Romney's Equal Pay Answer: Two Solid Minutes of FAIL

[Major Nikon]

56. I have a minor quibble with #2

Some of the points you make here are completely valid and certainly apply to Rmoney who could give a shit less about working women, or women in general for that matter. He talks about flexible work schedules as if he invented the concept. He didn't. Flexible work schedules would have come to Mass state employees with or without Rmoney, and I suspect it would have had less trouble without him.

When Romney was talking about flexible work schedules, he was talking about an issue that is important to women. The reason is not because it's assumed that all women are mothers, it's dealing with the reality that many people in the workplace have children. When one or both parents don't have the option of flexible work schedules, and kids are involved, who typically suffers most? The reality is in our culture (and every other one I know of), the woman suffers more because they are less likely to compromise when it comes to children. It's also a reality that there are far more single parent households headed by mothers than fathers. While it's great to envision a culture where this is not the case and I'm certainly not going to argue against it, the reality is we just aren't there as a society. Flexible work schedules also are a benefit to mothers even when the father is the only one provided them. I've worked shift work for most of my career, and as such I picked up most of the responsibilities of taking our kids where they needed to go during the day while my wife was at work. This enabled my wife to focus more on her career and she has advanced quite well as a result. Had we not had this flexibility, we would have had to make some hard choices early on and one or both of our careers would have inevitably suffered. Flexible work schedules work to benefit both sexes because they can increase family income and improve family life. While this should be an issue for both genders, the reality is that women place a higher value on it than men.