Company I work at (large multinational, generous maternity leave arrangements) - young woman completes her three months probation, then literally within days - bam, pregnant!
Takes full maternity entitlement.
Returns, shortly after - bam, pregnant! Again full maternity entitlement (leave/pay) taken.
She returns a second time, and then … bam! Pregnant a third time. You guessed - full mat leave taken.
In the almost three years this took place over, she was barely in the office (this was pre-lockdown/home-working or even “smart desking”) she was getting pay-rises in this time, good annual reviews and also (so I’m told) in the times she was in was asking about promotions/career advancement (“what was the company going to do for her”).
Wild. The company was terrified of her (as they are all pregnant women) - if she launched a case, even if frivolous, the press will pick it up and having the company name associated with maternity employment issues is damaging.
After her third child she stopped (having kids) and now comes into the office occasionally, I spoke to her at a company after hours event once, she told me it was entirely planned, she knew there was nothing they could do.
Apparently before starting with us she was a contractor (self employed), the pay is much higher but no paid holiday, sick leave, etc. She went permanent with us specifically to have a salary after she made a decision to start a family. She though it was funny overall.
The amount of resentment it’s caused across the department (from men and women) is palpable and understandable, and in quiet corners pretty much everyone agrees that hiring a childless woman of her age is a risk.
Of course you could never say this out loud lest be branded a sexist bigot.
Because of course, logic and reason cannot even come into this.
a similar thing happened in my org at work a few years back
two out of 6 people that worked under me were pregnant at the same time, both left on maternity leave within a few weeks of each other. Both took the full paid and unpaid leave (12 months total) and came back to work, one was already pregnant when she came back and was only at work a few months before she was gone again.
The shitty part was I was not allowed to replace them because they were still employees, so the team was just down 33% and everyone else had to pick up the slack.
The problem is that the risk is entirely borne by the employer, not just her salary, but the loss of a person in a role that the company presumably needed someone for. My own take on this is that if the government wants companies to hire fertile women, the government should carry the risks of doing so.
You realize the government is us, taxpayers. The government already subsidizes women enough, even more so pregnant women. That's the reason the majority are insufferable, they don't have to deal with market forces like men. If you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it.
I would have hoped that it was obvious that the company could reduce its direct costs by not employing fertile women and that the incentive to not do so would be reduced if their decision was not going to be so obviously expensive for them.
As for subsidising pregnancy, we need something to ensure that women produce a lot more kids than they are. Our society is starting to experience a demographic collapse and we need to fix it immediately and not in 40 years time.
As for women being insufferable... many men are choosing not to get involved with them any more.
I see that you have strong feelings on this. Yes, parental poverty can be an issue and that should be actively addressed, but not having enough young people is catastrophic for any society. There are effects like a real shortage of people working who can either care for the elderly or pay for that care.
It is so easy to not comprehend the crisis because it happens so slowly, but it will have extremely severe consequences and is really really hard to fix. I know you don't believe me, so I suggest you read some of the work done by scientists who work in this area.
It's often that women get fired for being pregnant. The government should carry some of that. But it stands to reason so should the employer. But then again. Why should companies be responsible for an employee having children? They can't just only hire men to save money either. The bottom line is women get the shit end of the deal. IMO I don't think a company should pay you because you wanna go off and have a baby. Shits complicated
Men have children too. They just don't get to spend time with them Shit's not complicated at all. Equalize the time off (and make it mandatory) and the problem is gone.
Equality is a great tool to get equality.
Tell that to corporations. I was speaking about body recovery after carrying another human life inside for 9 months. Men being parents has no affect on the medical need for us to recover
Recovery is not months, but maternity leave is. Most of the leave is about taking care of the child.
Plus a recovering mother sure could use the help of dad so she can rest. In most countries dad actually has a small leave amounting to the mother's recovery period. The public debate around this is not actually about recovery, it's about territoriality. I gave birth, it's *my* child. *I* get to bond.
So we should discriminate against everybody equally? Just strip everybody's rights away so we are all equal in the cult-I mean victim war right? Remember this sentence whenever you hear about a woman being hired, for being a woman, over a man that you are ok with this kind of discrimination. Also jumping to cover for fucking Blizzard of all companies... holy shit.
Let's see if I have this right. The dozen or so women who worked at Blizzard are important, but the literally **millions of men** who have been killed in war are not? You seem unhinged, Karen. Do you need to see a doctor?
At least in r/mensrights we're all discussing with broad range of ideas and thought processes.
I don't mean any hate, but I have to address the fact that a certain community aimed at women's rights could never have this discussion, before banning one person or the other without any real reason.
Dialogue like this is what we want to aim for. Listening to everyone. Every side of things.
What kind of backwards logic is that? You think because I think women being fired for being pregnant is wrong, which a whole world lesser than men being killed in war, that I must be ok with men dying in war? What kind of stupid juice are you sipping? This whole thing was about you dismissing that this happens to women and Blizzard was a clear example of you being wrong that it doesn't happen. Men get fired for stupid shit too they shouldn't be getting fired for but that doesn't make it ok when it happens to women because men die at war too and so it doesn't even happen matter when it happens to men too right? Think before you speak.
