Too sexist for my T-shirt: This gender inequality question is a non-runner

SO you’re going for a job interview.

You’re female, and halfway through, the HR recruiter asks you if you’re planning to have babies and, if so, how many.

It couldn’t happen under present law, but if Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, has her way, it will be the Next Big Thing. Anyone selecting new employees for their company should, she holds, be permitted to ask such questions. We need, she says, to have “a much more open dialogue about gender”.

Ms Sandberg’s input comes oddly wrapped as a contribution to equality. She surrounds it with guff about children’s T-shirts, those early indicators of culture and personal freedom.

She has, she announced, seen T-shirts for little boys reading “Smart like Daddy.” But then she has also seen T-shirts for little girls, reading “Pretty like Mummy”. These garments and their dangerous messages exemplify the attitudes hindering women, according to the Facebook boss.

She says the career path of women is like a marathon. “Everyone’s cheering the men on, whereas the messages for women are different. ‘Are you sure you want to run, don’t you want to run, don’t you have kids at home?’ We have to talk about this,” she says. We do, really. Because when someone in Ms Sandberg’s position says something of such moment, attention must be paid, or those T-shirts will screw with all of our futures. And as for those marathon naysayers — they just have to be found and exterminated.

The only problem is that finding these evildoers who tell women not to run marathons because they have kids at home might be a bit difficult. Not to say impossible. Marathons, to those of us who have never run one and will see hell freeze over before we ever do run one, are viral.

Completely normal women end up with big numbers on their visibly diminished chests (running tending to etiolate the upper body), wearing themselves out in company with hundreds of thousands of other sweaty women cheered raucously from the sidelines by their children.

Women who are exhausted from having and rearing several children get infected with the call to join the oxymoronic “fun run” and before you know it, they’re involved in fundraising 10Ks and flirting with the notion of a marathon or two. Somewhere, a phalanx of Ms Sandberg’s negative thinkers must come into play, waving nappies instead of shrouds and calling on the marathoners to desist and go home to be more mumsy, but, in all the years of listening to the women who get the running bug, I have never, ever encountered one who’d been told she should be at home with her kids. And if it ever happened, which I seriously doubt, then it clearly didn’t work, as more and more women are running marathons more and more often.

Now, Ms Sandberg has a point when she says that no man is ever asked, as he hits the top ranks, if he really would be better off at home minding the kiddiwinks, whereas, to this day, some women do get so asked, just as any reasonably famous woman gets asked how she balances home and work, whereas no man in the same situation is ever asked the same question. In this context, let me suggest to the upcoming sisterhood that the only answer to that is: “Perfectly. Next question?” Playing along with the attitude underpinning the query ensures its perceived legitimacy.

If all this T-shirts and marathon material led to some proposal that would further expedite the liberation of women into the fulfilment of their potential, this would make sense, given Ms Sandberg’s concern about women not making it to the top in the same numbers as men. But what it fed into, in a side meeting in Davos, was a suggestion it should be OK at interviews for women to be asked whether they are planning to have children.

This seems to be based on the current reality, where, according to myth, guys get selected at interviews where the woman candidate is clearly better, because the HR person doing the interview decides that the female candidate carries the inherent threat of fecundity, whereas if the male candidate gets his partner pregnant, that’ll be some other company’s problem; the company doing the hiring won’t have to put a sub in for six months or longer and won’t be troubled by discontinuity.

The area of business and fertility is full of anecdotal evidence. On top of the myth that men get recruited even when inferior, because they’re not going to suddenly start popping sprogs, there’s the one about the legions of women going for jobs knowing themselves to be pregnant and not letting on, so, between the notice period with the old employer and the maternity leave from the new employer, they’re not seen in the day job for the guts of two years.

Everybody seems to know one case. Nobody has any statistics.

But let’s call this one for what it is: Anti-feminism dressed up as feminism. If Ms Sandberg were really fighting for equality, then she’d insist that men, too, be asked about having children, since the one thing that affects most new fathers these days, even if it didn’t in the past, is sleep deprivation, which is proven to screw with your capacity to make good decisions. So a young job candidate who gets his partner pregnant ensures that, nine months down the road, he’s going to have several months where his energy and concentration levels may dip. But it would be ridiculous to ask him about his plans for baby-making, right?

Right. And it’s more than ridiculous to ask a woman about her plans in that area. It’s an invasion of privacy and deeply sexist. It skews the recruitment process in a multiplicity of ways, not least of which is the implication that a woman in her late 30s or early 40s, with three teenage children, is a better bet (if you’re an employer betting against pregnancy) than a woman in her 20s who hasn’t given birth at all.

THE oddest thing about this episode is that the boss of Facebook thinks that women could answer the question accurately. The medical profession wouldn’t have to constantly undo vasectomies and untie tubes if people could predict their reproductive desires or behaviour in advance. Women who have completed their families go on to have second relationships and second families. Women who never wanted babies in the first place get pregnant. Women who wanted one baby deliver triplets. Predicting one’s own future behaviour requires a level of rigid certainty which would signal to any decent recruiter a profound unsuitability for employment in any career involving human beings.

“Organisations need to address the institutional barriers we all know about; the overt discrimination, the non-overt discrimination, the lack of flexibility,” Ms Sandberg opines, and so say all of us. But no discrimination, overt or covert, is ever going to be removed through asking women at job interviews how many offspring they plan to have.