One major issue in this scenario: you don’t know who wants/can/will have kids. Discriminating against women because they have a uterus and might get pregnant and might have a problematic pregnancy and might carry to term and might give birth and might take parental leave is incredibly short-sighted - even in your scenario you’ve just missed out on 4+ years of work because you’re worried about a few (potential) months.
Beyond that, while (cis) women have the necessary equipment to have kids, we’re not the only ones with bodies that can get sick. Penalizing all women for one particular way of (potentially) disrupting work is incredibly unfair, and ignores that men also can need leaves of absence.
The point is that unlike things like race discrimination, when all other things are equal, there IS a real difference, no matter how small, in term of risk (and in practice, it's really not that small). I worked at a large company where most employees were women in the 20-35 yo rangeny for a while on HR project and saw some of the data. It was not pretty.
As a society though, we shouldn't let that be ground for discrimination. As you mentioned, not all women want or will have kids. Of those who do, many will have supportive significant others, and the difference in productivity will be negligible. Even if it wasn't, I don't want to live in a world where people have trouble getting a job because they might end up doing something a very significant portion of the population will do.
But it's still a fact that, given 2 exactly equivalent candidate, both in their mid twenties, one is a guy, one's a woman, there is a well known, significant short to medium term risk in the later, if only looking at it from a local maximum perspective. We as a society need to find a way to artificially make up for it.
My personal favorite solution is to give both men and women equal (mandatory?) parental leaves, and no difference if its an adoption, same sex partners, or anything like that. Yes, women have an actual medical need, yes it might not be quite representative of reality, but that equalizes the risk from an employer perspective. No difference between the man and the woman (bonus point, it will help even out parental contribution and responsabilities at home).
That still leaves the age discrimination, but considering ageism is often against older people, that might really just even things out a little.
Mandatory leave for both parents is a terrible idea. There are a lot of people who prefer traditional model where one parent works and the other takes care of children and home. Why would you force those people to loie according to some relatively modern untested family model?
If 43% of women leave the workforce after having a child, it’s still more likely than not that your employee is coming back. And my guess is that the number of women who plan to come back and then don’t is much smaller than 43%, because - to the surprise of many - women often know what they want in life. (That snark is not aimed at you, btw, just that this thread is full of people second-guessing women.)
What's interesting is that the author talks only about impact on children. I was under the impression that a large part of the argument for universal preK (and universal day-care, like Head Start) was that it evens out how easy it is for parents to work when they have small kids. If that's the case, then it's not a huge problem that the academic results aren't great over time for the kids themselves if it means that overall family well-being is improved.
As a side note, Head Start is also interesting in that it, when it's done using blended classrooms, it also lets kids from diverse background interact with each other before they've learned a lot of prejudicial behaviors.
It may well be true that pitching universal preK as universal child-care would be more honest. I suspect the problem is that it would also be significantly more controversial as it wouldn't really be "for the children and the future" any longer but rather, for better or worse, a straight income transfer to parents of young children.
> Many universities in the AAU survey offered 6,000 students
> $5 each to fill out the survey, yielding a total potential
> cost of $30,000. But if you were willing to pay $30,000, it
> would be far better to pay 600 randomly selected students
> $50 — a $200 hourly rate for a 15-minute survey, giving
> students a much larger incentive to respond.
This is a good reminder of how important study design is, not just the questions on the survey.
The only worry I have is the tiny sample size one would get of underrepresented minorities, which in other studies have been show to have a much higher victimization rate than other groups.
> Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the underlying qualities you are trying to judge.
I'd be pretty careful about this line of argument. What we think of as a clue to underlying qualities is cultural... for example, one of the biggest superficial differences in people is the color of their skin. What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?
In the US and Europe, we have a long history of trying to find the ties between visible and non-visible qualities. Phrenology, eugenics, Blacks as having "inferior intelligence", the belief that women are prone to hysteria - all were attempts to find that link.