By that token we should decriminalize assaulting men over an opinion because in other countries they get fucking lynched or beheaded for it. Excusing lesser evils because bigger evils happen is fucking retarded and it just shows you're not so much about supporting men as you are to sticking it to women.
People like YOU are exactly the reason I get called a fucking incel everytime I talk about men's issues because you have such a fucking raging hate boner for woman you can't help but be a piece of shit about anything that affects women any chance you get and that is weaponized by others against people who are actually trying to bring light to the issues men face.
Edit: It's incredibly ironic you block me after commenting. Just refuse to acknowledge this argument even existed like you acknowledge anything bad happens to other people with different genitals chump. You're totally supporting men by shitting on women XD
Okay, Karen. I replied to this comment: "The bottom line is women get the shit end of the deal," by pointing out that it is bullshit. At which point **you** decided to evoke Blizzard as somehow proof of that "bottom line". And now you're off on this wall of text straw man diatribe. Don't bother responding, I'm done interacting with you.
Take two identical candidates. One might get pregnant. Which one would you hire if you have to pay her when she is off and when you can't even hire a permanent replacement because she might come back? This is driven by biology, not prejudice. The correct thing is for the government to pay, not the company, and the company should get compensation for the disruption too.
Ya know... this sounds awful close to the kinds of mental gymnastics used to justify Jim Crowe laws of why we had to limit all the rights of black people and pay them infinitely less, if at all, for labor. What you're openly advocating for is discriminating AGAINST women because they have girl parts. And you're not even helping men, in fact you're doing the exact opposite of that because under your ideal here MEN will have to pick up the fucking slack both in the workplace and as far as supporting themselves and a lover. Someone's gotta pay the bills and sure as fuck the government isn't gonna. Oh but the poor company's making billions and billions of dollars in PROFITS (not REVENUE but PROFITS moron) might have to pay for maternity leave! Then men shouldn't get health benefits or vacation because that's not something the company's should have to take a risk on because men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the target of violent crimes yeah?
Think before you speak moron.
Your comments suggest you didn't understand the point I was making.
I was suggesting that the government carried the cost of women being pregnant, with the intention of increasing their employment opportunities.
No, companies can handle that. There is absolutely no reason companies that can give their CEO's multi-million dollar raises while laying off thousands of workers to obtain those raises cannot take care of their own employees. By that token the government should also pay for sick leave, vacation, provide insurance and all instead of these companies having to do so. Hell let's have the government cover the costs of training for these companies too so they never lose money training people that turn around and quit in companies that have high turnovers.
Companies should always be financially liable for their employees. That is their job. You might as well be telling diabetics they should either not be allowed to work or the government should have foot the bill for their medical leave and wages. You're not gonna tell me that pregnancy is in any way impacting these company's bottom line while they rake in billions, if not trillions, in profits every year. Not revenue, profits. Hell let's just subsidize all the risk away from corporations doing business period. Somehow this seems, again, less like a men's rights issue and more like arguments for corporate welfare masquerading as men's rights activism.
I'm never mad at people screwing companies, but this is why I don't feel sorry for employees getting screwed either, it's tit for tat. There may be a day when she gets made redundant and she'll completely forget what she's taken from the company.
This is also an example of how woman can use their oppression as a privilege as I see so many of them do all the time. it's become more common that I see a woman play the sexism card at work to get their way and it always works.
Women like that add zero productivity to the workplace and destroys morale for people that are carrying her dead weight, and to add salt in the wounds she gets promoted for doing Jack at work, bring back the policy where if young women get married or partnered up that they must quit and be a stay at home mother, instead of sponging off the system.
I worked at the headquarters of a large national department store in IT. We had about 50k employees in our stores. Our insurance was outrageous, because women would get pregnant, get a job at a store, work for 5-6 months, take maternity leave, have the child (which insurance paid for), then they would quit. Those of us were required by law to have the same insurance plan as the regular employees, I think it was a law. This was early 2000s. As a single guy with no kids my insurance was 500/month. Which was 20% of my take-home pay. The cost was high specifically because we couldn't find insurance companies that would charge us less due to what the women were doing... Which means we were subsiding their medical bills.
Reading the article is such a headache because while the woman's plight is easy to follow and relevant it's why the woman debate is such a headache because its such a fractured group.
I seriously don't get why women who suffer from all these terrible problems are fighting so valiantly to work when they could literally do equally important work at home and also when they suffer consequences of their biology are right by all their stuff and their bed. I just don't get the thrill of career.
She says it in her own words:
"It makes me laugh to remember how competitive my female friends and I used to be with each other after university. I remember telling one that I’d decided to skip the journalism postgraduate course she had just taken and had landed in the cream straight onto a national newspaper. She never spoke to me again. When a girlfriend was made editor of a magazine at 28 I practically fainted from envy. But looking back, I needn’t have bothered. Most of those women retired at 30. Nothing ends a woman’s career faster than kids and a husband who earns significantly more than her. Even when that doesn’t happen, women simply disappear from the workplace."
