Elisheva Urbas made the following observation about
our recent exchange about helping moms get time at work
to pump:

>The problem is that from the employer's point of view the most efficient
>solution of all is to hire men.    This may not be a permissible thing to say
>out loud, but they can hardly help thinking it.   And even if they are just
>whispering it to themselves it tends to make them look at you, explicitly or
>subtly, as a professional liability.   Take it from me -- my job was
>"elimininated"  6 weeks after the end of my second maternity leave
>
>So we need to hesitate before we lean on moms to make this pitch to employers
>who may hear it with very different ears than we do.

I understand the problem. It is important to know the individual
situation before giving advice about how to approach an individual
boss. There are lots of women who find ways to pump at work and
circumvent the boss all together. Women often support one another.
Also, the overwhelming majority of women in this country are
still employed in jobs in which very few men work and so the
employers have to deal with chid bearing women. That's not to say
that they don't treat new mothers and breastfeeding mother unfairly.

I think we are caught in the porverbial bind of knowing that if
LOTS of women in LOTS of workplaces begin to demand bf policies then
the problem will be worked out. But in the meantime, we have to
work with individual women who are in individual situations.
That's why it is so important for lcs and new mothers to find
one another so that we can support one another and so that we
can let our respective bosses know that we are not alone and they
will not  be alone in suppporting us.
  Naomi Bar-Yam PhD

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New England Complex Systems Institute
http://necsi.org
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