专四专八考试

【单选题】It’s nice that LordDavies is thinking of us ladies; just a shame he isn’t thinking more clearly. The former trade minister this week handed in his report on why so fewBritish women are making it to the top in business. There are currently only five female bosses of FTS
E、100 companies—and three of them areAmerican.Across the top 350 companies here, women make up just 12.5 percent of board members, and hold a measly 5.5 percent of executive directorships.
LordDavies seems to believe this is a symptom of deep-rooted misogyny in the business worlD、He has warmedBritish companies that they are in the "last-chance saloon", and set them a target: they must ensure that a quarter of their directors are women by 2015, or the Government will step in—perhaps by imposing quotas.
All of which completely misses the point. It isn’t sexism that is holding women back: it’s babies.
Consider the bigger picture. It starts so promisingly: girls outperform boys at school and university, get good jobs, start shinning up the greasy pole—and then, suddenly, they fall away.Across all professions, women’s careers take a nose dive the moment they reproduce. The full-time pay gap more than trebles for women in their thirties (from 3 percent to 11 percent), while the part- time pay gap increases from 23 percent to 32 percent.
For a certain kind of reactionary, this just proves that women aren’t cut out for the top jobs. Pop a baby in her arms and even the most ball-breaking career woman will suddenly find she longs to be at home all day, making organic finger food and mopping up organic vomit. It’s biology, innit
Well, not exactly. What happens is this. From the moment you deliver your first child, and your husband is booted out of the hospital while you get on with the business of bonding, it is made very clear that child-rearing is women’s work.Even if your husband takes his full two weeks of statutory paternity leave, you will soon be left alone to negotiate this strange new worlD、
Because you are at home, it makes sense for you to take on the endless admin: health checks, vaccinations, nursery registrations, interviewing nannies or childminders. It is up to you, too, to keep the little critter fed, clothed and entertained—and while you’re at it, you might as well do the shopping, cooking and tidying-up.
By the time your maternity leave is up, you’ll find you have been zapped back to the 1950s. You are something perilously close to a housewife, while your man has become an old-fashioned, long-hours breadwinner. Splendid, if that’s how you like it but not so good if you need, or want, to work.
The division of duties, once established, is extremely hard to alter, so it is almost invariably the woman who scales back her career. 41 percent of mothers in couples work part-time, compared to just 4 percent of men. This has an obvious effect on their long-term prospects: mothers who work part time are four times less likely to hold a senior post.
The working woman’s enemy is not some pinstriped, misogynistic boss, cackling evilly as he slams the boardroom door. Nor, in fact, is it men in general. There is plenty of evidence thatBritish men want to be more involved in rearing their children.But our system of parental leave is so heavily skewed that both sexes have little choice but to succumb to an outdated status quo.
In a brilliant new book, Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Myth ofEquality, RebeccaAsher shows the harm this does, not only to women’s aspirations, but to family life and the economy. Spending thousands to train and educate women, only for them to fail out of the labour market at the peak of their expertise, is a very profligate way to run a country.Asher’s solutions— which include six or seven months’ paid leave for each parent, funded by the government and taken consecutively—are affordable, if eye-wateringly radical.And unlike LordDavies’s "targets’’, the
网考网参考答案：A
网考网解析：
该篇文章无论是从数据引证还是解释说明方面，都体现出作者客观公正的立场；作者在解释说明女性不能担任要职时，不是空洞严肃的说教，也不是感情充沛，更没有讽刺。 document.getElementById("warp").style.display="none"; document.getElementById("content").style.display="block"; 查看试题解析出处>>