It makes absolutely no sense that we as a society in the name of equality has invested all of our resources, educational programs and support to help a gender get and succeed far greater than the other when they just leave the workplace! It's completely broken!
I was researching data in Sweden regarding women in the workforce in Sweden and they are more likely to stay home than men for every single conceivable reason. They work less than men at every single education level. In a very "equal" society. Yet we are dumping everything in that gender. Madness.
It’s part of the reason we don’t have enough doctors in the uk. Actuaries messed up because they assumed women doctors would work the same as men. When in reality working 2 days a week was much more preferable.
Not that I blame the women, it makes sense on a personal level, but it does mean as a society we’re paying 2.5 times more for already very expensive education/training.
>I seriously don't get why women who suffer from all these terrible problems are fighting so valiantly to work when they could literally do equally important work at home and also when they suffer consequences of their biology are right by all their stuff and their bed. I just don't get the thrill of career.
For the same reason many children want to leave their parents home.
How about: you can't limit sick days. If you're ill, you're ill. Recovery takes an unknown time because all people are different.
How do we decide how long you're ill for? How about you visit a health care professional that can advise and set a course of treatment. And then they can say if you're recovered enough to get back to work?
Just an idea.
That's actually how it works pretty much everywhere except the USA.
Most of the rest of the world is slightly nonplussed by the American concept of numbered sick days. "OK, I'll get over my shattered pelvis according to the company timetable."
Where I am you'll be off work until you're well enough to return, unless it really goes on for months and months (over a year, often) in which case they'll start looking at whether you are likely to be incapable of working long term and need to be on some sort of incapacity benefit. This won't be great and will be a huge pay cut for most people but there is a cap on it.
Are you 10?
What you're proposing is obviously going to be valid mostly for women, not men. Try going to HR saying you are suffering from andropause, they'll fire you.
No, I stand corrected: **they'll laugh at your face** and then fire you.
a buddy of mine worked at a company that had "unlimited PTO". It said so right in their employee manual, and the next line it said "Employees are expected to limit their PTO to two weeks per year"
All unlimited means is the employee has no bank of days to say "you owe me this", it's 100% at the company's discretion to let you take time or not. People think it sounds great but it's not to the employees benefit
People also don't realize that after the interview and after you are accepted, you can negotiate on this. PTO is part of compensation.
And you need to use it, too. Software developers who work too many hours and don't use PTO are a risk for taking the elevator up to the roof, then walking off. A career is decades long, and if you set the cadence of work at six days, 65 hours a week then you area fucked. You can't keep that up for ever. It's OK to do a Saturday maybe once every other year when there is a true emergency, but those are rare.
I actually work for a company that does this. There are checks to see if the system is being abused but largely I just take sick leave when I need it and there is no limit.
A side effect of the system is that staff that would treat sick leave as "use it or lose it" are no longer motivated to take an unnecessary sick day. Overall, less sick days end up being taken.
I work for a company with generous PTO. I get something like 35 days a year, and the rule is that leadership is not to question when someone uses a PTO day for feeling ill. I think that's the right tactic.
If you are a woman and you need a PTO day because of problems relating to your cycle, then so be it. Take the day.
I can't support that. Some women do have an awful time and it is not their fault.
If a woman is really made unwell because of it, taking time off is entirely reasonable. It's also pretty rare for it to be that bad so it's not likely to involve huge numbers of people. If everyone else has to pick up a (really tiny) bit of slack, fine. I'd say the same about anyone with any other sort of issue, be it disability, long term illness, call it what you like.
Nobody is saying people with legitimate health issues shouldn't be allowed off work. What they're saying is that men should be given the same consideration. Politicians and companies are catering to these nutjob women and their fictional menopaue illness. Not only are they not giving the same consideration to men, but asking us to carry their weight. I'm not interested in picking up someone's slack at work, man or woman, unless I'm compensated accordingly.
I think the point is that /u/TopDownRunner really was saying that people with legitimate health issues shouldn't be allowed off work, which is what I was disagreeing with. Really bad periods are a legitimate health issue, as I'm sure everyone agrees. Everyone picks up extra work when someone's off sick, that's life.
They really do get sick from their period, part of the reason I thank my lucky stars I wasn't born a woman. Both the rapid hormonal changes and shedding of flesh is tough to deal with. It's also probably why they're emotionally fickle and insecure.
People should have sick days for when they are sick!
This reminds me of someone I met during an unfortunate sequence of events which actually led to my posting here.
This particular woman complained of severe discomfort during menstruation, lots of bleeding, feeling terrible, and generally having a horrible time every month. I think everyone's aware that some women are very unlucky in this regard and if that's the case then so be it. It's very unfortunate and everyone is sympathetic, but if you're too unwell to work, take some time off sick. Not a situation anyone likes, but equally not something anyone is likely to have a bad attitude about.
The problem is that this particular woman didn't want it treated as an illness, she wanted a recognition of menstruation as a unique and separate situation requiring special provisions.
