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Today (a few days ago) from the NYT's Upshot column: When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire.

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women -- even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences.

They can end up discouraging employers from hiring women in the first place, because they fear women will leave for long periods or use expensive benefits. "For employers, it becomes much easier to justify discrimination," said Sarah Jane Glynn, director of women's economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

It goes on to rattle off some supporting statistics: In the wake of strong maternity-leave protections, women are more likely to remain employed after having a child, but less likely to be hired or promoted (even if not planning on having

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For reasons which may later become clear, I've written two subtly different versions of this post, for different audiences. Poets, dreamers, and readers who don't particularly care to erect walls between fantasy and reality, click here. Readers who don't have time for my mind games and just want to read a normal Bucket o' Links, click here.

Jeff Kaufman has an announcement on their blog, that I'd like to get behind here:

Clarifications, details(, and the real content of this post, let's be honest...):

(1) This is not a thing I feel very strongly about. (Kind of like vegetarianism!) If it makes your life harder to remember to (or you're in a social setting where it would be strange to) not use gendered pronouns, by all means do the easier thing.^[1] But if it's easier for you to not have to remember to gender pronouns, or which way the gender goes, or whatever, then I'm not so attached to he/him/his to insist that you need to use those instead of they/them/their. I think I'd object to being referred to with female pronouns, though, so don't do that, please. (I'd probably be confused the first time it happens, but I've come around to believing that I'd probably be 100% behind this if it started happening in settings that didn't confuse everyone in a way that made my