Stuff Nation posted a story on a man not employing married women, and saying that they should be home raising their children instead, gained a bit of notoriety and generated discussion on talkback shows a few days ago. Soon after, David Farrar posted about it and another opinion post, complaining that about these sorts of opinion type posts from Stuff Nation mascarding as news items devalue the work of the Stuff journalists.
As for not employing married women because they should be home raising their children, I think that an employer that acts this way should also be paying all his married male employees a generous enough salary so that they can support a wife and children on their paycheck alone. It's incredibly hypocritical to be telling a woman that she needs to be home looking after her children if you are contributing to ensuring that women need to be working to support their families because their husbands aren't being paid enough in order to do so themselves.
But here’s an example of what I was complaining about. I follow NZ Stuff Politics on Twitter. My expectation is that tweets from that account will be linking to stories written by journalists on politics. One tweet this afternoon was:I agree with him, as that "story" appeared on my Google News feed as a supposedly genuine news item. Stuff is not the only site that does this sort of thing, however, but it is annoying when you have your news contaminated with reader's opinions.
Call for new Education MinisterI clicked through on this, thinking it was a significant story. That a lobby group or school or union or MP had called for a new Education Minister.
Instead the link was to this Stuff Nation story. It was basically a letter to the editor, or a short piece by a reader called Peter Condon that he thinks Parata should go.
This shouldn’t be tweeted as a political news story by the Stuff NZ Politics twitter account. It isn’t a story. I’m not saying don’t have the opinion on the website somewhere, but this treating of a Stuff Nation opinion as no different to a news story is I think bad.
As for not employing married women because they should be home raising their children, I think that an employer that acts this way should also be paying all his married male employees a generous enough salary so that they can support a wife and children on their paycheck alone. It's incredibly hypocritical to be telling a woman that she needs to be home looking after her children if you are contributing to ensuring that women need to be working to support their families because their husbands aren't being paid enough in order to do so themselves.