Equal opportunity and hiring risk
A recent article on Sciencemag.org reveals some researchers and organizations in Japan don't seem to respect employees' private plans. Asking about private life is just against the manner in modern society (but apparently in some part of Japan, incl. the group of faculty at U-Tokyo, country's THE top institute, it is not yet acknowledged). To the worse, the those interviewers in the article take the private piece of info of the interviewees into hiring decision. Hardly acceptable. I might have been a higher risk employee as a spouse of surgery trainee with 2 kids who frequently get sick, so that there were many days I had to get off of work to pick up kids from school and watch them at home or took them to ER, stay at the hospital for a few days. I'm just fortunate that the employer understood the risk and managed everything accordingly -- I was asked to travel minimum number of times. Abundant flexibility for deadlines. Elder brother HG was last hospitalized in Nov. 2