The school system here encourages a parent to stay at home. there are plenty of stay at home dads at the playgroups and garderie for our kids.

So, you're saying that the time off for maternity leaves, taking care of children is equal to holiday?

Aren't these activities also supposed to be counted as learning and gathering another type of skills and experiences?

plenty yes but nowhere near equal. that's what this thread is about after all.

It will never be equal because so many moms WANT to stay home and exercise their choice to do so. You can't force them to go to work. Men are far less likely to have a choice than women are in that regard.


If my wife decided to go to work tomorrow and her income would be the same as mine I would be a stay at home dad in a heartbeat. No second thoughts, no hesitation. Work sucks.

I agree, but there is nothing stopping it being equal, which is the argument being made - there is nothing legally within switzerland (or many countries) that means fathers cannot bring up the children while mothers work. If your saying it "should" be equal, then I think that if you take 100% of women at a playschool and ask them whether they want to be full time workers and let the father be the full time carer, less than 50% would say they would like to swap their current role.

I wonder whether anyone has considered asking the men at work whether they would like to swap their roles and be full time carers while the mother worked full time ? It would be an interesting survey, i really dont know what the outcome would be.

I'm not sure my bladder could cope with that many cups of tea in a day.

I'm not trying to be flippant here, but you're joking, right?



and in no way at all, btw, did I ever suggest that raising children was like a holiday. but it also offers absolutely zero skills and experiences that have anything at all to do with what I do professionally.

What if I told you that Switzerland is a democracy and women are for some reason allowed to participate in it. There is not some evil power designing the school system keeping women at home - the Swiss population thinks it's the way it should be. And again - in my experience is it especially the Swiss women who have a very strong opinion that a kid "needs a mother" and could not possibly go to some care facility during working hours.

I cannot see how you guys can deduct a women rights issue from that - there is no legal discrimination, just a lot of really conservative people who set up their society in conservative ways. Thats also why stay at home dads are very few - there is no law against it, it is just not accepted in Swiss culture.

It's not my personal opinion at all and I think it would be great if Switzerland would have a look how it could work differently, say for example in Scandinavia... but that's not a topic for international womens day but affects men just as much.

That's right, it doesn't add up to the professional skills (unless the professions are somewhat related to the childcare activities). But neither the skills are counted anywhere else.

If your reasoning becomes the ground for gender pay gap, there's no way women would ever compete with men at the workplace.

there you go.

Qed!

17th march St Patrick day ,18th and 19th headache day

Well here we will celebrate in a different kind of way. During the 100 years of prohibition, there were many famous women absinthe distillers in the Val-de-Travers. Nowadays, since the re-legalisation 10 years ago, we still have a few, even if in the minority.

So why not come and meet our women absinthe distillers- talk to them, hear about the women distillers of the past- and taste their wonderful absinthes- as well as visit our amazing Absinthe Museum- La Maison de l'Absinthe, a really imaginative and modern Museum in the 17C building that used to house the local Court- where the illegal distillers/bootleggers used to be judged and sentenced.

In Môtiers, Neuchâtel- just 2 mins walk from the railway station- withe the wonderful restaurant 'Auberge des Six Communes' in the old medieval Town Hall. I'll be there and happy to welcome you and give you a private visit- with 90 quality local absinthe, gadgets and other absinthe related produce on sale.

But maybe we should think about rewarding people for productivity rather than simply "time spent" on the job...

http://fortune.com/2015/03/03/female...-to-work-with/

Now THAT is a celebration! Bravo!

There's a little (far) more to it than that. Tiny, barely relevant details, like having been out of the work force for a decade.

I am glad I started this post (I only wish I could have kept more up-to-date with it). It shows that this is still a hotly debated topic and rightly so. I learned something from these posts. I even changed my mind about a couple of things along the way. But it also cemented for me the sad fact that some people deny that there is a gender imbalance in our society and others recognise it but aren't willing to give anything up to change it.

The screening of 'Miss Representation' takes places at Impact Hub Zurich tonight (doors open 18.30) and it will be followed by a panel discussion with international speakers. The details are in the link below. You are all most welcome to attend and carry on the discussion. And if you do show up please come and say 'hi'

http://www.missrepresentation-zh.eventbrite.com

assuming 2 people are equally bright and focused on their job while they are working, someone who works 10 hours a day instead of 8 is going to be 2 hours more productive every day. in order to somehow arrive at a conclusion that the person working 8 hours a day would ever be equally as productive as their peer, you have to assume that the person is 20% brighter and more efficient than their peer. I can't speak for others, but I don't come across very many people who are 20% smarter than everyone else around them.

sure, a person can skate by on potential and aptitude early on in their career, but a professional career is no different than professional sports - the higher up you go, the more you find that everybody was top of their class and everybody is smarter than hell. in other words, there's no such thing as being "more productive" or "more talented", there is only effort and sacrifice. this is not to say, of course, that every economy should not provide career opportunities for people across all spectrums of ability, ambition, etc., and that every economy should not ensure a liveable income for its participants. but, when people talk about "pay gap", etc., they are not talking about everyday middle-class jobs or liveable incomes, they are talking about making the big bucks.

The Swiss are rather reserved and don't like to be too showy.

But certainly the achievements of Swiss women are acknowledged; what about that bird who invented the bicycle helmet who's on the the 50 franc note?

I've seen orders of magnitude difference in performance between people who have ostensibly rated (by academic achievement and apparent past performance) the same. In big companies you still see this; small companies, by natural selection, will gravitate to the higher performers (or go bust). In the small companies, you'll be compensated for performance either by salary increases and asset options or just by simply still having a job...