You are entirely correct.
I have worked since I was 16 & I still work doing bookkeeping for 2 clients at age 78.
Not only do the rest of the co-workers have to fill in the slack—MANY of those co-workers do not have any kids & never did or will.
This places the burden of discrimination into the picture. One employee-—able & willing to keep having kids gets preferential treatment & their ‘job’ is held open for them for a number of weeks. The rest of the staff has to fill in the gap.
Perhaps, as an employer, I can find that I can run the office/business with fewer people all along ???
Then, after the kids come along, those employees get to take time off for doctor’s appointments, etc. They might get docked the pay, but that doesn’t change the work burden or the time frames in getting that work done one little bit.
I worked many a job where the daily work was just that——daily. It had to be cleaned up at the end of each day because a new load of paperwork was coming in the next morning. When someone was missing, the rest of us had to squeeze in that person’s work along with our own duties & workload.
Giving ANY kind of preferential treatment to a woman who chooses to have kids when they have a job they want ‘held’ for them is just plain wrong.
Either have the job or have the kids. IF you have to lose a job to have your kid——so be it. Otherwise. these women are getting the best of both of their worlds——while many of us never even had kids.
As you can tell, this has been a burr under my saddle for a very long time.
I’ve got kids and I completely agree with you. I quit work at the time we started our family. I reasoned that I could either be an engineer or I could be a mother of young children but I could not do both at the same time and do either one well.