I can answer every one of those charges with one word: CHILDREN
In the vast, vast, vast majority of households that are single parent, that parent is female. In WELL more than 50% of the two parent/two career households, if one of the kids is sick or whatever and someone needs to stay home, it's the mother who ends up doing it.
When my son was little, if the school called, it was me they called and me who left work if he was hurt/had a problem. If I was in a bind and called my (now ex) husband he literally gave me the attitude of "What, you expect me to do something? I can't leave, my job is important. You're the mother, you take care of it." The one time I was out to lunch and they called him and not me, he called ME to go take care of it, and he's NOT the only guy who pulls that shit, not by a long shot.
Plenty of women take jobs that allow time flexibility, which are usually lower paying and less fast track, because they know when push comes to shove, the father will drop the ball and they have to have some flexibility to take care of the kids, end of statement.
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I agree. But, why should people who choose to have children get more days off and paid the same?
You are right
some women choose a job where they have more flexibility. This is one reason why the NOW say women can't complain about the pay differences.
Usually, the man can't pick up the kid. ("drops the ball") Because, he has to take a job that isn't so "flexible" that pays more. (so the fucking bills get paid)
Most men would love to take a more "flexible" job. But, then they would be a loser because they can't pay the fucking bills. (generally)
Also, I was surprised about this to...
Female absenteeism is not just about child care
Why women call in sick more than men is a complex workplace issue
By
Eve Tahmincioglu
msnbc.com contributor
updated 1:38 p.m. ET, Mon., Nov. 5, 2007
The good news: Workers are calling in sick less often than they did just a decade ago.
The bad news: Women are still absent nearly twice as often as their male counterparts in the workplace.
It’s been a perpetual problem: Women tend to call in sick more often than men. But the why — even though you may think you know the answer — isn’t that clear cut, nor should it be.
The obvious answer from human resource experts, employers, employees and even us in the media is always that “working moms have most of the responsibilities at home,” and that translates into female employees having to take sick days to tend to sick kids.
Indeed,
new Labor Department data shared with msnbc.com seem to support this to a degree.
“
Both married and unmarried women with children report a higher rate of absences than those without children,” says Terence McMenamin with the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among single dads, the absentee rate is also higher than the rate for men without children.
What’s interesting, McMenamin points out, is that married men with kids actually report a lower rate of absences than men without children. It was so surprising to this labor data expert that he checked back to 2000 and found the trend is consistent for the past six years.
Before you pat yourself on the back, having guessed that child rearing is what has many women calling in sick, McMenamin surmises there must be many other factors contributing to the high rate among women.
“Even among people who have no children at home,” he adds, “the reported absence rate is higher among women than among men.”
Making assumptions on why women call in sick can be detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace, says Eric Patton, an assistant professor of management at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
As part of his research on how workplace absence is perceived, Patton studied a century’s worth of New York Times articles that dealt with the issue. He found 3,000 articles on the topic.
“Whenever it was an article about women’s absenteeism it was about gender. If it was about men and absenteeism, gender was not brought up,” he says.
That focus on gender, he adds, has created a situation where co-workers and managers expect women to be absent more often, and that, in turn, can creates an air of unreliability around female employees.