Looking for a Perl development position in London

[Philip Potter]

On 4 February 2010 16:29, Raphael Mankin <raph at mankin.org.uk> wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 15:48 +0000, Philip Potter wrote:
>> On 4 February 2010 14:48, Raphael Mankin <raph at mankin.org.uk> wrote:
>> > On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 13:31 +0000, Bob MacCallum wrote:
>> >> Under the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act it's unlawful for an employer to
>> >> discriminate against you because you are married.  This means that they
>> >> cannot ask you about this during interviews, etc.
>> >
>> > That may well be so but the fact remains that many employers will
>> > quietly discard the applications of women of child-bearing  age. They
>> > are just too expensive to employ. What with advertising and recruitment
>> > costs, maternity leave and all the rest, small firms e.g. solicitors and
>> > GP surgeries and so on will quietly overlook such applicants.
>>
>> I'd like to see if the "more expensive" claim here could be backed up
>> by data. How much more expensive are they? How do you know? In
>> particular, given that you don't know if/when said candidate may fall
>> pregnant, the expected cost is far less bad than the worst case cost.
>
> It's 9 months of full salary more expensive to hire a woman who gets
> pregnant, takes her full maternity leave and then decides not to return
> to work. Adding on to this  advertising, time to review CVs, time to
> interview and so on, the cost of recruitment can itself run into
> thousands.
>
> I know because, in spite of not myself being a woman, I have friends who
> have been bitten by this problem.
>
> The situation is exacerbated by women who take on a job with the full
> intention of getting pregnant as soon as possible. There do not have to
> be many of them for it to be a serious problem for employers.

Yes, but none of that is data. Not every woman of childbearing age
will get pregnant during the time they are working for you, and women
get paid less on average than men. It may be the case that having to
pay women less money outweighs the possibility that some of them may
get pregnant. I don't know. What I want to see is some real data
showing what the difference in cost is to hire a woman of childbearing
age who may or may not have any plans for getting pregnant, compared
to hiring a woman who one knows for sure won't get pregnant. Without
that data, you cannot make a proper informed decision, just an
ill-informed prejudice.

Phil