Feminist complains about women getting workplace entitlements

[Tom Sawyer]

Commpanies always pull bullshit like this. There are more than a few out there who even go and match contributions into their employee's retirement accounts. That's just their way of saying that old people are useless and they need to go and fuck off.

Ageist assholes.

 

[Rhea]

I'm not seeing what would prevent a child-free woman from getting some eggs frozen, taking the $20K and then choosing to never use the eggs?

Unless the $20K is reserved to be paid out only to the storage and fertilization clinic, in which case this sounds like more of a program to help pay for egg harvesting, storage and IVF so that delay becomes an option for women who otherwise could not access it?

I didn't read the full article, but I assumed based on the quote in the original post that the $20K was to cover the costs of freezing the eggs. And it said "up to $20K", so it's possible that freezing the eggs costs more than that.

It's clearly a way to convince women to delay having children in order to keep them at work and this may be an attractive option for those women who want to have their career now and their children later and not worry as much about the potential negative effects of delaying. However, it also sends the message that women who want to have children when they're younger are less valuable to the company.

Oh, yeah, I see that now. So no employee is getting $20K. They are getting a freeze-n-store option. In case the only reason they were going to have kids right now is fear of egg degradation. And the company is saying, "if that's your fear, we're on your side." So, yeah, this seems like it'd be best if it were available for ALL employees (M/F). Because whatever work loss happens to young parents will happen to both. Unless you're biased and you want to suggest that you expect the women to be the only caregiver. In which case, yeah, you just put your foot in your mouth.

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People waiting to have kids until they are older are fucking nuts. Raising kids is a job for the young.

I'm in my late to mid-40s and my last kid is turning 18 this year. I see couples my age raising young kids and would want to shoot myself if I had young kids at my age. They are exhausting to raise.

Eh, we do okay. pays to stay active, though.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Oh, yeah, I see that now. So no employee is getting $20K. They are getting a freeze-n-store option. In case the only reason they were going to have kids right now is fear of egg degradation. And the company is saying, "if that's your fear, we're on your side." So, yeah, this seems like it'd be best if it were available for ALL employees (M/F). Because whatever work loss happens to young parents will happen to both.

This is an interesting point and I wonder if they are offering to have the eggs of the spouses of their male employees frozen at their cost. If not, then the assumption seems to be that the father will have no impact on his work performance when he and his spouse have a child now.

 

[ksen]

People waiting to have kids until they are older are fucking nuts. Raising kids is a job for the young.

I'm in my late to mid-40s and my last kid is turning 18 this year. I see couples my age raising young kids and would want to shoot myself if I had young kids at my age. They are exhausting to raise.

Eh, we do okay. pays to stay active, though.

I salute you!

 

[laughing dog]

This offered benefit is not an entitlement but compensation - these women are WORKING to get it.

 

[Shadowy Man]

People waiting to have kids until they are older are fucking nuts. Raising kids is a job for the young.

I'm in my late to mid-40s and my last kid is turning 18 this year. I see couples my age raising young kids and would want to shoot myself if I had young kids at my age. They are exhausting to raise.

It is definitely exhausting raising a kid in while 40-ish, but I don't regret all that I did in my 30s without a kid.

 

[ksen]

People waiting to have kids until they are older are fucking nuts. Raising kids is a job for the young.

I'm in my late to mid-40s and my last kid is turning 18 this year. I see couples my age raising young kids and would want to shoot myself if I had young kids at my age. They are exhausting to raise.

It is definitely exhausting raising a kid in while 40-ish, but I don't regret all that I did in my 30s without a kid.

We started when I was 23, she was 22. So we do have some regrets about never having a life outside of family while in our 20s and 30s. But we made the decision to start early so we'd have that time start before we got to our 50s and could still enjoy time alone together.

My hat is off to those that start later. You included! :hug:

 

[Shadowy Man]

It is definitely exhausting raising a kid in while 40-ish, but I don't regret all that I did in my 30s without a kid.

