I got the seed of this idea of Instapundit, and decided to talk a bit about it. So let's say you are an employer and you got sued for firing someone the previous year and had to pay out a lot of money. You felt the suit was unfair because you had a legit reason to fire the person. So now you have a choice between two candidates for another job, equally qualified, but one of them is in the same situation as the person you fired, so you hire the other.

Now consider what happened with the initial suit. A female employee dropped the ball with a client and lost the company money. You fired her, and she sued saying she had PMS that day, and she won. So when you are confronted with two equal candidates for a job, you go with the man because you know he won't be able to blame poor performance on PMS.

Can't have it both ways. Either you can use PMS as an excuse and get paid less, or you can not and just have to deal with it. But getting the same money and then saying you are not responsible for your actions 3 days of every month. Sorry, that ain't gonna cut it.

Did you know that very detailed studies have been done showing that if you take out maternal leave and that sort of thing, women do actually earn about the same money as men in equivalent jobs? And fair or not, why should someone be paid as much when they might decide to leave for 6 months at any time, and have their job protected by law (ok, that might not be true, I don't know if companies are required to provide maternity leave and keep the job available like they are supposed to for the military).

Anyway, if women want to be treated the same as men, then they need to stop expecting me to hold doors open and put toilet seats down.

Now look, I'm not saying women are worse than men in any way. But they are different, and there's something wrong with the dichotomy between how men are expected to act with women and how the law treats women.