Thanks to everybody for allowing me to have the conversation I wanted to have. It's really good to see that we can actually talk about stuff with getting silly for 5 minutes.

So it seems that we're saying that women should be able to choose the point at which they have kids, and yet I think we'd all agree that medically speaking there is a preferable window for this. On that basis, is there something we could be doing as a society to support the making of these decisions and the open discussion of the issues surrounding them?

Picking up on your point saying women should be able to chose when to have kids... I think the choice for a lot of women is career or family. You can't really do both without something giving somewhere. I've seen a VP where I work take a break to have a baby later in her life (I'd say early 40s), she came back for a bit after maternity leave and now she doesn't have a job.

Whether we like it or not in the majority of cases child care is down to the woman. I know a couple of men that have stayed at home to look after the kids but it's not the norm. Yes maybe in years to come we will see the responsibility being split but it's not going to happen over night. My company has recently started offering longer maternity leave. How many other companies do that? I doubt there are many.

But in all honesty, how indispensable do you have to be in order to be able to leave for an extended period of time and to then have them want you to return?

Or to put it another way, how much duplication of your job role does there need to be?

Ultimately, if the work you do is important and there is nobody else that could do it for an extended period, you probably shouldn't leave. If somebody else can cover you for an extended period whilst you have m/p leave then they don't really need you to work there. No?

That is the problem with society and capitalism. You can't take a break and come back after a couple of years, because as you say, if you were indispensable, you couldn't take the time off and if they could find a replacement, then you are no longer needed.

Society needs to change to allow for long periods of absence, to make use of the skills of people, when they are available.

But in order to do that, you need to come up with another model for society than capitalism (or even communism for that matter). I don't have the answer, but I can see the problems we have with society.

Well obviously if nobody does your job while you're away and the company is still there afterwards then you're functionally redundant, yes. Generally though with maternity leave someone else is doing the job in the meantime. That person may not be as good at it as you or many not want to continue doing the job when you get back. There's no actual basis for the idea that going on maternity leave should be the equivalent of making yourself redundant.

Jon

Well yeah, there is.

If my absence for an extended period i.e. longer than a fortnight IMO causes no loss of revenue/efficiency/productivity with minimal additional work from other people then my position is redundant in the truest sense of the word.

What would make more sense is for new parents to be able to continue to work around their schedules is a manner that is already familiar to self-employed people the world over. It is our reverence for offices, set working hours and the prospect of a "secure job" that is the issue here.

If your lack of productive utility is only discovered in your extended absence, then it is your boss who is redundant.

Most bosses ARE wholly unnecessary. But that's another thread and I suspect nobody else would read it.

We have five line managers in an office of about twenty other people... And two others in an office of six!

We have that thread all the time. It usually contains lots of "so called" redundant uses of the same/identical/unchanged word and a great deal of ..... pointless .... punctuation. For some reason.


Boobs are greatly preferable.

Then it seems my brief moment of debate in my native tongue is over, back to work.

Bring on the boobs...

Unless I've missunderstood the debate there's a lot of 'one or the other' whereas my wife went to University AND had two children before her 28th birthday.

It makes me laugh how loads of people that are not young females in procreating age discuss issues that don't touch them personally.
I just turned 28. No kids, neither have any of my friends below 30 to be fair (except the ones that stayed in my hometown in the sticks). However I have worked two of the world leading companies in my field and manage 500,000 GBP of budget for an iconic project worth over 2 billion.
I know which one I'd pick every single time

So only women aged 16-30 are allowed to discuss a subject if it relates to childbirth?


Which suits you and is fine, but it doesn't mean that having children early is an invalid choice. It really depends on how each individual measures 'success'

Imagine how you'd feel if all you ever *really* wanted to be was a mother, you weren't really interested in a career other than raising your own children but you bowed to pressure from society and 'feminist career counsellors' to go to university, have a career and be successful before you settled down because "there's plenty of time".

Imagine how you would then feel at the age of 30 when your Doctor told you that you were unable to have children now, perhaps if you'd started earlier you'd be eligible for fertility assistance or medical intervention, but at the ripe old age of 30 there was nothing currently to be done. Imagine it breaking up a 13 year relationship because of the strain on both people.

You probably can't imagine that because it's not what you want from life, but surely you can see that for someone who spent their entire life looking forward to having children of their own, it's devastating. Made all the worse when you meet "The One" and have to tell that person that you won't be able to have children with them. Then imagine that door shutting a bit more firmly as you discover at the age of 35 that you aren't eligible for adoption.

You may not care to be a mother, but there are women who would really have benefited from a bit more understanding from 'careers counsellors' and just this kind of advice and assistance from family and friends, women who might have read an article like the one under discussion and talked it over seriously with their partner of 13 years a bit sooner and taken the scary step of trying to start a family young, picking up a career later in life.

Before you respond from your own POV again, please bear in mind that I am one of those women, I regret not trying for children earlier and although I am now resigned to the fact that I will never have my own family, it doesn't *in any way* lessen the feelings I have about the subject. Since I am not trying to get you to change your mind about your own situation, I don't need you to come back and justify anything to me. I'm very glad that you are living the life you love and that you don't feel the need to have children, that's great, for you. I still feel that Kirstie's article and the points she raises about young women are valid and should be discussed in homes up and down the country, all over the world.

No need to lock the thread, I'm done.

I also left it too late. Luckily for my partner, she had children early. Now she is too old for more (well technically not, but it would be dangerous), so I had the snip. That also doesn't stop me thinking what could have been, had I met her earlier...