We started when I was 23, she was 22. So we do have some regrets about never having a life outside of family while in our 20s and 30s. But we made the decision to start early so we'd have that time start before we got to our 50s and could still enjoy time alone together.

My hat is off to those that start later. You included! :hug:

Well, I was in grad school until I was 29 and I didn't even get married until I was 36. There are definitely times when I do feel bad about how old I'll be at various stages of my child's life and wondering if I'll be physically up to doing certain activities when my child is physically able to do them (like the hiking and mountaineering I did in my 30s).

 

[Metaphor]

No, it doesn't. It just makes it more doable.

This is absurd. Were women not breeding during the about 100,000 years of human history where nobody had paid maternity leave? It's always been 'doable'.

I don't usually like stating things as absolute fact, but in this case I'm confident enough to do so. No woman in the history of the planet has ever had children just because their employes gives them maternity leave.

I never claimed they did. I said it incentivised it. Paid maternity leave isn't going to want to make someone have a baby when they were otherwise against it.

(Similarly, free egg-extraction and freezing isn't going to make someone have it done if they were otherwise against it).

Please, this policy clearly tries to do exactly that. The message is clear: "Either do this, or expect your career to stall out.";

So you're against the sentiment behind the egg-freezing offer, but not the egg-freezing offer itself?

The sentiment is "it's better for your career that you don't take a year off every few years to breed". Is that message morally wrong? Why?

it's intended to manipulate women into not having kids because greedy executives want to squeeze every bit of productivity out of their employees they can. And as any corporate white man knows, pregnancy makes women emotionally unstable, and having kids means they're dividing their loyalties between your bottom line and their offspring.

Having kids means the company is paying you while you produce nothing of value to the company. It's not about 'divided loyalties'. It's about everyone in the company paying. Except the senior executives, you can be assured they won't be paying, either financially or in increased workloads, so that having children becomes more 'doable' for some people.

 

[Metaphor]

This offered benefit is not an entitlement but compensation - these women are WORKING to get it.

It certainly does count as non-cash remuneration -- the companies in question were not mandated to provide it.

It's just an unfair one that discriminates against most of their employees.

 

[laughing dog]

Having kids means the company is paying you while you produce nothing of value to the company. It's not about 'divided loyalties'. It's about everyone in the company paying.

Typically, the compensation paid to one employee is not going to paid to another, so other employees are not paying for this. In addition, the company would clearly not pay women while they are on maternity leave if they did not believe that investment would pay off upon their return.

 

[Metaphor]

(Both options, of course, mean men, older women, and fertile women who wish to remain child-free will pay for the women who choose to take advantage of the benefit).

I'm not seeing what would prevent a child-free woman from getting some eggs frozen, taking the $20K and then choosing to never use the eggs?

Unless the $20K is reserved to be paid out only to the storage and fertilization clinic, in which case this sounds like more of a program to help pay for egg harvesting, storage and IVF so that delay becomes an option for women who otherwise could not access it?

That's correct.

(The article implies that the ongoing costs of storing the eggs -- about $500/year -- will also be covered by the companies).

I'm sorry I did not link the full article however if you copy a sentence and google it, it should return the original article.

 

[Metaphor]

Having kids means the company is paying you while you produce nothing of value to the company. It's not about 'divided loyalties'. It's about everyone in the company paying.

Typically, the compensation paid to one employee is not going to paid to another, so other employees are not paying for this. In addition, the company would clearly not pay women while they are on maternity leave if they did not believe that investment would pay off upon their return.

Any individual's compensation is not directly affected because a company has a generous parental leave policy, because the companies that tend to have such policies tend to be very large enterprises with high profits and the ability to absorb it. However, that does not mean others are not paying. Presumably, the person on parental leave was doing productive work for the company when they were actually at work, so this work now has to be either done by the others in the company (with no extra compensation, since they're typically salaried individuals), or a person must be hired temporarily into the position (with the resultant salary and oncosts to the company).

It's worth noting that Facebook's and Apple's parental leave policies are not being criticised in this article (I don't know what the policies are, frankly), but this policy is in addition to whatever parental leave policies they already had.

