India’s top court has rejected a petition seeking menstrual leave for working women and female students with the judges saying if they were to make such a law, “no-one will hire women”.
The two-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant said mandatory leave would make young women think they were “not at par” with their male colleagues and would be “harmful for their growth”.
The subject of menstrual leave has long polarised Indian society - while many agree with the justices’ views, others argue that a day or two off can help women deal with painful periods.
Some states and a number of large private companies have introduced menstrual leaves for employees over the years.
The top court’s comments came while hearing a petition filed by lawyer Shailendra Mani Tripathi, seeking a national menstrual leave policy, legal website LiveLaw reported.
Tripathi later told news agency IANS that he had hoped that working women would receive “two-to-three days of leave” to account for menstrual difficulties.
The judges, however, said that introducing such a policy would not benefit women - instead, it would harm them by reinforcing gender stereotypes and affecting their employability.
So instead of giving women 2-3 days off per month to deal with menstration, and creating a law that would safeguard women’s employment, judges instead blame women for the ‘hardships’ men would face.
Jfc.
Sounds easily solvable by just giving everyone those mandatory days off regardless of gender… Then there’s no employer preference towards men, and no perceived hardships created.
Many women need thise days off for real medical reasons … but you support giving men the same amount of days off just because.
That makes zero sense.
Maybe you should sit down at a table with 20 women of all ages and ask them why they need days off work. I would hope you’d listen to their horror stories.
I support giving everyone extra days off ‘just because’, actually, but that’s beside the point. The problem as stated in the article was that employers perceive disproportionate days off as a reason to not hire women; the obvious solution is to just remove that from the equation. I wasn’t aware that giving men days off somehow harms women, but apparently I just don’t understand.
Meanwhile it is not actually an argument without merit that employers would prefer employees not to be absent with no recourse ≈10-15% of the month compared to others.
Is fairness what you’re aiming for here?
No, I’m aiming to remove the objection. This seems like the easiest way to accomplish that.
It does make sense. Just like it would make a lot of sense for parental leave to be the same length for both parents, and mandatory to be taken. Sure, it’s the mother who has given birth and needs the time to medically recover, but that’s not the only use of the parental leave. Both parents need to bond with the baby and take care of it. And if you make it the same length and mandatory you remove any argument against hiring women “because they might get pregnant”.
Same principle, better outcome for everyone.
We have mandatory paid sick days, and while it’s not quite the same thing, it does simplify things for the workers. Instead of a patchwork of different laws and workplace rules that might let some people fall through the cracks, everyone knows that they have X number of days that they can use (with documentation). That’s what I thought the other user was referring to
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/employment-business/employment-standards-advice/paid-sick-leave
Do doctors in India have to tell the employer why their employee is not able to work? I would think that just getting a doctors note would solve the problem.
… of course that would assume that the doctor is not a piece of shit and accepts menstrual issues as a valid reason to stay home resting.
Oh how I hate how shitty the world is and always has been. Plaargh.
