Career Women Harmed by Housewives

[ku]

I was reading the following Batroc Z Leaper http://groups.google.com.au/group/alt.troll/msg/41eb3621851f2260

The biggest single reason is that women work less than men. If you factor in hours worked, half of the difference in income disappears. The rest is due to the fact that women don't concentrate on a career. Just when they are getting started, they quit to raise babies. Career women without children have no income gap.

 

Women earn less than men because they choose to be less productive.

If it more likely that women will quit and raise babies, this will only make discrimination more tempting, especially for jobs of high importance. Imagine 80% of females quit and have babies. If you were hiring someone to be CEO and thought about a highly qualitifed female, you would think, "There is an 80% chance this female will quit and have children. The replacement costs would be high if she decides to quit. Perhaps I should hire a man instead." A female's decision to quit and have children, therefore, can hurt other females. I think this is really sad because if bosses lump hardworking career women with the Stepford Wives, then all females are pulled down together.

 

On one hand, it's horrible that a female is discriminated against but on the other hand employers need to hire loyal people who won't quit, and if women just keep becoming housewives then there is just no easy solution to this.

[Phi for All]

Since women will always want to have babies AND careers, what needs to change is the job environment stereotypes that perpetuate the lack-of-productivity myth. Strides are being made to show that workers can be just as productive overall from a home office environment. Not all careers facillitate this option but most can be adapted to fit.

[SorceressPol]

I think the problem is that some fathers need to take a more active role in their children's lives. After the woman has a baby many people(men and women) assume that she is supposed to take of the child by herself. It goes both ways. In order for both parents to enjoy having a career they need to help each other out. This one female doctor I know is taking time off to have a baby. She's not quiting her job because her husband understands that she loves being a doctor, and he's not going to leave the child rearing completely up to her.

[Martin]

taking two or three years off to look after an infant----or working half time for several years----can have severe effects on a MAN'S career as well, and all the more so because employers don't expect it. When you look over a man's resume you do not expect to see gaps.

 

Some women seem to take a long interval of time out----perhaps as much as 10 years---and then come back into the workforce with the understanding that the childrearing episode is over. And in some cases they may be considered serious about their post-childrearing professions and may be quite successful as I have observed.

 

IMO that size gap would look worse on a man's resume, because not conventional

 

there is an issue of whether daycare, and nursery school, works for your kids. or elementary school (and whether the public system is broken in your area)-----and the issue of the COST of decent daycare and private schools, if you go that way.

 

some kids probably take more customized looking after by one or both parents, while other kids require less parent time and thrive in commercial daycare and public schools.

 

I think it is a complicated bunch of problems and I don't see any clear answers.

 

I suppose that with so many of the jobs going to Asia especially to China over the next decade or so, that the US job market will get a lot more competitive and a lot less secure for everybody, men and women alike.

 

this may affect peoples decisions about having children. they may be more apt to have only one child so the mother can quickly get back into the job market and resume her career-----the man may be more loath to take a parttime job and devote substantial time to parenting because of potential career risk----so many couples may have fewer children than they otherwise would

 

increased job insecurity could actually motivate an odd change-----sectors of the population where there is a traditional family pattern and where women do NOT expect professional careers and where men are expected to be sole or main breadwinner may experience a HIGHER BIRTH RATE because the traditional family pattern may be able to manage better at having lots of children in an insecure job market.

 

that could be interesting.

 

I can't comment on the O.P. ideas expressed by ku. not sure I understand what ku is driving at-----might be that ku is subtly arguing against giving compensatory extra consideration to women in the job market---or maybe not.

main thing is have to view all this in context of dynamic situation including effects of globalization and outsourcing. big impacts on US economy

[ku]

Apologies for the ambiguities. I'll clarify what I was saying.

 

When a firm hires someone for an important position, the firm takes into account the quality of the applicant's service that she or he provides to the firm. The quality of the applicant's service is a dependent on such things like whether or not she or he takes a break or leaves early to raise children. An important employee in a firm is like a gear in a machine. If this gear is taken out for a while or taken out completely, the machine (i.e. the firm) may not operate smoothly if an imperfect substitute is found. In other words, a firm will want to hire as few pregnant women as possible because a child-minded female is like a poor-quality gear in a machine that constantly needs replacing. A woman who leaves the firm will cost the firm money. Suppose the firm loses $10,000 if a female quits. This cost is in the form of search costs (a replacement must be found) and training costs (the replacement must be trained). In most high-end jobs this is difficult because the higher paid someone is the more unique he or she is in her or his skill set and experience and the harder it is to find a replacement. So like I said, suppose the firm loses $10,000 if a female quits.

 

If only 1% of females have children, then the probability that the next female applicant will quit to have children is quite low. Even if the firm faces a loss of $10,000 if the female quits, the expected loss is if there is a 10% chance of this happening is $100, which the firm may decide is insignificant and so they firm hires many women.

 

However, suppose women all of a sudden want to become traditional housewives, have children, and so on. Suppose the probability that women have children rises to 80 percent. Then the expected loss from hiring a woman is $8000. If it is uncommon for men to quit and take care of children (suppose it's zero percent) then if you are faced with hiring two people, one is female and the other is male, and both are of equal productivity or intelligence, but the female has an expected pregnancy cost of $8000 while the male is virtually nil, then who would you hire? The man.

 

This may (or may not) explain the observation that the important jobs, i.e. senior management, senior executive and so on, are nearly all taken by men. This may explain the "glass ceiling" phenomenon.

 

What I suggest is the power for firms to discriminate against women who have children. A woman must pledge to not have children to work and then the firm will have no rational reason to discriminate against her. If a firm is able to distinguish between a career woman and a Stepford Wife, then the Stepford Wives will not pull down the career woman with them.

[zyncod]

What I suggest is the power for firms to discriminate against women who have children. A woman must pledge to not have children to work and then the firm will have no rational reason to discriminate against her. If a firm is able to distinguish between a career woman and a Stepford Wife, then the Stepford Wives will not pull down the career woman with them.

 

Women that have children are not Stepford wives. What companies need to understand is that the human sphere does not operate entirely separately from the corporate sphere. If they want employees beyond the present generation, women are going to have to carry these future employees to term and carry primary responsibilities for raising them.

 

It's actually incredibly offensive that you call mothers 'Stepford wives.' Given how much of the world's future rests in the wombs of women, I think we can trade a few months of 'vacation time' here and there.

[pcs]

I'm unclear as to what responsibility, if any, employers should have to accommodate their employees with respect to gender roles. I can't say I know of any evidence supporting Phi's point on the efficacy of home office work environments as compared to other systems; largely because most the scholarship in ILR is highly conditional and rarely, if ever, supports judgements as general as that.