A U.S. army study found that ``even when pregnancy leave is included, [enlisted women] take less time off than men, who lose it to sports and auto injuries and drug, alcohol and discipline problems [1]."
Similarly, a study of the hiring of scientists and technical staff at the (British?) National Health Service found that employers often assume
that all women will leave to have babies and that wastage due to pregnancy is greater than for any other reason. The pervasiveness of [this myth] was shown by the way in which they influenced practices at selection (for instance, only women were asked questions about marital status and dependent children). They also influenced notions of who can be a manager [2]."It would be unthinkable in Switzerland to refuse to hire a Swiss male just because he had an obligation for military service. If a woman takes an eight week pregnancy leave once over the course of six years of graduate study, she is away from her work less than half the time that the Swiss male would be!
``All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."
Martin Luther King, Jr.
``It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past."
Mikhail Gorbachev (1988)