Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career. That assumption may or may not be dumb. It's certainly correctable if there is serious statistical evidence it is wrong (unlike someone just being a bigot).
That wouldn't help this case though, because the inclusion of kids in the resume was an intentional signal that mangers were meant to interpret as such. Since the applicants gender was misread, the signal was read as they wanted flexible hours, not that they were stable. Sure, dad's could ask for flexible hours, but that is on the whole a less frequent occurrence.
This is an even stronger single because asking if I have kids in an interview is in fact not legal in most places in the US, so including it your self is making a huge point.
Oh, there's also the fact that if you did interview them and not hire, the fact that it was in their resume might give the grounds for sueing you for gender discrimination.
In the present times, some set of managers would assume it for ANY woman of childbearing age. And if a woman doesn't have kids, she's assumed to get pregnant and go on maternity leave.
Imagine what would happen if a guy came in and said "I like this job, but my real passion may be art. There is a %50 chance in the next 5 years I am going to leave my job to peruse that." You'd try to avoid hiring them.
Of course, this has terrible consequences in that it effectively discriminates against women in hiring, but simply trying to get hiring managers "not to be sexist' isn't going to fix the problem. You are asking employers (men and women) to weigh their personal ideals ( gender equality) against financial incentives(retaining employees, not paying to).
The point is that not hiring women because they have kids, is stupid, as the same can happen to men as well. Except for the pregnancy time, of course.
Many European countries, have shared leaves between parents.
Sweden does it :)
Would you say that assumptions is completely unfounded? What percentage of women don't have kids?
A more salient question is why there is discrimination on gender in hiring. Is it outright sexism or is it discounting for the fact that a women is far more likely to exit her career to have kids or reduce her hours. The answer radically effect how you fix the problem.
The study in question: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf
It's not such a huge point if you read the bio at the top of the article and noticed that the author lives in Australia and not just assume he lives in the US.
Mind you, Australia does have similar anti-discrimination laws.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find such a law. What you will more likely find that it is illegal for an employer to discriminate in hiring based on that information, and an employer asking the question in an interview is quite likely to be used in any lawsuit over alleged discrimination as evidence that they were, in fact, discriminating in hiring based on the information, since asking a question in an hiring interview is pretty compelling evidence of an intent to use the response in making hiring decisions.
It saddens me to know there are people who think the presence of women infringes on their right to make sexist remarks. And that making sexist remarks is such a vital part of their everyday life that hiring women is the unacceptable route.
I'm sad that you were forced to make that choice, I'm proud of the choice that you made.
It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life.
If you find yourself so embattled with the courts, perhaps you should try and understand the behavior of reasonable people. I have to agree with rayiner -- this sounds like typical male-tech resentment for being called creepy one too many times.
"No, he's not sexist, he just doesn't like women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just can't talk to women... for good reason!" "No, he's not sexist, he just has seizures when he sees the color pink, and women are more likely to wear pink."
Who cares? The woman still doesn't get the job.
The excuses are equivalent to a student saying they deserve an A for trying hard and having extenuating circumstances though they can't actually do what they're graded on.
People take "sexist" and "racist" to describe intent. I don't give a s(*& about your intent. It's the effect that's relevant.
In his position if I wanted to make a more general point about the court system I would have burned a few more sentences clarifying my point.
Also, badclient wrote exactly one sentence: It is a problem when "sexist remark" has a much more vague definition in court than in everyday life. This is a true concern that does not infer anything about which sex did which sexist thing... only that the definition of "sexist" is dangerously vague. If you think that translates to a "hate of all women", you have projected that upon badclient.
EDIT: "both ways" should probably be "all ways" since all parties involved could be the same gender.
Americans seem to like having things escalate. Going to court is the first reaction to everything in stead of asking someone to apologize or talking things out. The incentive for going to court also seems to be very high, you can get large sums of money for small things. Money is the biggest reason people work in the first place.
I don't know why hiring decisions would be based on gender at all, though, so I don't know why badclient seems to argue for it here. Both men and women can be frivolously litigative.
And I'm not trying to be a PC zealot here. I've told and laughed at many an inappropriate joke. But I also have a lot of respect for the idea that you should not make people feel uncomfortable at work and you shouldn't go out of your way to dismiss candidates of a particular gender (or race or class) because you think you would offend that person and you are incapable of not offending them.
Another notable thing about feeling like you can't hire certain people because they will be offended by things you say in the office is that you are making it clear that you have a narrow range of means to express yourself.
You can have a lot of respect for something and still have a hard time achieving it. You're suggesting that people that make crude jokes around a sex about that sex don't respect that sex. I find that assumption to be unfair and false.
Schools like to separate girls from boys, and points towards improved and safer environment. Conferences like to create women only sections, in the idea (with some irony) that it would improve gender equality, and like schools, make a better environment for teaching out technology.
I call it stupid because it fail some basic common sense. A mixed classroom, work space, or conference room is better because it increase cooperation, make society better, and switch the focus on the individual skill level rather than their sex. Schools have almost gone through this stage and fully gone over to mixed classrooms. The work space is learning the same lesson, but slower. As to conferences, I can only assume that they are looking at the workplace and fail to connect the dots.
