Meet some crazy people

1. Some crazy person in Missouri is trying to have Alison Bechdel's fabulous book Fun Home banned from the library. It's not clear if this is because it's about her dad being teh gay, if it's about her dad committing suicide, if it's because Bechdel herself is teh gay, or if it's because it's a graphic novel. Probably the whole lot all together. Still, if you've read it (and if you haven't, buy the damn thing already, it's great), you know that it's a fabulous book. It even promotes the classics, for god's sake.

2. BritFriend sent me a link to a news item that, in the UK, women are no longer entitled to equal pay with male peers who don't take maternity leave. As I said to him, I actually have mixed feelings on this, which the article he sent sums up nicely:

The court rejected her claim against the Health and Safety Executive, stating that additional years of service allowed for greater experience which in turn led to improved work performance.

This justified the extra salary paid for length of service even though there was an in-built bias in favour of men who did not take time off to care for children.

Leena Linnainmaa, the president of the European Women Lawyers’ Association, suggested that the situation would only become fairer for women when men took more paternity leave, something most did not do even though they had the right to in most European countries.

On the one hand, seniority pay seems reasonable to me. On the other, the simple fact is that men do not take, and are not eligible to take, maternity leave. If a company (or a country) provides maternity leave, but not paternity leave, then paying less to women who take it is, I think, clearly discriminatory. On the other hand, if they offer both maternity *and* paternity leave, and if the paternity leave is as long as the maternity leave, then I'd say fine, legally. Although I imagine that in the real world, the dad's company may not offer such leave, and the fact that it's legal to discriminate in pay if someone takes it is probably *more*, not less likely to encourage men not to do so.

Fuck it, man. We need to just make paid parental leave for both parents mandatory.

3. I realize saying that demonstrates that I am the crazy one. If you need further evidence, I agreed to be an editor for a new wiki of Academic Blogs. Henry Farrell at CT did all the work putting it together, and says a little about it here. As soon as I get my act together, it'll replace the "Professoriate" part of my own blogroll, which is a pain to keep updated (so I haven't, lately, which is bad). The nice thing is that academic bloggers can add themselves (or remove themselves, if they get Dooced and have to take down their blog or something). Super dooper.