Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Unless I am mistaken, both the NY Times and the WaPo are owned and run by the same people. Well, the following example below is exactly what peels my flesh about the hypocrisy of not only today’s liberals/leftists/feminists, but of the MSM. Compare and contrast what is said in the video, by a career woman/mother/feminist, and by the article … and then you tell me I am supposed to give a damn what these people say about government, healthcare, war, or anything else above where is the best place to get pizza … and even that I wouldn’t trust them with.

And that dumb shit Diddy in his last dumb-assed video wanted to know, “Would you leave your kids with her (Palin)?”

Hey, Diddy, you shit-head, I’d leave my kids with Sarah in a heartbeat … which is why I trust her to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office … As to your thug brother inside that same question … Nope.

Exactly what disqualifies Sarah Palin in the eyes of this country’s feminists? It is NOT her 5 kids … not the ’special needs’ baby … not the 17 yr. old daughter with a baby on the way and no ring on her finger. No, what disqualifies Gov. Palin with these people … these fork-tongued, two-faced swamp rats is the fact she has done it all and gotten so far without their help or their blessing. that she won’t be ‘force-fed’ their ideology or politics. That she won’t be subservient to them, or anyone else. That she thinks outside their uterus …

Wage Gaps for Women Frustrating Germany

By SARAH PLASS - (NYTimes)

FRANKFURT — Maria Schaad, an ambitious 41-year-old businesswoman, considers herself lucky. After the birth of each of her sons, now 7 and 3, her employer, a major pharmaceutical company, allowed her to work flexible, reduced hours — a perk that is far from a given in Germany.

But her luck extended only so far: though Ms. Schaad had once set her sights on a position in management, her career stagnated after she started a family, she said, even though she had earned an M.B.A. after she became a mother.

“At some point, women have to make a decision,” she said matter-of-factly. “Having children means you have to make compromises” at work.

Millions of working mothers — and sometimes fathers — have to make often difficult trade-offs when it comes to work and family, but labor experts say the calculus is especially harsh in Germany, a country that despite having a woman chancellor and sitting at the center of supposedly liberal Europe, has one of the widest gender wage gaps on the Continent.

It is just one of the disparities between working men and women, especially mothers, that government and union leaders say is creating a drag on female participation in the work force and, consequently, on economic growth, at a time when Germany may be teetering on the edge of recession. And they point to a range of societal and governmental barriers that are hindering change.

Ingrid Sehrbrock, deputy chairwoman of the German Federation of Trade Unions, calls German pay inequity a “scandal.” Europe’s commissioner for employment and social affairs, Vladimir Spidla, recently called on German employers “to really apply the principle of equal pay for equal work.”

A clutch of new data suggests that Germany is going in the opposite direction. While the wage gap between women and men is narrowing across the European Union and in the United States, it is stagnant in Germany.

Since 2000, German working women on average have gone from earning 26 percent less than men to making 24 percent less than men in 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, according to data provided by the government statistics bureau, Destatis.

It is one of the largest gender gaps in the European Union. Only Cyprus, Estonia and Slovakia have equal or greater gaps, according to a study by the European statistics service, Eurostat.

Across the Continent, women on average made 15.9 percent less than men in 2007. That gap has narrowed each year since 2001, when women made 20.4 percent less than men, according to a report released last week by the European Union foundation that has studied the trend for years.

Comparing statistics with those of the United States can be difficult, since Europeans tend to count part-time and full-time workers, while the United States statistics most closely watched count only full-time workers. Women are more likely to work part time, which depresses their average wage and increases the gender gap when both full- and part-time workers are considered.

Still, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday that in 2007 American women working full time made 22 percent less than men working full time. It is the closest American women have ever come to income parity, a percentage point closer than in 2006. Since 2001, the number has bounced between 23 percent and 24.5 percent.

There are many reasons that Germany has continually been in the European cellar. Outright gender discrimination is one, researchers say. Maternity leave is another: men get promoted while their female colleagues take time off to have children.

“The dilemma is that while 50 percent of the junior employees are female, they pretty much disappear on their way to middle management,” said Heiner Thorborg, a human resources consultant in Frankfurt and a vocal critic of gender inequality. The income gap is smaller for younger women who have not had children. It is greatest in western Germany, largely because the average hourly wage for men in this part of the country is almost 50 percent more than for men in the former East Germany.

Some human resources experts even point to less aggressive salary negotiations by women. (Coaching programs aimed at women have mushroomed over the last decade.)

But there are also societal and policy pressures. For example, mothers who work are sometimes derided as Rabenmutter, or “raven mothers.” The phrase — based on the erroneous belief that ravens fly away, leaving their nests behind — refers to women who pursue careers instead of being homemakers. It is more common in the west than in the east of the country.

On the policy front, Germany has some of Europe’s least generous supports for working parents. Just 9 percent of children age 3 or younger have access to day care, compared with an average of 23 percent in advanced countries. In northern European countries, the numbers are even higher: 40 to 60 percent.

East Germany still benefits from a wider network of child care operations — a legacy of the Communist era, when female participation in the work force was among the highest in the world and day care was vital.

The minister for family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen, recently introduced a plan to help finance private child care and increase the availability of kindergarten spots. The Parliament is expected to approve it by the end of the year.

Officials in Berlin have also tried to make having children more attractive. In 2007, the government introduced Elterngeld, or parents’ money, a benefit intended to encourage fathers and mothers to take time off after the birth of a child. Almost 20 percent of new fathers have applied for the benefit so far this year.

Meanwhile, some 60 percent of married couples with children younger than 3 follow the same pattern: fathers keep working full time, while mothers stay at home.

The difficulty for many women in working and rearing children is partly responsible for Germany having one of Europe’s lowest fertility rates: 1.37 children per woman, researchers say. It does not help that women in child-bearing years are still often asked in job interviews if they plan to have children — a question that is against the law.

Silke Strauss said she could not have attained her present position had she decided to have children. She was just named managing partner of a management consulting firm, and is the only female partner among eight men. “It would simply not work with children, not with the amount of flexibility that is expected,” said Ms. Strauss, 42.

For some women, time spent abroad makes a critical difference, showing them that life can be different.

Jutta Allmendinger, the first female president of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin and the mother of a 14-year-old son, earned a Ph.D. at Harvard. While there, Ms. Allmendinger said, she saw the “idols of her youth” — female colleagues who taught while being pregnant and went back to work soon after giving birth, while still nursing their children.

Back in Germany in 1993, she became pregnant while teaching sociology in Munich. Some of her colleagues, unable to imagine she would consider having a baby, thought she had just overeaten during the summer. “It was impossible for some people that women in certain positions would actually have children,” said Ms. Allmendinger, 51, laughing.

Those lucky enough to find a kindergarten or nursery school face yet another obstacle: many end the day at 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. — not very convenient for working mothers. That is one reason every third woman in Germany with a job works part time, the ultimate career killer, in the view of many human resources experts. Among Europeans, only women in the Netherlands have a higher share of part-time work.

About 61.4 percent of American working women worked full time and year-round in 2007, a record high — up from 60.6 percent in 2006, according to the census.

In a just-completed study, Ms. Allmendinger found that young women — and their male peers — want both a career and children.

Ms. Schaad, the pharmaceutical company employee, said those young women had better hurry. In business, she said, “Realistically, a woman who has not made it by 40 has no chance to make it at all.”

Me: Pass the damn Tylenol …