Indulging garamet, for reasons that escape me.

What's to address? I don't agree with it, support it, or argue in favor of it.


If you do the same work, put in as much time, and contribute the same value to the company, I say you should receive equal consideration for raises and promotions. But if you fail at those measures, if you don't pull as much weight as another employee, you should not expect to be treated as favorably as they are, and absolutely no consideration should be paid to gender in this assessment.

But nothing is off the table. You cannot say it's unfair to consider lesser contributions for one reason, but not another. Gone for a ball game, gone for a pap smear;five minutes to smoke a cig, five to swap out a tampon, you are still gone, your job is not being done by you, and you should not expect to be treated as though it was, period.

This was proposed as far back as the Seventies as a solution to child care. Two women would do the same job. One would sit at the desk, say, M-W-F, the other T-Th, or they'd alternate weeks, or a host of other variations. It was even proposed that the one who was not in the office that day would take care of the other one's kid along with her own.

Employers laughed until they peed themselves, and then said "No."

Why? Because obviously people won't work unless there's a supervisor standing over them.

Then there's telecommuting, which is still being resisted today, for the same reason.

Job sharing sounds feasible, who is resisting telecommuting, I know plenty.

OK. 5 pages. I believe I've put the question of whether I can conduct a civil, rational discussion to rest.

d.p.

Then we're no longer talking about feminism.

Actually, I take that back. We are talking about feminism, from the POV of the people at the top who have argued for decades that "Well, we can't pay the women the same as we pay the men. You know how they are. They take longer bathroom breaks. That makes them less productive. So we gotta pay 'em less. It's only fair."

In short, you're colluding *against* the very equality to claim to support.

I never doubted you could do that.

And you've raised - and discussed - some very, very good points.

But toward the end your discussion was less about feminism and more about employee behaviors that annoy you on the job every day.

I disagree. I'm saying uniquely female considerations should not carry any more weight or elicit any more sympathetic treatment. What could be more feminist than that?

No, I am emphatically not doing that. You're trying to characterize valid points I raise as interchangeable with rationalizations invoked by "Old Boy Network" executives, based on a passing, superficial similarity of subject matter. The difference I will not allow to be ignored is that I would base my evaluations on what is demonstrated, not what is prejudged. It is not the same thing, and I'll thank you not to try that again.

Of course I know that.

But I'm not Uncle Albert, who apparently times his subordinates bathroom breaks with an atomic stopwatch.

There are jobs out there that do accommodate. One of the places I worked let us split the work week between two people. There was a woman coming back to work after having a kid that preferred to work part time, and I was returning to school. The job was four ten hour shifts. She took Monday and Wednesday and I took Tuesday and Thursday.

Most jobs that I've had have been similar, where they'll let you shift around your work schedule to come in early or late. If I call in sick, I just work later the rest of the week, for instance.

Job sharing *is* feasible. But corporations balk at it.

I know folks who telecommute as well. I'm one of them. But corporations resist this as well. Not for top management, but for the backbone employees, the folks who handle the most electronic "paperwork." Because there's that employer mindset that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. Employees are children. If you don't stand over them and crack the whip, they won't work.

My girlfriend telecommutes two days a week. Her boss was very much against at it first, but gave in.

Now her boss is amazed at how much work she gets done on the days she's not in the office. It's amazing what not sitting in traffic, avoiding office gossip and being able to take a walk around the block can do for a company.

Well, we've been agreeing on that from the get-go. The problem is, you're coming at it from the direction of "women shouldn't be allowed anything more than men are" and I'm coming from "women shouldn't be allowed anything less than men are."

It's possible we could meet in the middle if we stayed at this long enough, but you're about to brave that long commute home, and you need to save up your energy for that.

Let's say you have an important job and, in your unforseen and unavoidable absence, a replacement is hired since, although your circumstances are unfortunate, there is still a company to be run.

The replacement proves to be just as competent in the job as you were, and even more efficient. You return to work, but your employer decides to leave your successor in his current position, and offers to put you in a different position of importance that has been recently vacated. The position pays exactly the same as you were making before, but the work it involves is somewhat less interesting to you.

Well, yeah, *now* it's happening...30 years after it was dismissed as impractical.

And as traffic congestion gets worse and worse, it will be tried more often.

Better late than never, I suppose.

I totally agree with its virtues, but it's still an offering entirely at the company's discretion.

In many cases it does make better business sense. However, some on this thread are oversimplifying things. Job sharing is extremely limited in terms of what jobs it is appropriate for. Telecommuting is becoming more popular, but so is the concept of work teams. Work teams allow employees greater autonomy and opportunity for initiative, but they work better when all members are actually present. And all of this depends on the industry you work in, the type of organization you work in, and the position you fill. Additionally, the more you get paid for your job, the more available you are expected to be. The more valuable your time becomes, the less you can afford to be absent.

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......aaand what about the rest of my post?

Then why do people get more vacation time as they move up the ladder?

Obviously, Mike has never heard of "incentives"

Yep, at my latest engagement, there's nothing, NOTHING that I couldn't do just as well at home. We have a group of people working at computer desks in a boiler room and have communication/monitoring with Central Control via AIM. I have a 20 mile one way commute, so if I work 5 days a week that's 200 miles of gas to pay for...(my Escort gets 30+mpg).

The problem is that the bosses really don't know how to monitor their own product. Someone sitting at a desk and slaving away, they can understand, but actually having to judge someone based on their production is something they just can't fathom.

It's an incentive, but a double edged sword as well. Getting vacation time, and actually using it are two different things. Also, if your being paid a large salary, you can expect to take a laptop and phone with you on vacation and work at least part of that time.

I saw this with my father and am now seeing it again with my older brother. The higher you go, the more time you can expect to invest in your work.

I thought this:

...meant you were done with the thread. But, okay:

You seem to be arguing "See, if women wouldn't take so many bathroom breaks, they'd get paid just as much as men."

Granted, if you ran a major corporation, you'd treat everyone the same. But you don't run a corporation, so you're working within the status quo, with no interest in changing it.

Theorizing about women competing with men in sports is all very nice, but it's a sidebar.

And griping about bathroom breaks is a diversion.

You want women to contribute on the same level as men. Whether or not they get paid less - in society as it exists, not in the world you'd run if you ran the world - would seem to be of no interest to you.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Exactly. I was reading something the other day about a survey of sales reps across a particular industry. They measured success not by volume of sales, but by number of customers. So if they sold to 20 customers today, it was a better day than yesterday, when they only sold to 10. The fact that they might have sold something cheaper to the 20 customers at, say, $1,000 that day, and sold $2,000 to the 10 customers the day before eluded them.

Managers like to see people sitting at desks. It's a very difficult mindset to break.

As a magazine editor, I hated that mentality. I used to chase people out to get work done — because outside of story meetings and production flow stuff, everything else could often be done better away from the office. If my writers faced a nasty deadline, I'd event a fictional media event and send them home to write. They liked the freedom and were vastly more productive.

As for the women versus men productivity issue — with one exception the women were all better at making deadline and less likely to standing around BSing. I also made sure my people were paid equitably, same work, same pay, period.