Positive Discrimination

A few years ago, an “Employee Forum” was created to discuss Women’s issues at work. If there are issues like wage inequality, then I’m all for it, but I just didn’t understand why we formed this. I hadn’t heard any complaints, but I suppose they aren’t gonna complain to me. If anything, I think women are treated better at work.

I was thinking about this scenario recently which I’ve known to happen several times now. A woman is about to have a child, so they manage to take a full year off. 9 months for the actual maternity leave as a starting point. Apparently those 9 months accrue holiday allowance as if you were actually working, and any bank holidays during this time are also added to your holiday allowance too. So it ends up accumulating to around 4 weeks annual leave. Then they ask for 2 months unpaid leave and get it. May as well round it up to the nearest year, right?

Instead of worrying about returning to work and people being promoted ahead of them, they somehow manage to also pre-arrange a promotion, so they actually jump ahead of their team. They have 1 year less experience than their team, aren’t aware of things that happened at work in that year, yet get promoted ahead of them. Sometimes even going part-time too.

I’m not just saying this is unfair to men. There’s sometimes loads of women in their team, and yet they just have to work that year as normal, and might actually be denied a promotion because of this person that will return in the promoted role. It’s like we overcompensate because we don’t want to be accused of discrimination.

Now men cannot get pregnant, but what happens if they want a year off? One man wanted to see his family that lives in Australia, but he decided it would be nice to live with them for a year. He asks for a “Sabbatical” but gets denied. He is told that there will be positions available in his role in a year’s time, so he can just re-apply for his job. So as planned, he quits and goes to Australia. After a year, he returns to England, he comes in for the interview and gets rejected!

I don’t see how that is fair. He wanted 100% unpaid leave for a year, then to come back to his standard job. Yet, women get various pay for their time away: some full pay, half pay, and often a promotion with some scope for working less hours. Then they are taking time out of work to discuss “issues” in this Employee Forum.

I think both these reasons are fundamentally the same reason – you want time away for “family” and it’s much better for your mental health not to have to think about work. I’m not sure if it is the right thing to randomly decide these things, or seemingly decide based on gender.