TIME Magazine Asks: Are American Women Better off Than French? Paid Sick Days is One Reason They Might Not Be.

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anthony Weiner make headlines, TIME Magazine takes a look at how France and America treat women. Through the lens of the wage gap, harassment, and paid sick days, TIME points out that while Americans are holding famous men accountable for their treatment of women (and rightly so), this accountability may not help the average American all that much.

From TIME Magazine:

And it's pretty certain that all the salacious details emerging from Weiner's Twitter account won't help the millions of American women who don't have even one paid sick day to take care of a child or themselves. For many of the women who clean hotels and serve food, taking a day off means losing a big chunk of a week's pay. That's something that French women would surely not tolerate. (In the U.S., only 41% of low-wage service-industry jobs, which are dominated by women, allow paid sick days.) And how about maternity leave? America is one of only two industrialized nations, along with Australia, that do not guarantee paid maternity leave, and only 11% of U.S. civilian workers get paid family leave.

Read the whole article at http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2076113,00.html.