7 ms·

I got mono last year, and was out for longer than some of my female coworkers who had a child were. Same observation for one of my coworker who got in a snowboa

by GuiA 10y ago

I got mono last year, and was out for longer than some of my female coworkers who had a child were. Same observation for one of my coworker who got in a snowboarding accident. I've also had several male coworkers leave because they wanted to devote themselves fully to their family. This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold. I once had a CEO say directly to me: "honestly if one of my female employees got pregnant, i would take it personally. We're a startup, we can't afford people who do that". He had no problem pushing several great engineers to burnout and firing them when their productivity tanked though.

emodendroket 10y ago
I'm a little wary of this kind of argument. Let's just accept the OP's premise for a second. If he's right that upper class women really are more likely to leave the workforce, would it make the discrimination acceptable? Personally I don't feel it would.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Sure, I get your objection from an epistemological perspective; I don't disagree. The thing is that then you wouldn't be comparing "upper class women" vs the rest of the workforce. You should be comparing upper class women in their 30s vs upper class women in their 50s vs men who smoke vs single men in their 20s vs ... In that case you might find that upper class women in their 30s are indeed more likely to leave the workforce than single men in their 20s, but less likely than men in their 50s. At that point, the "economically rational" argument becomes to only hire single men in their 20s, which I guess is what Silicon Valley does.
- derefr 10y ago
  If corporations want to be prejudiced (because it serves their rational economic interests), you can't just stand there and say "well, they shouldn't want that then!" and expect the world to change. You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful, so that (as rational actors) corporations stop wanting to be prejudiced. And to do that, we first have to come to agreement, in the clear light of day, whether corporations do want that (potentially unacceptable) thing or not. Which seems to be a large problem in discussions like this: trying to talk about the way the world is butts up against people who want to talk only about the way the world should be, and don't want to acknowledge that you have to talk about both "before" and "after" if you want to get from one to the other.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Yeah, no kidding. The obvious one, which has a precedent, is making companies subject to legal penalties for discrimination.
  - 5262727 10y ago
    It's not prejudice if it's based on real world statistics.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Yes, the word should be discrimination, but the point stands.
  - Asooka 10y ago
    > You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful That's usually regulation. Child labor is useful, no vacation time is useful and 16-hour days until your workers literally start dying is extremely useful. You would make a ton of money that way. There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice.
    - halomru 10y ago
      >There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice. No, because it's nearly impossible to get even two people to always agree what the moral choice even is. But your examples are fairly easy: all of them are clearly net negatives for society, and would only be profitable for companies if they don't pay the true costs of their behavior. Child labour carries a huge opportunity cost for the child: it can't get proper education, potentially costing it millions in lifetime earnings. Given a lack of immediate financial pressure, the economically rational decision for a child would be to demand far higher pay than an equally skilled adult because the salary has to offset the labor cost. Similar arguments can be made for working people to death and giving them no vacation, but the payment schemes become complicated. Luckily they are even easier to solve: if unemployment is an acceptable condition (little stigma, decent unemployment benefits, etc), then the pool of people willing to work such jobs vanishes. Of course regulation also works. Sometimes it's the sensible option (much easier to outlaw child labour than to teach economics and long term thinking to small children). But it is always valuable to first check if we can fix the root causes of a complex problem before we start with medicating the symptoms.
- imh 10y ago
  The point isn't that discrimination being rational makes it ok. The point is that if discrimination is irrational, the best way to fix it is different from the best solution if it were rational. It's an important factor in deciding how to best work towards equality. If it's irrational, educating employers may be a great option. If it's rational, we probably need to level the playing field somehow (e.g. make it just as ok for dads to stay home as it is for moms or something).
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Sweden tried that. They gave out 330 days of maternity + paternity leave. Women used 94% of it. So they had to make some of it "use it or lose it" for men only. Men started taking the bare minimum, so Sweden is planning to increase the "use it or lose it" portion. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/08/snack_bags_and_a_regular_paycheck_the_happy_life_of_a_swedish_dad.html?from=rss http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/08/snack... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/swedish-fathers-paid-paternity-parental-leave https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/swedish-father... Consider the possibility that maybe men just don't want to stay home as much as women, even if it's acceptable.
    - patmcc 10y ago
      "Legally allowed" != "acceptable". I can't speak to Sweden directly, but Canada has (almost) gender-neutral parental leave laws and many industries/companies still consider it very unusual if a father wants to take more than three or four weeks off at the birth of a child. I have friends that explicitly told me they would have liked to stay home more, but weren't able to because they feared what would happen at work.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        According to the slate article it's normal and socially accepted. Men still don't do it much.
        10y ago
yuhong 10y ago
This reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805665 I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They probably worked better for manual labor and other commodity jobs. A compromise would be to limit them to these kinds of jobs.
zone411 10y ago
Do you have any data/studies besides an anecdote to show that this kind of observation does not hold in real life? All the data I've seen show that women do work part-time more often, work fewer hours (for example, for doctors: http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016/female-physician#page=20 http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016...), take more vacations (http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-travel-study/2110505/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-tra...), and take more sick days (http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-do-women-take-more-sick-leave-than-men-and-what-can-we-do-about-it http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-do-women-take-more-si...).
- psyc 10y ago
  Someone posts a comment explicitly stating it's an observation from personal experience. Why on earth would that commenter have a study on hand?
  - sinxoveretothex 10y ago
    Well, what the OP said is not as clear as you make to be. He did give an anecdote as evidence, but the claim he was justifying was that: > This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold. This is too strong a statement to be described as merely "stating it's an observation from personal experience". Anyway, what's nice is that this is a forum and another commenter might answer with the data if such data/argument exists.
  - Melk 10y ago
    It's funny they you're getting downvoted while above you are there are several anecdotes that apparently do prove the plight of the poor white man.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
home_boi 10y ago
Having a child and devoting yourself to a child are completely different choices. When a man decides to devote himself fully to his family, he is making the decision between neglecting a child and providing for a child. When a women decides to have a child, she is deciding between her desire to have a family and her team/company's well-being. FYI, men don't ever make the decision to have a child. Men only make the decision to have sex. Women make the decision to have sex and also have the decision to have a child by bringing the pregnancy to term.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  What a cheery worldview -- women should just get abortions if they want good careers.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > FYI, men don't ever make the decision to have a child. Men only make the decision to have sex. Some men are married.
- kaitai 10y ago
  That would only be true if abortion and plan b were always accessible and economical.
Spooky23 10y ago
The stats I've seen at a large diverse org doesn't agree. Women take more leaves, birth for maternity and elder care. They also have a higher rate of voluntary work schedule reduction. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability. For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value. When the industry as a whole makes a conscious effort to be more diverse in hiring, the short term incentive to put a thumb on the scale for the preferred background gradually disappears. For example, a third of all GCs and CLOs at F500 companies are now women. It makes little sense to put a thumb on the scale for men in that environment.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mcguire 10y ago
  "I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability." Is it a cause or is it an effect?
- ximeng 10y ago
  "I think that's a good thing" "I might agree that hiring wealthy candidates makes sense to the business" Just parsing out those double negatives for reference.