To their detriment. As a product of both coed and all boys private schools, there is a stark difference in teaching and disceplin in single sex schools that research shows improves outcomes. Hit http://scholar.google.com/ with "single sex education." There is a huge discrepancy in male performance especially that most teachers admit a preference to teaching girls as they "behave" better.
Bigotry and sexism exists, but the "problem" is an effect of the US obsession with political correctness and an overly sensitive and litigious society. There are cases of systematic discrimination in organizations, but they are not as pervasive as a few decades ago, so there has been progress, especially in corporate environments. An example is a female cousin with a law degree. Being a women of breading age, she was specifically asked if she intended to have children in the next 5 years which was a non-starter. These were small firms that couldn't afford to have a junior partner off for maternity leave. She had no problem with that at a large corporation.
On equality, if you start giving men maternity leave in the same way as women, and effectively change societies views on gender roles in the home, you might start seeing that form of discrimination disappear as in the scandinavian countries.
There is much to be said about differences in men and women's personalities. Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that. So as long as the kid gloves are on...
I agree.
>Normal banter between men about women kept on the "acceptable in a sitcom" when not directed at any specific women, in my view is not sexual harassment, but clearly some people disagree with that.
I definitely disagree with that at work. If you want to discuss your sexuality, comment on people's body parts, or articulate your unified theory on the differences in the natures of men and women, get some friends. People have to work in order to eat - allow women (and men) to get through it without having to constantly bite their tongues or else be seen as the problem. We've made a decision as a society that racial, sexual and religious discrimination are problems at work. Find another subject.
Right. Bite my tongue and put on the kid gloves. Wouldn't want to discuss last nights episode of Game of Thrones in the break room, less be seen as a sexist jerk. People do have friends at work, and normal human interactions do take place there.
If your friends at work refuse to meet you away from work for your crucial sex talk, they may be uncomfortable with it too. If your self-righteousness is because you feel put upon by not being able to say what you want when you want, I entirely lack sympathy.
If someone is uncomfortable with something they should speak up. If someone says they are uncomfortable with something that should be respected (within reason).
Its not that hard when everyone just behaves as adults instead of spoiled sheltered children who cannot communicate with each other
And even so they should still speak up. Even if someone has some unreasonable discomfort (ie it makes me uncomfortable when you wear red) it may be so minor that it can easily be avoided. You couldn't expect people to not wear red, but if a co-worker said that to me i'd probably just try to not wear red.
Without communicating/talking about it, reasonable or not, there is absolutely no chance of the situation getting better.
I agree there is a place and time for everything. However, true friends are rarely made in polite company. I prefer to work with friends.
It's a subtle thing, really. One person can make remarks about women and shoes and it's funny because we know that's not his real opinion, another does it and it's offensive because he thinks it's true. It really is about what your real opinions and intentions are.
Perhaps step one should be "find out their real opinion and intention". But too often people just go straight to "thermo-nuclear melt down".
In a world where sexism is still a huge problem, it seems that forcing students into a monosexual environment would only contribute to stunting their social development even more. Compare, for example, the relative incidence of sexism in a heavily male field like programming or philosophy with the amount of sexism in a gender-integrated field like biology.
This idea of separating students by gender to increase performance is really treating them like little test-taking machines: students, by and large, do not choose to take gender-segregated courses unless their parents require it of them. They're human beings. They have a fundamental right to develop in a natural social environment. And, like it or not, schools provide a large proportion of a child's social interaction, which isn't going to change anytime soon.
But most importantly, any improvements are highly controversial and tend to disappear once researchers attempt to correct for confounding.
"The Pseudoscience of Single-sex Schooling", Halpern et al, Science 2011: http://womenstudies.wisc.edu/documents/ScienceSingle-sex09-2...
The most successful school systems in the world, in Northern Europe and East Asia, are all coeducational. There are also a whole lot of interventions that don't require such drastic measures. Cracked of all publications wrote a surprisingly well-researched article on the subject:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19254_5-surprisingly-easy-way...
Using a microphone and turning on the lights is a far less severe encroachment on students' freedom than, well, segregation. Seriously.
That's sexism, plain and simple. Who are they to assume she's going to take extended maternity leave and be the primary care giver? They would never ask that of a man (most male law partners are married and have kids), because they would as assume that his wife would take care of the kids. That's sexism.
Why is it legal to discriminate based on data in some situations but not others? I think the only solution is to remove the logical justification for discrimination: force men and women to take equal parental leave.
as a result car insurance prices for women increased significantly, while mens remained the same.
additionally annuity rates for men dropped, while those for women remained the same (the provider is no longer allowed to factor in that men on average die several years earlier).
I'm all for fairness. Equal is not fair in all cases, nor is fair equal in all cases...
No reason it can't be both. It is stupid, but it's also the dictionary definition of sexism.
Why is it bigot to think that? Seems like a valid concern, can't really blame companies for worrying about that?
It's of course a problem, but what is the proper solution?
I could be going too far, though. Maybe the kind of dumb lockerroom overshare bluster amongst the employees and managers of sexually harassing companies and departments lends itself to admitting incriminating things like that to other men with a wink wink nudge nudge.