Someone emailed me asking about this situation. A friend of hers – who works, I believe, in academia – has a colleague on maternity leave, “but insisted on attending the interviews of job candidates for a position in their department.” At the meeting, she nursed the entire time – the baby was hungry, and would have made noise otherwise.
So the person wondered – what do I think of this?
This was on a mailing list. Virtually everyone on the list agreed that it was wrong for her to bring a nursing infant into that meeting. One of the other folks suggested it was just as inappropriate to bring a nursing baby to a business meeting as it would have been to bring a dog or a gameboy.
But a baby is not comparable to a dog, or a gameboy, either of which can under ordinary circumstances be left unsupervised for an hour or two.
Under ordinary circumstances, an infant requires constant care. (Even when my six-month-old nephew is put to bed, one of his parents always has the sound monitor on hand.) Infants require caretakers, continuously. To say that an infant is inappropriate at a business meeting is to say, therefore, that people who care for infants are inappropriate at business meetings.
In my opinion, the no-babies-at-meetings ethic is leftover from an older and sexist world; one in which jobs (and notions of what is and isn’t “appropriate” at meetings) were created with the assumption that careers belonged to men who had wives at home to take care of all the childrearing stuff. We don’t live in that world any longer (and good riddance!).
There are already large barriers between being a caretaker and having a career, barriers that are a large part of what causes the wage gap between men and women. Some of those barriers we can’t do anything about (other than encourage men to take up a fair share of the caretaking burden). Non-caretakers will always have more spare time and energy to devote to their careers than caretakers; there are, after all, only so many hours in the day.
But the barriers we can do something about – such as an irrational belief that business cannot be conducted with a nursing infant in the room – we should get rid of. A meeting to hire a new faculty member is essential; who is hired determines a lot about the future direction of the department. Saying that a parent-with-infant cannot attend such a meeting is an unfair burden on parents, and – until we have a society in which men do an equal share of caretaking – de facto discrimination against women.
I do agree that having an infant in meetings will create a small discomfort for some co-workers. But that’s very tiny compared to the inconvenience suffered by parents of infants if caretakers are forbidden from attending essential meetings.
I anticipate some objections:
1) She could have hired a baby-sitter.
My answer: She’s already sacrificing her maternity leave time to attend this meeting, now she has to pay goodness-knows-how-much for babysitting? Most likely she’s already stretched her income to its limits – most maternity leave is either partial-pay or unpaid, after all, and new infants are expensive. Plus, for all we know she tried to hire a babysitter but was unable to find a reliable one – finding good babysitters is notoriously difficult.
2) It’s unfair to the job candidate, because he’s not getting the full attention of everyone present.
For all we know, the people there without infants have their minds on the lottery, or on Buffy, or on that ache in their knee. The job candidate will get as much of the attention of the audience as he can hold – and that’s always the case, whether or not an infant is present.
Anyway, I’ve had many meetings and conversations with parents of infants, including nursing moms. It’s simply not true that they’re so distracted that they cannot be expected to follow a presentation or conversation.
3) It’s unfair to the job candidate, because she might be thrown by the sight of an infant (or, worse, breastfeeding)!
Someone who can’t manage to give a good presentation while someone in the room nurses a baby will be a lousy professor anyhow. Being able to speak coherently and maintain concentration despite distracting people in the audience is part of the job (and I’ve seen students act in far ruder and more distracting ways than nursing!); and if one candidate is less able to overcome her distraction than another, then she’s less deserving of the position.
4) It’s rude to breast-feed in public.
No, it’s not..