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Oh, yeah, I see that now. So no employee is getting $20K. They are getting a freeze-n-store option. In case the only reason they were going to have kids right now is fear of egg degradation. And the company is saying, "if that's your fear, we're on your side." So, yeah, this seems like it'd be best if it were available for ALL employees (M/F). Because whatever work loss happens to young parents will happen to both.

This is an interesting point and I wonder if they are offering to have the eggs of the spouses of their male employees frozen at their cost. If not, then the assumption seems to be that the father will have no impact on his work performance when he and his spouse have a child now.

They're not making that same offer (which makes the offer sexist, heterosexist, and ageist).

 

[Metaphor]

Besides, in many cases its far better for a company to pay for and deal with maternity leave than it is to fire the employee and train up a new employee (even ignoring the horrible effects doing that as a matter of policy would have on PR)

Typically, they have to train up a new employee anyway -- someone has to do the work that the person was doing before they went on leave. But even if the work can be farmed out to others already in the organisation, then someone's paying the cost. Either the organisation (if the farmed out work is to waged individuals who spend longer hours at work) or the salaried individuals (who do not get compensated on an hourly basis).

Why shouldn't corporations be expected to fulfill social obligations that are perfectly within their means?

But you've contradicted yourself: a social obligation is a social (ie the government, which means the public) obligation, not a corporate one.

If we think society is obliged to provide for people to breed, then society is obliged to provide it.

Also, do you think Apple is providing this benefit to the people assembling its products in China? I can assure you they are not. So, leaving it to employers means the already-privileged (people working at a Fortune 500 company with already-handsome working condiitions) get even more privileged, whilst others get something substandard or nothing at all. (Do you think Johnny Lunchpail's lawn-mowing small business, or Sally Housecoat's fish and chip shop, could pay 4 months of paid parental leave without suffering serious hardship? Is there any reason at all they should pay?)

 

[laughing dog]

Typically, the compensation paid to one employee is not going to paid to another, so other employees are not paying for this. In addition, the company would clearly not pay women while they are on maternity leave if they did not believe that investment would pay off upon their return.

Any individual's compensation is not directly affected because a company has a generous parental leave policy, because the companies that tend to have such policies tend to be very large enterprises with high profits and the ability to absorb it. However, that does not mean others are not paying. Presumably, the person on parental leave was doing productive work for the company when they were actually at work, so this work now has to be either done by the others in the company (with no extra compensation, since they're typically salaried individuals), or a person must be hired temporarily into the position (with the resultant salary and oncosts to the company).

Well, any temp replacement is paying paid for the work, and clearly the firm thinks this investment adds value over time, otherwise the company would not offer the benefit.

 

[RavenSky]

If you're horrified by policies that give elite women at elite organisations free resources to incentivize delaying pregnancy, because they 'manipulate' women's bodies, you must be all the more horrified at maternity leave policies,

I am horrified by maternity leave policies, although not for the reasons you seem to. They should apply to both parents, not just one, so that we don't reinforce the cultural stereotype of woman being the only caregivers.

In most companies, the family leave policies do apply to both parents

 

[credoconsolans]

This doesn't particularly empower women at all; rather it sends very much the wrong message; "If you don't wait with having kids till later in life, then don't expect your career to take off with us." It may not be explicit, but it's certainly implied; all the denial in the world on the part of these companies won't change that. Plus, they couldn't possibly have picked a worse time to announce a policy like this. At a time when wealth inequality is at record highs, unemployment worldwide keeps rising, automation keeps making more and more jobs obsolete, they're essentially telling women that they should stop having babies so they can keep working nightmare hours for the big corporate overlords instead? It's like the executives behind this (and their supports) have lost all touch with reality.

Plus you know, it falls into a very conservative and traditional mindset of trying to control/manipulate women's bodies. You can pretend it's about giving them a choice, but when you elevate this to a policy instead of doing it in specific cases that are driven by the female employees themselves, you make it clear that it's not about choice at all.

Exactly the message I got right off the bat. It's pretty explicit to me.

