On 4 February 2010 16:29, Raphael Mankin <r...@mankin.org.uk> wrote: > On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 15:48 +0000, Philip Potter wrote: >> On 4 February 2010 14:48, Raphael Mankin <r...@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