bill maher's argument was that women are paid less because women have children. 'they might take a year off to have a child'. duh. first of all, how many women take a year off to have a child? i'm sure some women do, but i have never known one. i've worked for many companies in my life, and the maternity leave always averaged out to something like disability leave for 4 weeks prior to due date (and the baby seems to always comes before the 4 weeks is up) and then 4 weeks after the baby is born, or 6 weeks if you had a c-section. in '93, we got the FMLA (family medical leave act). so now even fathers can take off 12 weeks after a birth (or adoption, or illness). of course that's only guaranteed unpaid leave and i'm not sure how many people can really afford to take twelve weeks off anyway. some people aren't covered by the FMLA because either their company isn't large enough, or they haven't worked there long enough. ok, i'm going off on a tangent about the FMLA. point was that some women are now allowed to take 12 weeks off instead of the crap 4 weeks i was mentioning before. all i know is that i've never worked anywhere where a woman was allowed to take a year off to have a child, nor have i ever known a woman that's done so.

one of my rebuttals to this argument is - what about the women who never have children? i worked for my last employer for a little over three years. i never took any time off to have a kid. i know i was being paid less than the men who did the same job as me, though. so what's the story on that? my work was less valuable because i might have taken some time off to have a kid? so people say "companies aren't people. they're not loyal. they don't 'love' you." this is why they enforce a pay gap because even if i never take time off to have a kid, some other woman might, so they have to take that into account. it still seems like a load a crap to me. what if i worked there for 15 years and what if i really did take a year off to have a kid? wouldn't my 14 years worth of work for that entity be more valuable than say, a guy who has been doing the same for only 8 years? apparently not, because i'm sure he'd still make more than me.

one thing bill maher did agree to was that due to our patriarchal society, it is often much harder for a female to 'move up the ladder' than it is for a man. i hate paraphrasing, but there's no transcript yet. basically he agreed that the woman has to be nearly twice as good as the man to even get noticed. what rubbish.

the way the whole corporate world works, or even truer really - the way the world in general works, is such a load a crap, is it not? last week, there was a thing in the news about how there was a big ruckus over who won the state academic decathlon. apparently someone's test didn't even get scored (it was 'lost'), and there were accusations of incorrect grading from the other team. of course this whole thing got dragged into court. at one point, a judge ordered both teams to just retake the test. that seems pretty fair, right? well, that was a problem because of a bunch of other crap with the state & national organizations, so then another judge grants an injunction - no retest. these kids still didn't know what the courts were going to do, so they ended up flying all the way out for the national competition only to arrive and hear that the restraining order held, so they got on the plane and came back home. they talked to a couple of these kids on the news and they were saying things like "this just shows me that being right doesn't always matter" and "i thought they would decide this fairly, but i guess not." the news guy was all "these kids learned an important life lesson today, a little too early in their lives." yeah! they learned that people suck, and that people lie and cheat and steal, and that doing the right thing won't benefit you, and that doing a good job won't get you anywhere - you've got to kiss ass or trample someone else to get there.

i was going to write about some other stuff, too, but then i got all bitter and just started ranting. oh well. does the world ever make sense?

random movie quote: (ok, it's not really random and i may have already used it in here before, but it fits, so blah.)

"janie's a pretty typical teenager: angry, insecure, confused. i wish i could tell her that's all going to pass ... but i don't want to lie to her."