by GuiA 10y ago

emodendroket 10y ago

I'm a little wary of this kind of argument. Let's just accept the OP's premise for a second. If he's right that upper class women really are more likely to leave the workforce, would it make the discrimination acceptable? Personally I don't feel it would.

GuiA 10y ago
Sure, I get your objection from an epistemological perspective; I don't disagree. The thing is that then you wouldn't be comparing "upper class women" vs the rest of the workforce. You should be comparing upper class women in their 30s vs upper class women in their 50s vs men who smoke vs single men in their 20s vs ... In that case you might find that upper class women in their 30s are indeed more likely to leave the workforce than single men in their 20s, but less likely than men in their 50s. At that point, the "economically rational" argument becomes to only hire single men in their 20s, which I guess is what Silicon Valley does.
derefr 10y ago
If corporations want to be prejudiced (because it serves their rational economic interests), you can't just stand there and say "well, they shouldn't want that then!" and expect the world to change. You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful, so that (as rational actors) corporations stop wanting to be prejudiced. And to do that, we first have to come to agreement, in the clear light of day, whether corporations do want that (potentially unacceptable) thing or not. Which seems to be a large problem in discussions like this: trying to talk about the way the world is butts up against people who want to talk only about the way the world should be, and don't want to acknowledge that you have to talk about both "before" and "after" if you want to get from one to the other.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Yeah, no kidding. The obvious one, which has a precedent, is making companies subject to legal penalties for discrimination.
- 5262727 10y ago
  It's not prejudice if it's based on real world statistics.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Yes, the word should be discrimination, but the point stands.
- Asooka 10y ago
  > You've got to come up with a system or context in which being prejudiced isn't useful That's usually regulation. Child labor is useful, no vacation time is useful and 16-hour days until your workers literally start dying is extremely useful. You would make a ton of money that way. There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice.
  - halomru 10y ago
    >There is no way you can spin the argument such that the company would always derive higher profits by taking the moral choice. No, because it's nearly impossible to get even two people to always agree what the moral choice even is. But your examples are fairly easy: all of them are clearly net negatives for society, and would only be profitable for companies if they don't pay the true costs of their behavior. Child labour carries a huge opportunity cost for the child: it can't get proper education, potentially costing it millions in lifetime earnings. Given a lack of immediate financial pressure, the economically rational decision for a child would be to demand far higher pay than an equally skilled adult because the salary has to offset the labor cost. Similar arguments can be made for working people to death and giving them no vacation, but the payment schemes become complicated. Luckily they are even easier to solve: if unemployment is an acceptable condition (little stigma, decent unemployment benefits, etc), then the pool of people willing to work such jobs vanishes. Of course regulation also works. Sometimes it's the sensible option (much easier to outlaw child labour than to teach economics and long term thinking to small children). But it is always valuable to first check if we can fix the root causes of a complex problem before we start with medicating the symptoms.
imh 10y ago
The point isn't that discrimination being rational makes it ok. The point is that if discrimination is irrational, the best way to fix it is different from the best solution if it were rational. It's an important factor in deciding how to best work towards equality. If it's irrational, educating employers may be a great option. If it's rational, we probably need to level the playing field somehow (e.g. make it just as ok for dads to stay home as it is for moms or something).
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Sweden tried that. They gave out 330 days of maternity + paternity leave. Women used 94% of it. So they had to make some of it "use it or lose it" for men only. Men started taking the bare minimum, so Sweden is planning to increase the "use it or lose it" portion. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/08/snack_bags_and_a_regular_paycheck_the_happy_life_of_a_swedish_dad.html?from=rss http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/08/snack... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/swedish-fathers-paid-paternity-parental-leave https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/swedish-father... Consider the possibility that maybe men just don't want to stay home as much as women, even if it's acceptable.
  - patmcc 10y ago
    "Legally allowed" != "acceptable". I can't speak to Sweden directly, but Canada has (almost) gender-neutral parental leave laws and many industries/companies still consider it very unusual if a father wants to take more than three or four weeks off at the birth of a child. I have friends that explicitly told me they would have liked to stay home more, but weren't able to because they feared what would happen at work.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      According to the slate article it's normal and socially accepted. Men still don't do it much.
      - 10y ago