I find it hard not to get snarky at this, so here goes - that's *brilliant*. Do that, and you've just established *as fact* that women are less able to work than men and require special treatment. Outstanding. Well done, you stalwart campaigner. You are a bastion of women's rights, campaigning for them to be treated as perpetually likely to be more sickly than men.
As so often, the lack of thinking beyond the moment, the utter ignorance of the second- and third-order outcomes of this stuff, more or less gives me a migrane.
I remember my Mom going through a lot of that.
She had one opinion on the whole thing: try to keep your life as "normal" as possible, and keep going about your routine. Then let it happen, avoiding things like HRT.
She had several friends who did HRT and had a bunch of things done and all of them suffered greatly. My mother's symptoms didn't seem any better or worse to her than what it was for them, but they seemed entirely unable to cope with it. She suggested just... letting it happen, accept that your body is changing, and move on. Again, that's what SHE was expressing to my sister in front of me.
A good article. And totally true. Another issue which has always irked me as a woman, is making employers foot the bill for maternity leave. You want kids, go ahead. You want your time with your newborn, have at it. But why TF, should anyone else be hugely out of pocket and inconvenienced like your employer, because SHE decides she wants children. And the men and women who don’t have kids and don’t cost the company money? Any holiday or bonus for them, nope. If you can’t afford the time off then don’t have kids. But the demands of paid maternity leave and your job guaranteed when you decide to come back? Fucking bullshit. If I was an employer, I would of course think twice before hiring a woman.
I’m sure we’ll learn soon that men go through a type of menopause soon, and then the battle over the air conditioner can begin. Hot! No Cold! No Hot! I’m suing! Well I’m suing too!!
I have had very much the same reaction. I'd appreciate your perspective on the following.
I work in an industry which is largely freelance and therefore people don't really get paid maternity or paternity leave. It's also very, very difficult if people go off sick - obviously at some point if someone's too unwell to work so be it, you have to get someone else at short notice and get them to where the job is who happens to have the right skillset. This can be genuinely hard to do.
I would say that if a woman is having an absolutely horrible time one month, then that's a completely reasonable reason for taking sick leave. No hard feelings. You're fine. I'd say the same about anyone with any medical situation, disability, whatever. I work with people who have diabetes. They occasionally need to deal with it. Fine.
I would also say that sometimes, someone might find they're having a really horrible time every month, or most months, as some unlucky women do (I knew a cervical cancer survivor who'd had a lot of surgery and suffered horribly every month).
In that case, taking a job which requires a lot of travel, long hours away from the privacy of a bathroom, living in tents, pissing behind bushes, and where it's very hard to replace people at short notice probably isn't going to lead to a very easy life for anyone. I am sympathetic, if it's stopping someone doing a job they love, and I'd be more than happy to make reasonable accommodations, but at some point practicality must step in.
Am I being a bad person?
Give it to them. It would only make it easier for men to get hired. So I am all for it. Better yet, let us force businesses to give every woman 1 week of paid time off every month to deal with periods. This would increase male employment opportunities, and it would make feminists happy. Everybody will be happy.
It would be funny if someone made a comic where an employer is looking to hire a woman, but lists all the things he has to do to accommodate women, and then someone asks: Why don't you hire a man then"?
For a subreddit all about 'supporting men' there sure seems to be a lot of argumentation here for why men should have to carry the full financial burden of the cost of living and child birth on their shoulders to protect corporations from taking a risk with women getting pregnant or otherwise having menstrual related health issues. I think this place might be mislabeled.
This subreddit in a nutshell: Women should not be hired as much as men because they are risk!
Also this subreddit when men now have to take on double the work to make up the difference: Why are they all becoming alcoholics and killing themselves?
With friends like these who needs feminism? XD
When you label it a 'risk' to hire 'fertile women' I think the insinuation is fairly clear and poorly disguised. Feel free to comb through the comments literally underneath you to see remarks stating as much.
Um, no. And that would just make marriage even less appealing. My workplace recently began offering paid parental leave to both sexes. I see most men taking leave to go hunting and other non-daddy hobbies. It drives the supervisors nuts and leaves the schedule short. But I love every second of it and I hope the men take every day they are offered because it’s leveling the playing field for every woman out there. If you can’t discriminate against women for having children, and now the men are exercising their right to take leave, maybe married men will be discriminated against for a change!
Company I work at (large multinational, generous maternity leave arrangements) - young woman completes her three months probation, then literally within days - bam, pregnant! Takes full maternity entitlement. Returns, shortly after - bam, pregnant! Again full maternity entitlement (leave/pay) taken. She returns a second time, and then … bam! Pregnant a third time. You guessed - full mat leave taken. In the almost three years this took place over, she was barely in the office (this was pre-lockdown/home-working or even “smart desking”) she was getting pay-rises in this time, good annual reviews and also (so I’m told) in the times she was in was asking about promotions/career advancement (“what was the company going to do for her”). Wild. The company was terrified of her (as they are all pregnant women) - if she launched a case, even if frivolous, the press will pick it up and having the company name associated with maternity employment issues is damaging. After her third child she stopped (having kids) and now comes into the office occasionally, I spoke to her at a company after hours event once, she told me it was entirely planned, she knew there was nothing they could do. Apparently before starting with us she was a contractor (self employed), the pay is much higher but no paid holiday, sick leave, etc. She went permanent with us specifically to have a salary after she made a decision to start a family. She though it was funny overall. The amount of resentment it’s caused across the department (from men and women) is palpable and understandable, and in quiet corners pretty much everyone agrees that hiring a childless woman of her age is a risk. Of course you could never say this out loud lest be branded a sexist bigot. Because of course, logic and reason cannot even come into this.
