Are you a student? cipro while trying to get pregnant One potential problem with this finding, though, is that respondents may just be saying what they believe is socially acceptable: that the public policies in place drive their answers, thereby creating the fake impression that is culture that drives policy instead of the other way around. To make sure that is not the case, Givati and Troiano come up with a cultural driver of gender attitudes that (long) predates maternity leave mandates. Cunning linguists that they are, they collected data on the gender attitudes intrinsic in each country's main language: how many personal pronouns are different for men and women? That is, how many pronouns are like he/she instead of we? In English, he/she is the only “discriminatory” example, but in Spanish, for example, nosotros/nosotras is one in addition to 茅l/ella. It turns out that this measure of linguistic gender discrimination does a pretty good job predicting current-day gender attitudes, and, as a consequence, current-day maternity leave mandates.
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