Well, Levi, if Frederick Winslow Taylor were alive today, he might call you up and invite you out for tea.

Unfortunately, that last-minute concession in your letter complaining about Kata Alvidrez’ situation as a woman in a man’s world (how dare she!) regarding your support for families would probably have turned the “efficiency expert” off.

But you might still be able to join the Phyllis Schlafly Fan Club.

You make some dangerous assumptions and statements in your letter to the editor, not the least of which is that if women really want to succeed in the business world, they’d better not want to have children!

Of course, you try very hard not to come right out and say this, but your efforts are paper thin.

It is very easy to classify the work people do in terms of “output,” as you put it, and thereby equate them to a machine, discounting their lives outside the workplace.

While it is true that your job as a manager, supervisor or CEO of a company is to get the most out of your employees, you also have a responsibility as a human being to recognize that things like babies happen.

Whether the mother happens to belong to a 1950s nuclear family photocopy marriage is of no consequence.

The fact that women bear children and cannot work during childbirth cannot continue to be seen as an unfortunate disability, as you insinuate.

Perhaps if we found a way to get our children neatly packaged from outer space, and if we could teach them to raise themselves, we could concentrate on more important things like the “bottom line.”

But the truth is, women are the only people capable of becoming mothers, and if they want to get a job and not be relegated to being barefoot and pregnant hovering over a kitchen stove, they should be able to.

And with that job or career should come equal opportunity for advancement, not based on “output” but based on knowledge and skills.

A truly capitalistic society is a cold and uncaring thing where only the strong and lucky survive.

It shouldn’t take a computer engineer to figure out that that’s not everyone. Don’ t let yourself be suckered into thinking that “output” is the bottom line. It’s much, much more complicated than that.

Somewhere in between Frederick Winslow Taylor and Phyllis Schlafly is a happy medium, where women are “efficient” workers and mothers.

If you are still hung up on the “output” thing, consider children as part of a woman’s “output.”

The world’s population is over half female.

We owe it to ourselves in the interest of a just society to have over half of our doctors, lawyers, CEOs and U.S. presidents female.

But until you are willing to realize that we are operating in a system forged by men and maintained by men, you are conceding to let women continue living in ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.

I would prefer not to.

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Ross Bittner

Resident

Ames