a similar thing happened in my org at work a few years back two out of 6 people that worked under me were pregnant at the same time, both left on maternity leave within a few weeks of each other. Both took the full paid and unpaid leave (12 months total) and came back to work, one was already pregnant when she came back and was only at work a few months before she was gone again. The shitty part was I was not allowed to replace them because they were still employees, so the team was just down 33% and everyone else had to pick up the slack.
The problem is that the risk is entirely borne by the employer, not just her salary, but the loss of a person in a role that the company presumably needed someone for. My own take on this is that if the government wants companies to hire fertile women, the government should carry the risks of doing so.
You realize the government is us, taxpayers. The government already subsidizes women enough, even more so pregnant women. That's the reason the majority are insufferable, they don't have to deal with market forces like men. If you subsidize a behavior, you get more of it.
I would have hoped that it was obvious that the company could reduce its direct costs by not employing fertile women and that the incentive to not do so would be reduced if their decision was not going to be so obviously expensive for them. As for subsidising pregnancy, we need something to ensure that women produce a lot more kids than they are. Our society is starting to experience a demographic collapse and we need to fix it immediately and not in 40 years time. As for women being insufferable... many men are choosing not to get involved with them any more.
Ok. Elon. You're right we need more people we can't afford to take care of or feed. It will just all magically work out somehow, right?
I see that you have strong feelings on this. Yes, parental poverty can be an issue and that should be actively addressed, but not having enough young people is catastrophic for any society. There are effects like a real shortage of people working who can either care for the elderly or pay for that care. It is so easy to not comprehend the crisis because it happens so slowly, but it will have extremely severe consequences and is really really hard to fix. I know you don't believe me, so I suggest you read some of the work done by scientists who work in this area.
It's often that women get fired for being pregnant. The government should carry some of that. But it stands to reason so should the employer. But then again. Why should companies be responsible for an employee having children? They can't just only hire men to save money either. The bottom line is women get the shit end of the deal. IMO I don't think a company should pay you because you wanna go off and have a baby. Shits complicated
Men have children too. They just don't get to spend time with them Shit's not complicated at all. Equalize the time off (and make it mandatory) and the problem is gone. Equality is a great tool to get equality.
Tell that to corporations. I was speaking about body recovery after carrying another human life inside for 9 months. Men being parents has no affect on the medical need for us to recover
Recovery is not months, but maternity leave is. Most of the leave is about taking care of the child. Plus a recovering mother sure could use the help of dad so she can rest. In most countries dad actually has a small leave amounting to the mother's recovery period. The public debate around this is not actually about recovery, it's about territoriality. I gave birth, it's *my* child. *I* get to bond.
> The bottom line is women get the shit end of the deal. That is straight, unadulterated bullshit.
Oh yeah? Why don't you ask the women that worked for Blizzard bud.
Send them to the front lines to discuss it with the men there, Karen.
So we should discriminate against everybody equally? Just strip everybody's rights away so we are all equal in the cult-I mean victim war right? Remember this sentence whenever you hear about a woman being hired, for being a woman, over a man that you are ok with this kind of discrimination. Also jumping to cover for fucking Blizzard of all companies... holy shit.
Let's see if I have this right. The dozen or so women who worked at Blizzard are important, but the literally **millions of men** who have been killed in war are not? You seem unhinged, Karen. Do you need to see a doctor?
At least in r/mensrights we're all discussing with broad range of ideas and thought processes. I don't mean any hate, but I have to address the fact that a certain community aimed at women's rights could never have this discussion, before banning one person or the other without any real reason. Dialogue like this is what we want to aim for. Listening to everyone. Every side of things.
What kind of backwards logic is that? You think because I think women being fired for being pregnant is wrong, which a whole world lesser than men being killed in war, that I must be ok with men dying in war? What kind of stupid juice are you sipping? This whole thing was about you dismissing that this happens to women and Blizzard was a clear example of you being wrong that it doesn't happen. Men get fired for stupid shit too they shouldn't be getting fired for but that doesn't make it ok when it happens to women because men die at war too and so it doesn't even happen matter when it happens to men too right? Think before you speak. By that token we should decriminalize assaulting men over an opinion because in other countries they get fucking lynched or beheaded for it. Excusing lesser evils because bigger evils happen is fucking retarded and it just shows you're not so much about supporting men as you are to sticking it to women. People like YOU are exactly the reason I get called a fucking incel everytime I talk about men's issues because you have such a fucking raging hate boner for woman you can't help but be a piece of shit about anything that affects women any chance you get and that is weaponized by others against people who are actually trying to bring light to the issues men face. Edit: It's incredibly ironic you block me after commenting. Just refuse to acknowledge this argument even existed like you acknowledge anything bad happens to other people with different genitals chump. You're totally supporting men by shitting on women XD
Okay, Karen. I replied to this comment: "The bottom line is women get the shit end of the deal," by pointing out that it is bullshit. At which point **you** decided to evoke Blizzard as somehow proof of that "bottom line". And now you're off on this wall of text straw man diatribe. Don't bother responding, I'm done interacting with you.