I gave birth June 1, 2006. My daughter just turned 3 months old. I have been breastfeeding the whole time. Before I gave birth I was a person who wondered if people should breastfeed in public, because so many people believe it is wrong to be doing this in front of them, especially children. Well, when I started breastfeeding and saw that this new being was living and growing healthier everyday because of me. This made me I feel wonderful. I was doing something wonderful for my child and we were developing a strong bond. I was not doing something gross, I was doing what god intended. As for feeding in public, I do it all the time. I am covered with a shawl and you can’t see my parts hanging out, but you can tell I am feeding. You have to feed in public. I go in my car most of the time or on a bench etc. You don’t always have access to special feeding rooms, like at Disney, Universal studios, or babies-r-us. Most of the time there is no where to feed and your child is hungry. Some people, like myself with my 1 child, had to feed our baby lactose free formula, etc because of allergies. and couldn’t breastfeed. Most people , though, choose formulas because it is easier and also because they are to lazy to take the time to give up what they are doing to put the extra effort to find a place to go to breastfeed or pump. Example : if you are at Disney you have to walk back to main street and go to their feeding room versus popping a bottle in your kids mouth right there at the ride. I have an annual pass and I have had a premium pass for the last 4 years. I go at least 2 times a month. I walk back to the entrance, especially in the heat to feed my child every 2 hours. I loose alot of the day there doing this,but I want what is best for my baby. So, to all the people who think breastfeeding is wrong, I say poo to you. Your missing out on a wonderful opportunity to give them food personally made for them and a wonderful bonding experience bettween the two of you as he or she looks into your eyes ,which you will never get to relive again once they are not a baby anymore.
I breastfeed anywhere. I don’t use a blanket or cover, either. I try my best to keep my shirt down to her face. The only problem is that my baby loves to people watch, so she will look at all the action going on around her… and take my nipple along for the ride. It can get painful.
Although it does not necessarily derail the main point you are making, this is a bad argument. This only makes sense if you concede that there is absolutely no place or group where a feeding infant would be an inappropriate distraction, and I doubt that is the case.
For example: yes, it is possible that nurses and doctors in the operating room might be thinking about a Joss Whedon show or some state-sponsored gambling. It does not therefore follow that any personnel in an operating room should be breastfeeding while a surgery is going on. This is probably true even if that person’s hypothetical role were strictly advisory or non-physical.
If it is possible for people at a workplace to have a job to do that is too important to allow the distraction of a feeding infant in the immediate area, then the hypothetical possibility that those people might think about other things is irrelevant to that.
Does that make sense? I think what you are really trying to say here is that either: a) a discussion-oriented job that is not life or death can accommodate a few distractions, or b) people in this particular situation ought not be distracted by a feeding infant or the sight of a breast.
Phil, I’m a little puzzled how surgery got into the discussion. This was a post about babies in business meetings; a surgery is not a business meeting.
Of course, I agree there are some jobs where you can’t take an infant, surgery being a good example. But business meetings can, as you say, “accommodate a few distractions.”
BTW, for folks interested in this general issue, I think this post and thread are also relevant.
It is interesting to discuss, but I think the baby at work thing is irrelevant. If you’re on maternity leave, you are leave and management is responsible for the allocation and performance of your duties. Actively interfering in other people’s work like that like that is terrible behaviour. Management are clearly weak, as they should never have let her be there, and whoever was responsible for hiring in her absense has a legitimate grievance.
The surgery example was to illustrate that the specific argument you make in response to Objection #3 is a bad argument. (Or, I should say, not a persuasive argument.)
In response to the objection that the job candidate is not getting the full attention of everyone present, you rebut that the people there might have their minds on other things.
But that is silly. In fact, in every possible situation where human beings are present, they might have their minds on other things. No matter how big or small the task at hand, the people involved might have their minds on other things. College and high school students, taxi drivers, surgeons, nurses, adult film performers, IT personnel, flautists, jurors: all of these people might have their minds on other things. That is the status quo.
If an infant is distracting, then it is irrational to suggest that this distraction does not matter because of other hypothetical distractions that might be going on. Thus, it is rational to argue that a nursing infant is not distracting, but it is irrational to say, but even if it is, it’s no big deal because of other distractions.
To be clear, I am only calling you out on faulty reasoning in that specific paragraph; I’m not saying that your thesis is wrong because of this.
Phil, point well taken.
I guess I see “we can’t have a baby in a university business meeting because distraction” as evidence of priorities being out of whack.
In any situation, we need to ask “how urgent is it that all distractions be minimized as much as humanly possible?” and balance that against “how reasonable is it to ask people to not do X because X is distracting?” In my view, people who object to a parent occasionally having a quiet infant with them at a business meeting, are not balancing those two priorities correctly. The level of distraction provided by a typical infant is low enough to allow a typical business meeting to happen, and the harmful implications of forbidding infants from ever being in a business environment are a bigger concern than most people acknowledge.
That’s what I should have said, rather than the argument that you correctly point out is unpersuasive. Hindsight is so clear that way. :-p