Thank you for the acknowledgement.
Oy! Seriously? I don't think I would want to work for an employer who viewed me as a liability because of my sex.
To state the obvious, if women did not have babies, you'd have no workers. And men can take care of sick children. They can take paternity leave. But women still do more of the child-rearing than men, although men's involvement in housework and child-care is much more than it used to be. Part of the reason for this is that women still earn less than men.
As evidenced by this article, women take more sick time than men to care for sick kids and aging parents.
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/economy/an-epidemic-of-absenteeism/ Someone has to do it, and men can take on these responsibilities as well.
And you do realize that the reason men have been/are able to devote their lives to work and bread-winning for their families is that women are taking of them, their homes and their children (unless they can or do pay people to do that)? Double income households usually mean women come home to a second shift.
I once read a financial break-down of all the jobs housewives do - driving (to get kids to school and activities, to manage household affairs), cooking, chaperoning, cleaning, arranging schedules, shopping, making phone calls to deal with various issues, taking kids. If other people (usually women) are paid to do those tasks, it works out to something like $80,000 per year.
Also, I'll point out that most women in the developing world work while pregnant and work when they have infants/small children, because they have no choice. The same is often true of poor women in the developed world. Grandparents often take care of their children, or groups of 'other mothers' (a term I heard used to describe how African American women raise their kids as a community).
