> Some set of hiring managers assumed a mother with kids would likely focus more on family then career.

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.

I personally doubt the problem is mainly maternity leave. 3 months time off for a good employee is not that bad (though if you had an equal male candidate, sure on sheer cost reasons you'd hire them). The problem is they are more likely to leave permanently or the perception they are more likely to put up a stink about discrimination if you say they are not pulling their weight.

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).

In some countries that can happen to dads as well, because you can share the time with the kid afterwards.

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.

What happens is that women usually get to do the reduced time because they have a higher claim to their kids. It is not only the paternity leave, but also for example working part time later on. Dads don't get the option to do part time instead of their wives a lot. Of course it happens, but it is not the usual thing to expect.

It all depends on which country one speaks about.

Many European countries, have shared leaves between parents.

As I said, it's not only the parental leave that is an issue. Often later on one parent decides to only work part time. Usually it is the mother.

I guess I may be biased, because on our office guys also do that, which makes me wrongly extrapolate the common situation.

That's quite probably why my wife gets her contract renewed in half-year increments (and she feels like everybody wants to know if she's already pregnant)...

Actually the best remedy to this could be to give father equal length paternity leaves.

absolutely agreed. http://www.sweden.se/eng/home/society/equality/facts/gender-...

Sweden does it :)

"she's assumed to get pregnant and go on maternity leave"

Would you say that assumptions is completely unfounded? What percentage of women don't have kids?

You'd need to narrow it down some - what percentage of women in "industry X" don't have kids. I don't know if the numbers would be significantly different, but they might for some industries.

In some industries you might not have a significant enough number of women to create a significant statistic.

I don't think people are necessarily saying that this assumption is or is not unfounded. But it should not be grounds for not hiring someone.

But what is the solution? Why should companies be responsible to pay for that risk? I think if society doesn't want women to be disadvantaged because of the "risk" of becoming family persons, then society should pay up, not companies.

I'd like to see a study of response rates on resume's that are nearly the same, except for the gender, and race implied by the name. I feel like that would provide a pretty good measure to figure out how discriminatory our jobs system is.

They've done them, the results strongly imply discrimination. There's been some criticism of the methodology though. I believe there was a chapter in Freakonomics criticizing the "black name" resume studies (though I cannot remember the criticism). With some of the gender ones the claim is that the career trajectories were gender atypical when the names were switched and hence looked odd. I.e. that if you took a resume of a women and a man and swapped the names, the male named female resume would get lower responses.

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.

Note, the part about criticism was incorrect. The criticism was that if you handed someone a gender inverted resume, it would score lower period. So of course, if you took a "male" looking resume and gave it to someone with a female name on it, they'd find it odd just as they would if they got a female looking resume with a male name on it. The claim was the study failed to account for this.

The study in question: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474.full.pdf

Women "more likely" to drop out to provide childcare doesn't make it "100% women". But without fixing problems of families with small children (lack of affordable childcare, culture of long hours and such), anti-discrimination laws only create more discrimination and stereotyping... All women would be stereotyped as risky. I've known quite a few men providing childcare and needing flex hours, while their wives are too busy at work. Yet, such men are stereotyped as an exception. Because asking questions and deciding on a case by case basis is illegal, so it's a breeding ground for stereotyping.

There are 'blind audition' studies that clearly show gender bias: "A recent study by two economists finds that chances of women making it past preliminary auditioning rounds increase by 50 percent if they audition ``behind a heavy cloth suspended from the ceiling so judges can't see their gender.'' http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997-04-28/business/9704250...

> 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.

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.

Maybe I missed it, where did he say his name implied he had kids?

"If they did read further, the next thing they saw (as politeness declared at the time) was a little personal information, and that declared I was married with kids."

Your marital status and whether or not you have kids should NOT be on your CV. It's illegal for an employer to even ask about it in an interview.

> It's illegal for an employer to even ask about it in an interview.

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 likely depends on the country; for all practical purpose, it is illegal to ask this question in Canada.

I think that asking such questions in an interview in the US can make it easier for people to sue if they don't get hired.

He isn't an American. Not all countries have the same laws.

Ah, thank you!