Reason #2513 why I shouldn't breed

[featherynscale]

Posted with apologies to all my friends who happen to have babies, or who happen to be babies - it's nothing personal.

Noticed on my hotmail homepage (which I detest, by the way - I really just want my messages, and I'm not interested in any of M$N's supposed 'content') the article "7 cures for a crying baby". I can run through a lot more than that, but I'm betting the ones with things in them like duct tape and expanding foam didn't make the MSN list.

Comments

Reason #2514

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Heard on NPR this morning:

The GAO has released a report saying that women's pay continues to lag about 20% behind men's in general. What the online article doesn't mention is that apparently having a child results in a 2% average drop in income for a woman (but a 2.4% increase in income for men, curiously enough).

Re: Reason #2514

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

OOH! Don't get me started. One of my senior theses was about the politics of Comparable Worth. Gr.

Re: Reason #2514

[zylch.livejournal.com]

Right, but then you have to take into account some of the weird things that will affect that. For example, one case we discussed in Women in American History II was a lawsuit against a company which sold a lot of large appliances and payed their salespeople on commission (might have been Sears?). The female sellers generally made much less than their male counterparts, so there was a big hoo-haw about the company having sexist practices. It turns out that the wage differential was not the company's fault, however. Most large appliance purchases are made in the late afternoon or evening, and most of the employees working that shift were male, so the men logically tended to earn more commission money. The women weren't working that shift not because the company wouldn't let them but because they had chosen to work day-shift, often so that they could spend the evening with family.

There is still the social issue of why the women felt the need to be home more than the men, of course. And companies do often have unfair wage practices. My point is that even if it looks like it at first, that's not always automatically the case.