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十几年前的一项研究发现，有孩子的女性往往会在面试中遭遇薪酬歧视，而有孩子的男性却恰恰相反。这也是为什么很多女性会刻意在工作场合对孩子的事闭口不谈。幸运的是，随着职场环境的改善，这种奇怪的缄默正在日益减少。
测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：
gobsmacked ['ɡɒbsmækt] adj. <英口>大吃一惊的
blather ['blæðə（r）] n. 废话，胡说
maternity [mə'tɜːnəti] adj. 孕妇的，母性的
irksome ['ɜːksəm] adj. 厌恶的，讨厌的
阅读马上开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用的时间，对照下方的参考值就可以评估出您的英文阅读水平。
At a dinner in London not long ago, the chief executive of a very respectable organisation told a story that left her end of the table gobsmacked.
It went like this: she was in such a rush to leave work to pick up her children from school recently that she had to ask an underling for help on a minor chore. The underling was stunned, she said, because it turned out no one in the office knew she actually had children, even though she had been running the place for years. Then she said something I found more dismaying. She was thrilled to learn no one knew. She had made it a rule to never talk about her children at work on the grounds that being a mother was irrelevant and she never wanted people to think her family affected how she did her job.
The first reason I found this astonishing was because, even though I am childless, I doubt I would ever have the willpower to shut up about such a central bit of home life. I have bored my colleagues senseless with far less vital domestic news: the soul-sapping apartment move, The Great Kitchen Renovation Disaster, the bloke down the road who kept pinching our Sunday papers and returning them with the crosswords filled in. I cannot imagine censoring children from such blather and as I look around the office at mothers I have worked with for years, I am glad I cannot see one who has kept noticeably quiet about her offspring.
Yet none of us was trying to be a top executive, as far as I know. If we were, we might have thought again, because what really floored me about the story from that dinner was what it said about women in today's workforce.
On the one hand, there has rarely been another time when so much is being done by so many governments and companies to improve the lot of working women. In the UK, businesses with 250 or more employees will be legally required to publish gender pay gap figures from April next year and the Aviva insurance group has just introduced six months of fully paid parental leave for its 16,000 UK workers, men and women.
The US may still be the only OECD country with no nationally guaranteed paid maternity leave, but it is also home to companies such as Salesforce, the $75bn online software group that measures its gender pay gap and has spent nearly $3m a year to close it.
There are signs that sexist hiring practices blamed for blocking female academics in the sciences have waned, as research suggests that US universities prefer women to identically qualified men in some fields. On top of this, women are running everything from the International Monetary Fund to General Motors and Germany. Do they really need to worry whether anyone knows if they are mothers? Maybe not. Yet it is obvious why some still do.
One of the most arresting studies I have seen on this topic was done more than a decade ago in the US, where Cornell University researchers concocted fake resumes for equally qualified men and women, with and without children. They found mothers were not just a lot less likely to be hired than childless women, they could also expect $11,000 less in an average starting salary. Yet fathers were likely to be offered $6,000 more than non-fathers, who were thought less committed to their jobs than dads. In other words, it literally paid to have kids if you were a man and cost if you were a woman. I doubt this irksome motherhood penalty has completely vanished since then. But it is clear that things are changing.
Last week I spoke to Haruno Yoshida, the president of BT in Japan, a country with a woeful gender equality recorD.A few years ago, not long after she started at BT, she missed her daughter's high school graduation because it fell on the same day as a big reception for top executives at the telecoms group. When she later told her British boss, expecting praise for putting work first, she got a “purple and screaming” reaction. “He said, ‘How dare you? You did something you can never take back’.” That is partly a story of cultural differences. But it also suggests the world is moving on. Ms Yoshida says she would never let a female employee do what she did, and as more companies are run by people like her, I like to think there will be a lot fewer workers who still feel the need to keep mum about being a mum.
请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：
A.Because she never wanted people to think children distracted her from work.
B.Because she was afraid that she would got fired if her boss knew she had children.
C.Because she would have to take a pay cut if her colleagues knew she had children.
D.Because she believed being a mother was contradictory to what she did at work.
答案 (1)
A.In the UK, big companies are required to publish gender pay gap figures.
B.Women who tries to be top executives tend to avoid talking about children.
C.Salesforce introduced six months of fully paid parental leave for its workers.
D.Most of the OECD countries have nationally guaranteed paid maternity leave.
答案 (2)
A.Women were likely to take pay cut if they had children.
B.Having kids usually offered a pecuniary advantage to men.
C.Childless women were more likely to be hired as top executives.
D.Sexist hiring practices were to blame for gender pay gap.
答案 (3)
A.Accusatory.
B.Encouraging.
C.Empathetic.
D.Disapproving.
答案 (4)
(1) 答案：A.Because she never wanted people to think children distracted her from work.解释：她曾经规定自己不要在工作中谈论孩子们，因为做母亲与工作无关，她不希望人们认为家庭会影响她的工作。
(2) 答案：D.Most of the OECD countries have nationally guaranteed paid maternity leave.解释：美国可能仍然是唯一一个没有国家规定带薪产假的经合组织国家。
(3) 答案：B.Having kids usually offered a pecuniary advantage to men.解释：有孩子能给男人带来经济利益，却会给女人带来损失。
(4) 答案：D.Disapproving.解释：我无法想象在日常闲聊中把孩子完全过滤掉。当我环顾哪些与我工作了多年的母亲们时，我很高兴地发现她们没有一个人刻意对孩子的事保持沉默。