1. Having a child incurs a cost to employers.
2. Regardless of legality, a business will try to minimize this cost.
3. Since it's illegal during an interview to even touch upon the subject of having kids and what a candidate's strategy may be to remain a productive employee while raising a child, employers may be even more discriminatory towards _everyone_ of a child-bearing age, in order to avoid discriminating against recent or soon-to-be parents.
So, how can we alter the incentive structure for employers such that they're not tempted to discriminate. Should we shift the cost burden of child rearing to the govt? Or should we allow an employer to ask you about your plans for having children and how it will affect your employment
Rather, it addresses the specific issue of there being an economic incentive to discriminate, intrinsic to all businesses.
Addressing that issue is compatible with concurrent solutions that outlaw the discrimination on moral grounds, or do so more strictly, or provide more aggressive enforcement.
virtually no one who posts on this website will be better off after the revolution. why dedicate your life to screwing yourself?
Major corporations may have a lot. The random corner shop with two employees certainly doesn't.
I'm disappointed that we're not able to engage in better faith.
threatofrain got it right. This is a problem we need to address, but the solutions I've seen thus far don't take unfortunate pathologies of human psychology into account, and when we don't do that, we get very surprised at the lack of results down the line. You're more than willing to try to live in a world where you say "Because we said X this is what's going to happen" but I find that to be far less proactive than trying to ask what actual responses are, as distasteful as they might be, and ways to address them.
My concern is that Rayiner's response, "we prohibit it because we made it a law" is still ignoring the key point. _it's too goddamn easy_ to discriminate and paint it as something else, too many reasons I could turn down ANY applicant, for me to just brush it off as "a law is sufficient." I believe that if this is a problem we _really_ want to fix, it's going to involve delving into some unpleasant trains of thought that aren't really "acceptable conversation" right now. I just worry that by ignoring it, the problem goes unaddressed, and we potentially foment resistance against it.
It feels naive to me to think that just because a law is "full stop necessary" in our moral frame of reference, to think that's sufficient to implement it effectively such that it generates the outcome you want in the long run.