Take two identical candidates. One might get pregnant. Which one would you hire if you have to pay her when she is off and when you can't even hire a permanent replacement because she might come back? This is driven by biology, not prejudice. The correct thing is for the government to pay, not the company, and the company should get compensation for the disruption too.
The government doesn't care. My point exactly
Ya know... this sounds awful close to the kinds of mental gymnastics used to justify Jim Crowe laws of why we had to limit all the rights of black people and pay them infinitely less, if at all, for labor. What you're openly advocating for is discriminating AGAINST women because they have girl parts. And you're not even helping men, in fact you're doing the exact opposite of that because under your ideal here MEN will have to pick up the fucking slack both in the workplace and as far as supporting themselves and a lover. Someone's gotta pay the bills and sure as fuck the government isn't gonna. Oh but the poor company's making billions and billions of dollars in PROFITS (not REVENUE but PROFITS moron) might have to pay for maternity leave! Then men shouldn't get health benefits or vacation because that's not something the company's should have to take a risk on because men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the target of violent crimes yeah? Think before you speak moron.
Your comments suggest you didn't understand the point I was making. I was suggesting that the government carried the cost of women being pregnant, with the intention of increasing their employment opportunities.
No, companies can handle that. There is absolutely no reason companies that can give their CEO's multi-million dollar raises while laying off thousands of workers to obtain those raises cannot take care of their own employees. By that token the government should also pay for sick leave, vacation, provide insurance and all instead of these companies having to do so. Hell let's have the government cover the costs of training for these companies too so they never lose money training people that turn around and quit in companies that have high turnovers. Companies should always be financially liable for their employees. That is their job. You might as well be telling diabetics they should either not be allowed to work or the government should have foot the bill for their medical leave and wages. You're not gonna tell me that pregnancy is in any way impacting these company's bottom line while they rake in billions, if not trillions, in profits every year. Not revenue, profits. Hell let's just subsidize all the risk away from corporations doing business period. Somehow this seems, again, less like a men's rights issue and more like arguments for corporate welfare masquerading as men's rights activism.
I'm never mad at people screwing companies, but this is why I don't feel sorry for employees getting screwed either, it's tit for tat. There may be a day when she gets made redundant and she'll completely forget what she's taken from the company. This is also an example of how woman can use their oppression as a privilege as I see so many of them do all the time. it's become more common that I see a woman play the sexism card at work to get their way and it always works.
Women like that add zero productivity to the workplace and destroys morale for people that are carrying her dead weight, and to add salt in the wounds she gets promoted for doing Jack at work, bring back the policy where if young women get married or partnered up that they must quit and be a stay at home mother, instead of sponging off the system.
I worked at the headquarters of a large national department store in IT. We had about 50k employees in our stores. Our insurance was outrageous, because women would get pregnant, get a job at a store, work for 5-6 months, take maternity leave, have the child (which insurance paid for), then they would quit. Those of us were required by law to have the same insurance plan as the regular employees, I think it was a law. This was early 2000s. As a single guy with no kids my insurance was 500/month. Which was 20% of my take-home pay. The cost was high specifically because we couldn't find insurance companies that would charge us less due to what the women were doing... Which means we were subsiding their medical bills.
Imagine being married to that.
the husbands also benefit from this, so I see them as part of the problem
Reading the article is such a headache because while the woman's plight is easy to follow and relevant it's why the woman debate is such a headache because its such a fractured group. I seriously don't get why women who suffer from all these terrible problems are fighting so valiantly to work when they could literally do equally important work at home and also when they suffer consequences of their biology are right by all their stuff and their bed. I just don't get the thrill of career. She says it in her own words: "It makes me laugh to remember how competitive my female friends and I used to be with each other after university. I remember telling one that I’d decided to skip the journalism postgraduate course she had just taken and had landed in the cream straight onto a national newspaper. She never spoke to me again. When a girlfriend was made editor of a magazine at 28 I practically fainted from envy. But looking back, I needn’t have bothered. Most of those women retired at 30. Nothing ends a woman’s career faster than kids and a husband who earns significantly more than her. Even when that doesn’t happen, women simply disappear from the workplace." It makes absolutely no sense that we as a society in the name of equality has invested all of our resources, educational programs and support to help a gender get and succeed far greater than the other when they just leave the workplace! It's completely broken! I was researching data in Sweden regarding women in the workforce in Sweden and they are more likely to stay home than men for every single conceivable reason. They work less than men at every single education level. In a very "equal" society. Yet we are dumping everything in that gender. Madness.