> What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to
What underlying qualities does height clue us in to? Are you sure that, even though traits regularly correlate with other traits, skin color is the one trait that has no correlation with absolutely anything else? I don't find that very likely, personally.
Sure, but there's a widespread way to reliably detect correlations. Besides, my point is more that we shouldn't plug our ears and go "racism lalala" whenever the reasonable, scientific fact that, like everything else, race may be correlated with some traits pops up.
The history of seeking correlations between visible and invisible qualities has been largely successful. For instance, it's fairly well known that border collies can be successfully trained to herd sheep, but wolves cannot.
Further, in the US and Europe, we also have a long history of trying to find substances which kill infections. These failed until we found penicillin. Citing a few false claims (not all the ones you've cited are even known to be false) and using this as evidence that all such claims must be false is a logical fallacy.
Do you have any studies about humans? Because I'm not aware of many that are clear-cut (of course, there's environment-gene interplay, but that is way more murky than anything talked about in the article or in the OP's comment).
I'm not saying that those claims were false and therefore all such claims are false. I'm saying that in the West we've spent a lot of time trying to prove that non-white men are inferior in different ways. Arguments like "unconscious bias comes from evolution" ignore that long history of non-white-male qualities being judged inferior.
There are quite a few studies about humans, fruit flies also make an appearance (since you can rapidly breed them). All in all, there is quite a bit of evidence that genetics can influence animal behavior both across and within species.
Based on my reading, I'm quite confident in my belief that genetics explain at least 25% of behavioral differences. I haven't been convinced that it explains 50-90% (as some folks claim). I've appended below a dump of papers which I've either read or are in my queue.
Most results in this space find that white (particularly if you exclude Ashkenazi Jews) people are not the superior race, at least in popular metrics like intelligence, criminality, drug use and divorce. Those westerners trying to "prove that non-white men are inferior" probably should have realized that isn't how evidence works: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence...
But again, I'm not arguing that genetics don't have any impact on behavior - I'm arguing that getting from someone else's experience of appearance to genetics to the 20% of behavior that's affected is a pretty long jump to make.
See my link to a college math study (in a separate comment thread); you can improve predictions of math skill significantly above random (50% -> 55%) chance simply based on appearance.
I was totally shocked when I saw this, but there is at least some evidence that appearance predicts more than I would otherwise expect.
> Whatever do you, do not make a scene, as that will burden the entire community with your issue... Remember, this is not the time or place to start these kind of discussions.
Cool. I'll make sure not to make a big issue out of being sexually harassed online... online.
Intersectionality would come into play if he was arguing that he was a member of multiple minority groups. Here he was arguing that he was a contributor (not necessarily a member!) of a single group, distinct from the previously discussed ones. It's entirely possible he's a member of multiple groups, my point was just that his argument didn't reference that and it was therefore illogical.
I'm... actually not clear on what you're saying. Are you being sarcastic or serious? I can't read your tone and I could imagine realistic scenarios where you're saying one thing or the other.
My bad - I was being sarcastic about the first comment, not sarcastic about the second (and agreeing with you).
To more fully explain what I meant by my first response, I was frustrated by his lack of awareness of the ways intersectionality impacts how different people interact with each other online. Codes of Conduct become increasingly important as one recognizes that intersectionalities of oppression can create extremely toxic situations for some minority groups and not others, depending on the context of the group. So, basically what you were saying in your second comment.
You sound pretty knowledgable about intersectionality. Do you have any material on it? I'm only familiar with it from one blog post, so I wouldn't mind learning some more. It sounds like there are more nuances to it than I first understood.
Would you expect that amount of fudging to change over time? Arguing that fudging stats explains the drop in crime requires that you believe in the last 30 years police throughout the country have started undercounting the amount of crime in their areas by increasing amounts year after year.
Beyond that, while (cis) women have the necessary equipment to have kids, we’re not the only ones with bodies that can get sick. Penalizing all women for one particular way of (potentially) disrupting work is incredibly unfair, and ignores that men also can need leaves of absence.