In my life I have worked 5 jobs in total (7, if you include 2 online businesses I’ve opened myself), and all of them pretty much asked the same questions:
Why do you want this job?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
What separates you from every other interviewee?
But there is one question that I find is sort of favor to women, but always against men. The question is, “Do you have children or plan to have any?”
As a female who doesn’t want children, this obviously is a positive to employers seeking career minded individuals that will grow in their company as they will have both the time and mental capacity to conduct their job.
If a female has kids or plan to have kids, this may initially be seen as a negative. However, let’s be honest…most independent thinking females who are seeking a career has or plans to have that kid in daycare or drop them off at her parents house.
Contrasting this to the males, if we don’t have children this is seen as negative as we are seen as “reckless” and not attached to our job because we have nobody dependent to us.
If we do have children, this is also seen as a negative because employees will believe our minds are elsewhere aside from work. If you don’t believe me, I worked as a lab technician at my community college where I graduated and some reports had to be filed on inventory at a set due date. However, my co-worker in charge of that needed to make some quick revisions past the deadline because it was his turn to take care of his daughter the past weekend (he is divorced) and she was sick.
When he went to our boss to explain the situation and ask if he could have it submitted later in the day, she was furious with him telling him “listen…I asked for these reports TODAY at 4 P.M. and if you can’t do that then perhaps you need to find another job because it’s either work or your child so pick which one is more important.” He tried explaining how he was divorced and paying both alimony and child support while working this part time gig and in college trying to make ends meet. She wasn’t buying it. She just reiterated her point, told him to get it done by the end of the day or else he was fired, and walked out.
Now normally I let people in the workplace handle their own tasks, but I felt pity on the guy. Being a divorced man myself and seeing how unjust the judicial system is towards males – I only could imagine how much he made versus how much the state took away from him so I helped him out to get the job done.
My point for writing this is because I understand that a company needs to know if you are capable of being reliable and performing your job duties, but a better question to ask instead of ““Do you have children or plan to have any?” would be “Do you feel there are any personal or professional limitations to prevent you from completing the job duties as outlined?”
In this way, you at least have the opportunity to divert the conversation back to the job details instead of being immediately turned down.
Undead Knowledge 