the same couple decides
to have a second baby, and an argument ensues, as the other couple was
considering the same thing.  If, in fact, both couples go through with
their plans, the system will be stressed to its limits.  Food will become
scarce, handling of waste products problematical, and the living space
itself will become cramped as the children grow.

An argument ensues.  Whose food and water rations will the children's
portions be taken from?  The first couple, now well under way towards their
second child, says that all the resources should be divided evenly-- with
each person getting 1/7 of each resource.  The second couple argues that
the first couple has had more than their "fair share" of children, and
demands that the division be along the ORIGINAL lines-- half to the first
couple and their children (who now get 1/8 each), and half to the second
couple (who, with only one child, get the original 1/6)-- that their child
should not be deprived of the intended portion of the available resources
merely because the other couple was "greedy" and had too many children.
There appears no resolution to the argument, which battles on year after
year until the children are large enough to make the resource shortage a
reality.  Finally, someone remembers that there's a mention about dispute
resolution in the Biosphere's charter.  It clearly states that matters
not covered by the charter are to be resolved democratically.  So, all
seven people vote, and of course the vote is 4-3 in favor of equal
distribution.  That's when the first couple announces that they're pregnant
with their third child.

The second family can't stand it anymore.  The air is barely breathable;
the water purification system unable to handle the stress of seven people
and soon eight; and there's not even enough beds to sleep on.  The second
family calls it quits and heads for the emergency exit, terminating their
participation in the Biosphere experiment.

Unfortunately, we haven't found a practical emergency exit for the planet's
population yet.

Overall, this is a fairly accurate analogy for at least the housing/
homelessness problem, even here in our own country.  This is not a problem
with the economy, short of our own ability to fund the demolition of yet
more undeveloped land and the building of houses thereupon.  If there were
not a severe housing shortage-- right here in our own country-- housing
WOULD be affordable.  People become homeless not merely because they
couldn't pay to remain in their homes-- but when someone else with more
money CAN.  (You wouldn't kick someone out into the street unless there
was someone else interested in the same unit, would you?  This is what
"Bank-Owned Real Estate" is all about.)

Overpopulation issues aside, you might say that we still have the
resource allocation problem that the example "Biosphere" residents
have.  The middle class has given up much of their ability to afford
children because the "lower" (impoverished) class has stolen it from them
via entitlement programs and ensuing taxation.  The middle class, of
course, looks at the rich: "Give us your money so we can have children."
The problem is, of course, that there aren't many rich people, and not
much more that can be squeezed from them.  Ultimately, it's the same
question that we've been asking here for a while:

"Should I be paying for other people to have children, especially if
it infringes on my OWN ability to have children, or for me to survive at
all?"

We also shouldn't overlook:  "Is there anything wrong with letting the
'rich' people (who can afford it) be the ones who have children, even
though few others can?"

In many ways, this kind of thing seems to do what we want.  Rich, powerful
families dissipate their wealth and power by having children, as they
end up dividing their wealth.  If poor people have fewer children, there
(ultimately) are fewer poor people!  If this affects our population so much
that it DECREASES, the resulting reduction in the cost of living (due to
reduced competition for resources) makes childbearing affordable again,
and the population eventually stablizes.

>I don't have the reference, but someone said that giving, people a 1000 pound
>tax allowance per kid, say for the first 3 kids, would allow most women
>to work.  I am posting from the UK, allowance for the mother first, father 
>second, bit like the married persons allowance, that goes to husband first
>and wife second.  It would not actually cost that much.  Women receiving
>benefits can't work now, childcare is too expensive, but the allowance
>would make the difference, between them working and not working.
>Besides that once working they would be paying taxes and not being paid
>benefit.  Mothers who do work, often have to, to pay bills, childcare
>costs are one more stress, so making then more prone to illness. The 
>allowance would ease some of the stress.

The U.S. has a marraige "tax" (additional burden on two-income families),
and a modest credit for dependent children.  I don't think that the tax
credits and other programs are the issue, though.  We (USA, UK, others)
have gotten ourselves severely stuck in a mode of asking:

	"The government should give people like me..."

without asking instead where it's supposed to come from.  One of the
best such comments I heard came from someone else here:  "That's a good
idea.  But what program do we cut, or who do we 'let go', in order to fund
it?"  The government can only fund things by transferring money from one
place to another-- and they're notoriously inefficient at doing even that
(thanks to adminstrative expenses).  Our current media "witch hunt" against
anything with money bears this out:  "This company had a million dollars'
worth of sales, so we should tax it."  Oops, out of business now.
Thousands of middle-class workers unemployed.  Oh well.  "Hey, this
business had THREE million in sales.  We want some of that."  "Hey,
this international conglomerate only gave the IRS six million dollars last
year!", and so on.

>But then I have asked who cares it is only women who suffer? or could some
>of the marrige break ups be caused, by the stress of raising kids, in a
>society, where everyone looks after number one!!

Having children definitely stresses a marriage, or so I've heard.  But
"looking after number one" should be extended to include looking after YOUR
children at the expense of everyone else on the planet.

Please don't get me wrong.  I certainly believe that everyone should be
entitled to the privileged experience of having their own children.  But
encouraging people to have children "indiscriminately", via financial
incentives, is irresponsible of us on the whole.  The people who make the
best parents are likely to be the ones that realize ahead of time that
it IS a burden, financially and otherwise, and who make a responsible and
informed decision.  Then it can be one of the most rewarding "burdens"
after all.

I get the feeling that we don't disagree on what was my main point;
that men and women should not be treated in a discriminatory fashion
even where childbearing and child-rearing are concerned.  I extend that
a bit to say that we need to be fair to childless people as well; the very
ones who make the decision not to contribute to an overpopulation problem,
or the ones that never had the choice in the first place.

>Helen

--- Russ McFatter [russ@alliant.COM]
    std. disclaimers apply.
Newsgroups: soc.women