From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 20 2002 - 21:35:24 MDT
>Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com) wrote on Sun
May 19 2002 - 00:46:28 MDT
Men are paid more on average because of the long years
a woman's place was only seen as in the home, because
of lingering prejudice and because of such notions
that she "probably has a man to help take care of her"
or "is liable to find one and disappear to make
babies". >
Or how about "when her husband has to move to stay
with his career, she will probably quit and leave with
him." Or, "if she gets pregnant, there is a good
chance that she will take extended leave and, as
mandated under law in many jurisdictions, the company
cannot fire her and bring in a permanent employee to
replace her."
In the mid-'80's I spent $500 for a 20Meg Corvus drive
for my Amiga 1000. This was a major purchase for me
at the time, and necessary. The company that
supported it and the custom hardware/software
interface they had designed went out of business a few
years later due to the infant-care leave law. They
could not afford to hire someone part time to replace
the highly skilled woman who decided to take six
months off.
This did not impact me seriously by then, as the
hardware options had improved in the meantime, and my
ancient 50kg 1978 Corvus (still running) was a small
part of my storage. The company involved, however,
made good products and their loss was a blow to the
struggling Amiga community.
Where I work now, we have had several women leave to
go with their husbands who had critical positions and
were very hard to replace. A smaller, less
financially sound company could have been put out of
business more than once.
As to the other arguments, since I don't have time to
answer them just now individually, let me point out
that most women are infected with the set of memes
that convinced or allowed their ancestral mothers in
an unbroken chain of hundreds of generations to choose
having children, even though many - probably most - of
them knew that odds were that they would die of
child-bed fever, or other complications of pregnancy
or childbirth by the age of 30. A rational woman
would have chosen to remain a spinster. Men who
survived to adulthood in the same cultures typically
had a life expectancy of about 50. However, the
rational women did not pass on their memes - or not
nearly so well.
Any set of memes that is so overwhelmingly powerful
that it convinces people to throw away their lives is
not going to die quietly. I contend that "modern"
women today are still dominated by that suicidal meme
set, which includes of course, paramountly "the
wonders and joys of sacrificing ones self for ones
children," and implicitly a whole additional set of
supporting memes.
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