30,000 sacked every year for having babies
... was the headline I spotted in someone's newspaper at Reading station today, instantly raising my hackles, and causing me to utter "how can we even pretend we have equality when this sort of thing goes on?".
The headline belongs to an article published in today's Observer, and is in reference to a new report by the Fawcett Society called Sexism and the City, due out on Tuesday. To quote some of the stats mentioned in the article: apart from the headline 30,000 women who "lose their jobs for simply being pregnant", we also learn that 2/3 of low-paid workers are women (TWO THIRDS!), and that women working full-time are paid on average 17% less than men. At the top of the food chain, women make up 11% of FTSE 100 company directors, 20% of MPs, and 26% of civil service top management.
In a nutshell, apart from the sheer unfairness conveyed by those numbers, one of the things that riles me is this: when a man decides to have a family, he will not have to choose between his family and his career, whereas a woman does, as a general rule (there are of course the privileged few who have a household income that allows them to hire help and thereby have both, but realistically, this doesn't apply to most women). I don't see why this should be so; why we cannot consider both parents equal caregivers, and make our society and our laws conform to that idea. Why are maternity and paternity leave not of equal length? Why are fathers not the ones who go down to part-time hours, allowing the mothers to retain their careers completely? Where are the men who wind up in trouble at work because they prioritise their family, who are asked at interview whether they plan on having children, and so on? Do you see 50% of the children you know today being brought up by their fathers? (Or, to be slightly more accurate and less polemic, are all the children you know of brought up by both parents equally, or are women in fact still the main / majority caregivers?) What about caring for the elderly, sick or disabled? For as long as women are not the main breadwinners in their families, even where there is a theoretic option for them to continue working and for the men to stay at home, the economic reality dictates that the reverse will actually happen. In other words, even those who have the intellectual will to reverse this injustice are hampered by finances, the working environment, and labour laws.
Please, let's stop pretending that we've achieved equal opportunities for both sexes. It's blatantly untrue. And the next person to suggest I'm only saying these things because I'm "tired and irritable" will actually get shot.
The headline belongs to an article published in today's Observer, and is in reference to a new report by the Fawcett Society called Sexism and the City, due out on Tuesday. To quote some of the stats mentioned in the article: apart from the headline 30,000 women who "lose their jobs for simply being pregnant", we also learn that 2/3 of low-paid workers are women (TWO THIRDS!), and that women working full-time are paid on average 17% less than men. At the top of the food chain, women make up 11% of FTSE 100 company directors, 20% of MPs, and 26% of civil service top management.
In a nutshell, apart from the sheer unfairness conveyed by those numbers, one of the things that riles me is this: when a man decides to have a family, he will not have to choose between his family and his career, whereas a woman does, as a general rule (there are of course the privileged few who have a household income that allows them to hire help and thereby have both, but realistically, this doesn't apply to most women). I don't see why this should be so; why we cannot consider both parents equal caregivers, and make our society and our laws conform to that idea. Why are maternity and paternity leave not of equal length? Why are fathers not the ones who go down to part-time hours, allowing the mothers to retain their careers completely? Where are the men who wind up in trouble at work because they prioritise their family, who are asked at interview whether they plan on having children, and so on? Do you see 50% of the children you know today being brought up by their fathers? (Or, to be slightly more accurate and less polemic, are all the children you know of brought up by both parents equally, or are women in fact still the main / majority caregivers?) What about caring for the elderly, sick or disabled? For as long as women are not the main breadwinners in their families, even where there is a theoretic option for them to continue working and for the men to stay at home, the economic reality dictates that the reverse will actually happen. In other words, even those who have the intellectual will to reverse this injustice are hampered by finances, the working environment, and labour laws.
Please, let's stop pretending that we've achieved equal opportunities for both sexes. It's blatantly untrue. And the next person to suggest I'm only saying these things because I'm "tired and irritable" will actually get shot.