Last year, I kept hearing a number of complaints about American laws. They came from my boss at the time. He was from Norway. Being a European, he knew a great deal about the differences between those questions and policies you can implement in a European business and those you can do here. You can sum up the difference thusly: In Europe you can ask people a million questions before they're hired, but once they're on board, it's hard to fire them. In America you can't ask them much, but it's a bit easier to get rid of them.
One of the things he said he regularly asked women in Europe was whether or not they planned to get married or have a baby in the next three years or so. In the US, you can basically be impaled on a stake for inquiries of this sort. But the implications of the questions are fairly obvious from the perspective of an employer. Women who get married generally have their priorities change. Women who get pregnant are not generally as productive on the job, and need extended periods of time off to have the child.
The problem with the Equal Rights Amendment, which demands equal pay for equal work for females and males, fails to account for this fundamental inequality which is the logical consequence of being female. Women get married and have babies, and these things change their lives more than they change the lives of the men involved in the same process, from an employer's point of view.
The salaries women get in smaller businesses are more likely to be depressed as compared to their male counterparts where duplicate skills are not so readily available. I read the failure of the ERA quite simply as a recognition that businesses have to deal with realities not expressed or accounted for in its simple language.
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