✨️court jester✨️

| mary has joined the crew 🛰️💫 based off priya kansara ♡

Don’t overlook paternity leave because it’s a hugely important feminist issue

Celebrating fatherhood with official paternity leave policies challenges traditional gender roles and empowers parents in the workplace. It’s one of those rare issues where men’s rights activists and feminists can find common ground with a mutually beneficial cause. It even has an impact on LGBTQ equality.

- It’s important for LGBT+ parents who don’t fit the cis-hetero mold of one mother and one father.

- It’s an important feminist issue for reducing the second shift: when only one parent gets adequate parental leave, it’s only natural for a pattern to develop that the only parent who got adequate parental leave takes on the lion’s share of childcare. However, if both parents get adequate parental leave, then it’s more likely for a pattern to develop of sharing childcare duties. This is obviously massively important for reducing how much women’s careers are affected by having children.

- If the mother has post-partum health issues (anything from recovering from a C-section or other physical traumas, to post-partum depression and/or anxiety) it’s incredibly unfair to expect her partner to just go back to work immediately instead of allowing her partner to stay home and help with childcare duties. When someone is recovering from having a baby, it can be really important for their partner to stay home to help care for them and the baby.

However, one important point I haven’t seen brought up in why equal paid parental is so important for social equality is how important it is for reducing hiring discrimination.

By that I mean, when a country has *only* guaranteed maternity leave, but either no paternity leave (or really short paternity leave of a few weeks like the U.K. has), this is only going to raise the risk of hiring discrimination against women.

So if a company is choosing between two candidates for a position: one is a young woman and the other is a young man, if the country this company is in has a maternity leave policy of several months or more, but paternity leave is either just a few weeks (or completely non-existent), the company will look at the woman as riskier and less reliable to hire than the man.

So equal paid parental leave leads to more equality in the job market, because it means companies are less likely to see women as riskier and less reliable to hire. If everyone, not just women, has the same length of parental leave, everyone runs the same risk of needing to go on leave for the same amount of time.

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

The breeding of the astrophage to make fuel for the spaceship took so much energy that Eva Stratt paved over half of the Sahara desert, causing the weather to change in Africa and Europe. She blew up Antarctica to speed up global warming so they wouldn't die of cold before the probes could return. Stratt is playing supervillain with the Earth in the hopes that at least half of humanity would survive. After sending the three astronauts to certain death, her job is to keep humanity together for long enough to save the sun.

I think it adds a lot to her decision to send Grace away. Yes, it was cruel, but she knows what is coming for her and perhaps many of the people on the Hail Mary project. She is going to hold Earth and humanity together for decades, as people blame her for destruction and as nations in all likelihood go to war over scarce resources. Then, even if they succeed, she will probably be vilified or even executed for what she did.

Stratt is standing in the wreckage of Earth, knowing she'll live and die in infamy. She sent Grace off knowing that if he succeeded, he'd be remembered forever as a hero. She tore the Earth apart so he could save it.

Edit to add a quote:

Mark Watney watching Ryland Grace have to grapple with the fact that he will die and there is no amount of quick thinking or human help that can save him?

Mark Watney finding out Grace didn't volunteer to go to space and was instead sent as a sacrifice so the rest of them could live and getting fucking pissed on his behalf?

Mark Watney who knows what it is to starve on a foreign planet doing the math about Grace's remaining food supply when he decides to go back to save Rocky?

Mark Watney who realistically knows that there is nothing that can be done but who keeps watching the information come out about a middle school teacher who was probably going to die alone in space and not being able to stop thinking about it?

Mark Watney who had to be asked to stop proposing rescue missions because even if they could get funded, there was very little hope that Grace would still be alive even if they got to him?

Mark Watney with survivors guilt for a mission that he wasn't even on?

Mark Watney asking why me but not him?

So random Eridian scientists are talking to Grace and are like, absolutely no disrespect intended, but very interesting Rocky overcame the cultural weirdness and sensory disgust of "hugs" and does them despite no benefit to himself because he cares for your needs! Its sweet!

Grace: actually Rocky freaks out if he cant press himself against my lungs and heart through the thinnest xenonite possible until he can hear every muscle cell in my body moving at least once a day.

grace doesn't have his laptops on him, so we as the audience don't get to understand what rocky says just yet, but at this point, grace does.

and what does he respond to rocky's longer vocalization?