Most Israelis would not hire a young mother

To those who wonder why I'm still talking about gender (aren't men and women totally equal? my son asked recently), a startling Naamat survey confirmed that women still face some entrenched discrimination that has serious ramifications for their economic and social lives. According to the Naamat study, 61% of respondents would not hire a young mother or a newly married women. Sixty-one percent -- that's a lot of jobs that young women are locked out of because they happen to have a womb. "Don't let me hear that you're leaving to pick up your kids", a boss of mine once said (a woman, no less, but that's a conversation of its own). Or as my friend Hedy says, any excuse for taking a few hours off is fine -- except looking after one of your kids. "If I say I'm going to fix the transmission on my car, everyone smiles," she says. "But if I say that one of my kids is sick, that's when I get the dirty looks." Almost all the working mothers I know carry around stories like this. I wrote an article about my working mother friends a few years back that was published in the Jerusalem Post. Now Naamat provides the numbers to back up the reality. Thank you Naamat.