yuhong 10y ago

This reminds me of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805665 I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They probably worked better for manual labor and other commodity jobs. A compromise would be to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

zone411 10y ago

Do you have any data/studies besides an anecdote to show that this kind of observation does not hold in real life? All the data I've seen show that women do work part-time more often, work fewer hours (for example, for doctors: http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016/female-physician#page=20 http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2016...), take more vacations (http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-travel-study/2110505/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2013/04/25/vacation-tra...), and take more sick days (http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-do-women-take-more-sick-leave-than-men-and-what-can-we-do-about-it http://www.hrzone.com/lead/culture/why-do-women-take-more-si...).

psyc 10y ago
Someone posts a comment explicitly stating it's an observation from personal experience. Why on earth would that commenter have a study on hand?
- sinxoveretothex 10y ago
  Well, what the OP said is not as clear as you make to be. He did give an anecdote as evidence, but the claim he was justifying was that: > This kind of observation ("high status women are more likely to leave for family reasons therefore it is an economically rational choice to prefer men, given equal skills") seems logical on the surface, but when you start looking into the nuances of real life it just doesn't hold. This is too strong a statement to be described as merely "stating it's an observation from personal experience". Anyway, what's nice is that this is a forum and another commenter might answer with the data if such data/argument exists.
- Melk 10y ago
  It's funny they you're getting downvoted while above you are there are several anecdotes that apparently do prove the plight of the poor white man.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

home_boi 10y ago

Having a child and devoting yourself to a child are completely different choices. When a man decides to devote himself fully to his family, he is making the decision between neglecting a child and providing for a child. When a women decides to have a child, she is deciding between her desire to have a family and her team/company's well-being. FYI, men don't ever make the decision to have a child. Men only make the decision to have sex. Women make the decision to have sex and also have the decision to have a child by bringing the pregnancy to term.

emodendroket 10y ago
What a cheery worldview -- women should just get abortions if they want good careers.
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> FYI, men don't ever make the decision to have a child. Men only make the decision to have sex. Some men are married.
kaitai 10y ago
That would only be true if abortion and plan b were always accessible and economical.

Spooky23 10y ago

The stats I've seen at a large diverse org doesn't agree. Women take more leaves, birth for maternity and elder care. They also have a higher rate of voluntary work schedule reduction. I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability. For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value.

rayiner 10y ago
> For white shoe law firms, I don't necessarily disagree that hiring wealthy candidates doesn't make sense to the business. If your client is some Rockefeller heir, being able to chat about squash, sailing and modern art has a value. When the industry as a whole makes a conscious effort to be more diverse in hiring, the short term incentive to put a thumb on the scale for the preferred background gradually disappears. For example, a third of all GCs and CLOs at F500 companies are now women. It makes little sense to put a thumb on the scale for men in that environment.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mcguire 10y ago
"I don't think that's a bad thing, but it's definitely a disincentive for people to move up. Modern workplaces have unnatural expectations for employee availability." Is it a cause or is it an effect?
ximeng 10y ago
"I think that's a good thing" "I might agree that hiring wealthy candidates makes sense to the business" Just parsing out those double negatives for reference.