I've discussed this in the past. My company started offering 5 month paternity leave at the end of 2016. For a credit card company, this was huge. There had to have been a catch. I took the chance anyway, and got laid off. This isn't uncommon at the company either. I've heard of 3 females so far who also shared the same fate. All of thought it was illegal, but our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it."
I think it wasn't worth it because of an arbitration clause or whatever, but I wasn't going to risk my time, money, and energy required when I just had a baby.
That's awful. Why bother with a program if it's only there as a trap? Ok, so a few people take it in good faith; then the company lays those people off so as teach others not to take the leave... So they're back to square one where no one takes parental leave.
It's not mandated (yet) by law, so why bother to set-up bad goodwill? Just to bait people into joining?
It seems a very poisonous scheme with little benefit for anyone.
It's left hand not talking to the right. The HR people put the system in place as a way of promoting equality, hiring more easily and generally doing a decent thing. Individual managers of teams, with fixed budgets, high workloads and bonus targets around completing those workloads are probably not internally compensated for the cost of HR's policy, thus they look for ways to get rid of such people.
> our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it."
Sounds like you need a group lawsuit. Firing one person - could be coincidence. Firing three? Starting to look like a pattern of punishment. The more people you can get on the lawsuit, the stronger your case.
A wrongful termination lawsuit in a case like this should cost no money (contingency) and take very little time and energy, if you have the right lawyers. Arbitration would be even less commitment, with potentially less upside.
Just stop telling people that pure greed is the same thing as rationality. Never forget, Nash was crazy, and he did not get a Nobel Prize.
Superrationality provides nicer solutions to classic problems like the Prisoners Dilemma, but superrationality "is not mainstream". (Economists don't get it.)
How would this push any woman away from the choice to be a mother?
And why should someone who wants to be a mother and a careerist have to accept more career penalties than someone who wants to be a father and careerist?
And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
> And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
For the same reason that men do. After all, society as a whole has decided for some reason that children are a good thing, and that the cost of having them should be born by all, even those without.
In theory, yes, but in practice taxes tend to favor married couples and people with children. So even if in the theoretical case you are right practically speaking we all share the cost of having children.
Sorry to be that guy but you're making a clear logical fallacy.
The argument is "should we subsidize children" and you're substituting "does society want to subsidize children" and then for THAT you're substituting "do we currently subsidize children".
You can only go from 1 to 2 by assuming something like tyranny of the majority.
You can only go from 2 to 3 by assuming that the current system is exactly what society would choose if they decided now. