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Certain subsidies and tax breaks for married couples and families were enacted to encourage marriage and keep children from falling into poverty. But is this fair to people who aren’t married? Fewer U.S. households are headed by married couples every year. And all those single people aren’t happy about paying more and getting less.
Activists say that unmarried people are systematically discriminated against. They pay more for health and car insurance than married people do. They don’t get the same kind of tax breaks. Co-op boards, mortgage brokers, and landlords often pass them over. So do the employers with the power to promote them. “Single-ism—stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single—is largely unrecognized and unchallenged,” says activist Bella DePaulo, the author of Singled Out.
There are justifications for every one of these, but that doesn’t mean much to individuals who don’t like being lumped into a group. But the differences swing both ways, depending on a person’s circumstances. I personally know people who choose to cohabit instead of marrying because of economic reasons. Low income people can lose Medicaid and other benefits if they marry, and elderly widows can lose pensions by remarrying. And we’ve all heard stories of married women being passed over for promotions because they might get pregnant. So is there really any way to achieve equity between those who are married and those who aren’t? Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Alan Cleaver)
Got
a criminal history and can't get a job? That's discrimination, according
to Washington D.C. council member and ex-Mayor Marion Barry (he would
say that now, wouldn't he?):
“The idea of the criminal justice system is, they send you to jail for rehabilitation and punishment, and once you have served your time, it seems to me, your debt has been paid to society,” said Barry, who has had several run-ins with the law, including a 1990 conviction for misdemeanor drug possession.
In recent years, as officials have grappled with the city’s unemployment rate of nearly 12 percent, Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) and the council have pledged to reexamine the treatment of ex-offenders trying to reenter the workforce.
As Barry noted, about 10 percent of D.C. residents have a criminal record. People with such records, advocates and city leaders say, are far less likely to be hired — which is one reason the jobless rate exceeds 20 percent in Ward 8.
If Barry’s legislation is adopted, an employer would be allowed to inquire about a criminal record only after a “conditional (job) offer” has been made. If an employer rescinds the offer based on a past arrest, he would have to submit documentation explaining why the applicant could not work in that job.
Link (Photo: dbking/Wikipedia)
Are
you a Virgo or a Scorpio? Don't bother applying for a job at this Chinese
firm!
A Chinese firm has decided Scorpios and Virgos are too moody and critical, telling job seekers with those star signs they need not apply. Capricorns, Pisces and Libras, on the other hand, are welcome.
The unusual requirements are part of a job ad posted at a university in the central city of Wuhuan by an English language training company, and have generated a storm of online controversy since they were uncovered this week.
"We don't want Scorpios or Virgos, and Capricorns, Pisces and Libras will be prioritised," the job spec reads, according to the Chutian Metropolis Daily, a local newspaper in Wuhan.The report quoted a woman in charge at the unnamed firm as saying she had done research and found Scorpios had strong personalities and were moody, while Virgos were hugely critical and did not stay in one job for long.
"I hired people with those two star signs before, and they either liked quarrelling with colleagues or they could not do the job for long," the woman, surnamed Xia, said.
Previously on Neatorama: What's Your Sign? Nope. Try Again.
Wait,
let me check my calendar. Yup, 2011. So it's surprising to read about
a New York public bus line that still forces women to sit in the back.
Here's what happened when Melissa Franchy boarded the B110 bus in Brooklyn and sat down near the front:
For a few minutes she was left in silence, although the other passengers gave her a noticeably wide berth. But as the bus began to fill up, the men told her that she had to get up. Move to the back, they insisted.
They were Orthodox Jews with full beards, sidecurls and long black coats, who told her that she was riding a “private bus” and a “Jewish bus.” When she asked why she had to move, a man scolded her.
“If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’” he told Franchy, who rode the bus at the invitation of a New York World reporter. She then moved to the back where the other women were sitting. The driver did not intervene in the incident.
The B110 bus travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. It is open to the public, and has a route number and tall blue bus stop signs like any other city bus. But the B110 operates according to its own distinct rules. The bus line is run by a private company and serves the Hasidic communities of the two neighborhoods. To avoid physical contact between members of opposite sexes that is prohibited by Hasidic tradition, men sit in the front of the bus and women sit in the back.
Is it gender discrimination or a reasonable approach to accomodate religious rights?
Sasha Chavkin of The New York World reports: Link | Follow up at The New York World and The New York Times
An employer can’t discriminate hiring an employee on the basis of race, religion, gender, age, or disability – but what about joblessness? Can a company refuse to hire you simply by the fact that you don’t have a job?
Adam Cohen of TIME Magazine explores the phenomenon of jobless discrimination:
Job seekers have long known, of course, that it’s easier to land a job when you are still working. There are no hard data on discrimination against the unemployed. But there have been reports from across the country of companies’ making clear in job listings that they are not interested in people who are out of work. Employment experts say other companies have policies of hiring only people with jobs — but do not publicly acknowledge their bias. [...]
Some employers argue that they have a perfectly reasonable right to weed out the unemployed and that it is just good business. People who have lost jobs or have never been hired are less qualified as a group than those who are currently working, they say. People who are out of the workforce for a significant period of time may also have fallen behind in skills.
Although women have been researching and inventing for as long as men have been grunting and hunting, recognition for their accomplishments has been sparse. We think we owe them a few retroactive shout-outs.
Beatrix Potter may be known mainly as the mother of adorable anthropomorphized animals, but the British author and illustrator also used her skills for some decidedly less cuddly work. Around the turn of the 19th century, scientists had no way of photographing images under a microscope, so Potter found herself churning out watercolor paintings of fungi in labs. Pretty soon, she’d become a well-respected mycologist and was one of the first scientists to study lichens. At the time, women were barred from attending scientific meetings, so Potter’s uncle had to present her papers for her. Eventually, she had to settle for a more “appropriate” profession, and thus Peter Rabbit was born.
As a graduate student in Cambridge in the late 1960s, Jocelyn Bell Burnell builtr a radio telescope with her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish. While taking readings, she noticed a regularly repeating radio signal from a segment of space. Confused, she and Hewish labeled the phenomenon “LGM” for “little green men”. Later, the scientific community renamed them “pulsars,” for “one of the biggest astronomy discoveries in modern history”. In 1974, Hewish received the Nobel Prize. The ever-observant Burnell, however, wasn’t even mentioned during his acceptance speech.
Even though men used to have a hard time sharing their labs with ladies, they seemed more than happy to let women crunch the numbers. In 1946, after John Mauchly and Presper Eckert finished building the world’s first electronic digital computer, known as the ENIAC, they solicited the aid of six women to program and run the thing. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman subsequently became the world’s first computer programmers. Sadly, their work was considered “clerical”, and their station “sub-professional”. In 1997, however, those words were amended, and all six women were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.
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The article above, written by Hank Green, appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the September – October 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.
Don’t forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog today for more!
Police officer Javid Iqbal, 38, of Bedforshire, England, doesn’t just have any beard. No sir – he has what can truly called an "epic beard."
Daily Mail (yes, I know how you guys feel about this newspaper, but they always come up with the most interesting stories …) has more on Javid’s travail and lawsuit involving said epic beard:
A Muslim police officer claims he was forced out of his job by colleagues who made fun of his beard and called him a ‘f***ing Paki’.
PC Javid Iqbal, 38, said white officers openly discussed in front of him how they were ‘ better’ than their ethnic-minority colleagues. [...]
Mr Iqbal says he was sacked after fellow-officers in Luton launched a ‘smear and witch-hunt campaign’ during which they lodged a string of complaints about his performance.
He is taking the Bedfordshire force to an employment tribunal claiming he is the victim of racial and religious discrimination and unfair dismissal.
Whether you love PETA or hate them, you still may find the humor in their new campaign to change the word for “fish” to “sea kittens.” Maybe they took the word “catfish” a bit to far, but you have to wonder is a fish still a fish by any other name?
Personally, I find this to be further discrimination against ugly animals. If they con you into thinking fish are like adorable little kitties, will it really get you to stop eating more fish? As for me, go ahead and dish me up some delightful meowing sushi, I’m hungry.