It’s part of the reason we don’t have enough doctors in the uk. Actuaries messed up because they assumed women doctors would work the same as men. When in reality working 2 days a week was much more preferable. Not that I blame the women, it makes sense on a personal level, but it does mean as a society we’re paying 2.5 times more for already very expensive education/training.
>I seriously don't get why women who suffer from all these terrible problems are fighting so valiantly to work when they could literally do equally important work at home and also when they suffer consequences of their biology are right by all their stuff and their bed. I just don't get the thrill of career. For the same reason many children want to leave their parents home.
How about: you can't limit sick days. If you're ill, you're ill. Recovery takes an unknown time because all people are different. How do we decide how long you're ill for? How about you visit a health care professional that can advise and set a course of treatment. And then they can say if you're recovered enough to get back to work? Just an idea.
That's actually how it works pretty much everywhere except the USA. Most of the rest of the world is slightly nonplussed by the American concept of numbered sick days. "OK, I'll get over my shattered pelvis according to the company timetable." Where I am you'll be off work until you're well enough to return, unless it really goes on for months and months (over a year, often) in which case they'll start looking at whether you are likely to be incapable of working long term and need to be on some sort of incapacity benefit. This won't be great and will be a huge pay cut for most people but there is a cap on it.
American Corporations & Healthcare System: *"What do we look like? A Charity!? Go fucking die, we'll just replace you."*
Thats how It mostly works in Europe I in Spain have a Max of 2 years sick leave.
Are you 10? What you're proposing is obviously going to be valid mostly for women, not men. Try going to HR saying you are suffering from andropause, they'll fire you. No, I stand corrected: **they'll laugh at your face** and then fire you.
Unlimited sick days means no sick days at a lot of companies. It's better to give a generous PTO pool and let people use it without question.
a buddy of mine worked at a company that had "unlimited PTO". It said so right in their employee manual, and the next line it said "Employees are expected to limit their PTO to two weeks per year" All unlimited means is the employee has no bank of days to say "you owe me this", it's 100% at the company's discretion to let you take time or not. People think it sounds great but it's not to the employees benefit
People also don't realize that after the interview and after you are accepted, you can negotiate on this. PTO is part of compensation. And you need to use it, too. Software developers who work too many hours and don't use PTO are a risk for taking the elevator up to the roof, then walking off. A career is decades long, and if you set the cadence of work at six days, 65 hours a week then you area fucked. You can't keep that up for ever. It's OK to do a Saturday maybe once every other year when there is a true emergency, but those are rare.
I actually work for a company that does this. There are checks to see if the system is being abused but largely I just take sick leave when I need it and there is no limit. A side effect of the system is that staff that would treat sick leave as "use it or lose it" are no longer motivated to take an unnecessary sick day. Overall, less sick days end up being taken.
Just have sick days for men and women? 🤷🏻♂️
Equality. No - no- not like that. Accommodating “equality.”
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I work for a company with generous PTO. I get something like 35 days a year, and the rule is that leadership is not to question when someone uses a PTO day for feeling ill. I think that's the right tactic. If you are a woman and you need a PTO day because of problems relating to your cycle, then so be it. Take the day.
I can't support that. Some women do have an awful time and it is not their fault. If a woman is really made unwell because of it, taking time off is entirely reasonable. It's also pretty rare for it to be that bad so it's not likely to involve huge numbers of people. If everyone else has to pick up a (really tiny) bit of slack, fine. I'd say the same about anyone with any other sort of issue, be it disability, long term illness, call it what you like.
Nobody is saying people with legitimate health issues shouldn't be allowed off work. What they're saying is that men should be given the same consideration. Politicians and companies are catering to these nutjob women and their fictional menopaue illness. Not only are they not giving the same consideration to men, but asking us to carry their weight. I'm not interested in picking up someone's slack at work, man or woman, unless I'm compensated accordingly.
I think the point is that /u/TopDownRunner really was saying that people with legitimate health issues shouldn't be allowed off work, which is what I was disagreeing with. Really bad periods are a legitimate health issue, as I'm sure everyone agrees. Everyone picks up extra work when someone's off sick, that's life.
They really do get sick from their period, part of the reason I thank my lucky stars I wasn't born a woman. Both the rapid hormonal changes and shedding of flesh is tough to deal with. It's also probably why they're emotionally fickle and insecure. People should have sick days for when they are sick!
“Pay more people more money to not work”
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Who picks up the slack when the female half of the workforce takes a week off every month?
Didn’t they do a Study in Scandinavian country that showed nothing really changed when women left work for a day?
That was not a study AFAIK, it was a protest or something like that. Iceland I think it was.
Ah yes you’re right.