"We are not going to change our workplace expectations or system or atmosphere to accommodate 50% of our workforce, we'd rather just pay off those who want to have children early to wait. It's cheaper since not all women are of childbearing age."



So much for employers changing their business model when women start to dominate the workforce.

 

[Metaphor]

This doesn't particularly empower women at all; rather it sends very much the wrong message; "If you don't wait with having kids till later in life, then don't expect your career to take off with us." It may not be explicit, but it's certainly implied; all the denial in the world on the part of these companies won't change that. Plus, they couldn't possibly have picked a worse time to announce a policy like this. At a time when wealth inequality is at record highs, unemployment worldwide keeps rising, automation keeps making more and more jobs obsolete, they're essentially telling women that they should stop having babies so they can keep working nightmare hours for the big corporate overlords instead? It's like the executives behind this (and their supports) have lost all touch with reality.

Plus you know, it falls into a very conservative and traditional mindset of trying to control/manipulate women's bodies. You can pretend it's about giving them a choice, but when you elevate this to a policy instead of doing it in specific cases that are driven by the female employees themselves, you make it clear that it's not about choice at all.

Exactly the message I got right off the bat. It's pretty explicit to me.

"We are not going to change our workplace expectations or system or atmosphere to accommodate 50% of our workforce, we'd rather just pay off those who want to have children early to wait. It's cheaper since not all women are of childbearing age."



So much for employers changing their business model when women start to dominate the workforce.

Women are nowhere near 50% (let alone 'over' 50%) of Facebook's or Apple's U.S. operations; more like a third.

But you're explicitly saying women need to be 'accommodated' in the workforce; that it is women who should be taking the time off to bear and raise children.

It's very simple, really. If you're taking time off - often up to a year (and sometimes up to 4 months of that paid) - from your job, you are costing your employer money.

Reproduction is a choice, is it not?

 

[laughing dog]

Exactly the message I got right off the bat. It's pretty explicit to me.

"We are not going to change our workplace expectations or system or atmosphere to accommodate 50% of our workforce, we'd rather just pay off those who want to have children early to wait. It's cheaper since not all women are of childbearing age."



So much for employers changing their business model when women start to dominate the workforce.

Women are nowhere near 50% (let alone 'over' 50%) of Facebook's or Apple's U.S. operations; more like a third.

But you're explicitly saying women need to be 'accommodated' in the workforce; that it is women who should be taking the time off to bear and raise children.

Physically bearing children is a physical cost.

It's very simple, really. If you're taking time off - often up to a year (and sometimes up to 4 months of that paid) - from your job, you are costing your employer money.

Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. And if the employer is willing to invest that money today, it must be in the expectation of a return in the future. Your argument seems to ignore these very basic economic elements.

Reproduction is a choice, is it not?

And that is relevant because....?


To some degree, the complaint about "commodization" of women is not very strong, since employers tend to "commodize" all of their employees, regardless of gender or reproductive status.

 

[Metaphor]

Perhaps, but then again, perhaps not. And if the employer is willing to invest that money today, it must be in the expectation of a return in the future. Your argument seems to ignore these very basic economic elements.

It's true that an employer who voluntarily institutes a paid parental leave policy must be doing it because they expect that having the policy means they'll come out ahead compared to not having it, but that doesn't mean that every person who takes advantage of the policy isn't costing the corporation, or other employees, or customers. Someone's paying the price.

To some degree, the complaint about "commodization" of women is not very strong, since employers tend to "commodize" all of their employees, regardless of gender or reproductive status.

That's absolutely true, but I see no shame in speaking plainly about it. "Commodification" is one of my trigger words; whenever I read about something being 'commodified' (and therefore the person doing the commodification being evil), it sets my teeth on edge. In particular, it gets used by some people (often feminists) when someone is doing something they don't like (e.g. being a sex worker or renting their womb out as a surrogate). It's as if they think that by saying something has been commodified, there's nothing further to say, that it is absolutely unacceptable.

Instead, it's just a reality of every wage and salary earner and anyone who is self employed and indeed anyone who exchanges something they have for something else.