akuma587 said:
This is a pretty good list. I'll go ahead and comment that typically women need/deserve more assistance because if they have kids and don't have a husband their lives can be extremely difficult, and their kids can suffer because of it. Women are typically paid less than men too. And yes, someone should stop having kids because they can't afford it, I agree. But that doesn't make it fair to the kids to let them suffer for their parent's mistake. And believe me, the poorer people are, the more likely they are to become criminals. Poverty and crime go hand and hand. And nobody wins in society, rich or poor, the more criminals there are.
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That was just a list of people who shouldn't get assostance.
Single people with kids getting more is a different story. The wage disparity is real, but it's narrowed a lot. My research in my first business class was about that, I tried so hard to find evidence of discrimination on a large scale. What I ended up finding was a natural/voluntary disparity. America's largest employers as well as professional companies (law, accounting, medical firms) are very careful with base pay. Base wage (time at job salary) is pretty close to 47/53 in non-contruction (I forgot the exact number, but I could dig it up if you want me to); of course it still has way to go (That number means are woman still only making 94 cents on the dollar in hourly/salaried wages).
Days missed from work for maternity or child ilness shouldn't affect whether or not you keep a job, but why should bonuses, commissions, and perfomance raises not affect it i.e. John works 50 weeks does 500k in sales and Susan who took maternity leave work 40 weeks and did 380k (losing 20k off the ratio, because some her regular clients were moved to other agents). John gets his bonus on 500k, Susan on 380k. Should the company be forced to pay the difference? Should they not pay the agents who picked up her clients while she was gone? It's a difficult question, and nobody is really right or wrong; you have to make a value judgement.
If you mean income disparity among different positions it can get even more difficult to answer those questions (the modern day rendition of the glass ceiling). Why should a company be forced to promote the single parent who needs off at x time when a person with out kids or a two-parent worker can work whenever? Again, who should pay the tab?
I won't go into the more contraversial debates on risk taking or agressiveness because I don't have any empirical evidence handy (nor do I really buy into it), except an antecdote. I got promoted mostly because I asked (my female boss). Every raise I've gotten since I stopped working for big companies, I had to ask for. My mother, single mother when I was a kid, didn't want to "stir the pot" if you will, so she barely got any raises in the 10 years she worked at her job while I was a teen. Also, she would never think of quitting to find another job. It's not because she was a woman, it was because she was a scared single parent. No one is going to fire you for asking for a raise; and if they did, even in backwards Florida, you'd be eligible for unemployment. Should the government really legislate for people with irrational fear?
Still even on the base question, how do you enforce it?
Life sucks sometimes but there are solutions.
Daycare for single parents, not necessarily free but better monitored and 24 hours - safe licensed daycare is expensive as hell. Talking openly about the real reasons about the disparity might wake some people up, instead of the usual polarized discussion everyone in America loves to have on every issue. Better enforcement of child support. Government assistance when one parent is dead. These would help disparity by allowing women to work equally.
Now, before Mafoo says that this isn't society's problem, it is. We as a society have made it okay for couples to have sex out of wedlock. Society encourages children get out on their own as young as possible, breaking down the family to the nuclear family; this was done through government policy with lending and homeownership legislation back in the early 1900's. Easy credit was the pro business thing to do in 20061926.
Lastly, we as a society need kids to turn out okay. Whether or not the parents are right or wrong, it's not the child's fault.
I would cite regulation, but I know you will simply ignore it.