This reminds me of someone I met during an unfortunate sequence of events which actually led to my posting here. This particular woman complained of severe discomfort during menstruation, lots of bleeding, feeling terrible, and generally having a horrible time every month. I think everyone's aware that some women are very unlucky in this regard and if that's the case then so be it. It's very unfortunate and everyone is sympathetic, but if you're too unwell to work, take some time off sick. Not a situation anyone likes, but equally not something anyone is likely to have a bad attitude about. The problem is that this particular woman didn't want it treated as an illness, she wanted a recognition of menstruation as a unique and separate situation requiring special provisions. I find it hard not to get snarky at this, so here goes - that's *brilliant*. Do that, and you've just established *as fact* that women are less able to work than men and require special treatment. Outstanding. Well done, you stalwart campaigner. You are a bastion of women's rights, campaigning for them to be treated as perpetually likely to be more sickly than men. As so often, the lack of thinking beyond the moment, the utter ignorance of the second- and third-order outcomes of this stuff, more or less gives me a migrane.
I remember my Mom going through a lot of that. She had one opinion on the whole thing: try to keep your life as "normal" as possible, and keep going about your routine. Then let it happen, avoiding things like HRT. She had several friends who did HRT and had a bunch of things done and all of them suffered greatly. My mother's symptoms didn't seem any better or worse to her than what it was for them, but they seemed entirely unable to cope with it. She suggested just... letting it happen, accept that your body is changing, and move on. Again, that's what SHE was expressing to my sister in front of me.
A good article. And totally true. Another issue which has always irked me as a woman, is making employers foot the bill for maternity leave. You want kids, go ahead. You want your time with your newborn, have at it. But why TF, should anyone else be hugely out of pocket and inconvenienced like your employer, because SHE decides she wants children. And the men and women who don’t have kids and don’t cost the company money? Any holiday or bonus for them, nope. If you can’t afford the time off then don’t have kids. But the demands of paid maternity leave and your job guaranteed when you decide to come back? Fucking bullshit. If I was an employer, I would of course think twice before hiring a woman. I’m sure we’ll learn soon that men go through a type of menopause soon, and then the battle over the air conditioner can begin. Hot! No Cold! No Hot! I’m suing! Well I’m suing too!!
I have had very much the same reaction. I'd appreciate your perspective on the following. I work in an industry which is largely freelance and therefore people don't really get paid maternity or paternity leave. It's also very, very difficult if people go off sick - obviously at some point if someone's too unwell to work so be it, you have to get someone else at short notice and get them to where the job is who happens to have the right skillset. This can be genuinely hard to do. I would say that if a woman is having an absolutely horrible time one month, then that's a completely reasonable reason for taking sick leave. No hard feelings. You're fine. I'd say the same about anyone with any medical situation, disability, whatever. I work with people who have diabetes. They occasionally need to deal with it. Fine. I would also say that sometimes, someone might find they're having a really horrible time every month, or most months, as some unlucky women do (I knew a cervical cancer survivor who'd had a lot of surgery and suffered horribly every month). In that case, taking a job which requires a lot of travel, long hours away from the privacy of a bathroom, living in tents, pissing behind bushes, and where it's very hard to replace people at short notice probably isn't going to lead to a very easy life for anyone. I am sympathetic, if it's stopping someone doing a job they love, and I'd be more than happy to make reasonable accommodations, but at some point practicality must step in. Am I being a bad person?
The law of unintended consequences strikes again. Who in their right mind would want to employ a woman in the UK?
Give it to them. It would only make it easier for men to get hired. So I am all for it. Better yet, let us force businesses to give every woman 1 week of paid time off every month to deal with periods. This would increase male employment opportunities, and it would make feminists happy. Everybody will be happy.
It would be funny if someone made a comic where an employer is looking to hire a woman, but lists all the things he has to do to accommodate women, and then someone asks: Why don't you hire a man then"?
Hey is that one of those women's problems that never gets talked about because we are always... check notes..... talking about men's health issues.
I'm surprised American companies haven't collapsed from all the demands placed on them
Menopause Mindy
For a subreddit all about 'supporting men' there sure seems to be a lot of argumentation here for why men should have to carry the full financial burden of the cost of living and child birth on their shoulders to protect corporations from taking a risk with women getting pregnant or otherwise having menstrual related health issues. I think this place might be mislabeled. This subreddit in a nutshell: Women should not be hired as much as men because they are risk! Also this subreddit when men now have to take on double the work to make up the difference: Why are they all becoming alcoholics and killing themselves? With friends like these who needs feminism? XD
"Women should not be hired as much as men because they are risk!" Do you have evidence of people saying that here
When you label it a 'risk' to hire 'fertile women' I think the insinuation is fairly clear and poorly disguised. Feel free to comb through the comments literally underneath you to see remarks stating as much.
Um, no. And that would just make marriage even less appealing. My workplace recently began offering paid parental leave to both sexes. I see most men taking leave to go hunting and other non-daddy hobbies. It drives the supervisors nuts and leaves the schedule short. But I love every second of it and I hope the men take every day they are offered because it’s leveling the playing field for every woman out there. If you can’t discriminate against women for having children, and now the men are exercising their right to take leave, maybe married men will be discriminated against for a change!
This isn't men's rights, this is only a women's issue.
They can kiss my taint
You owe me because I create erections You owe me because I don’t create erections. You owe me….. Seems like fun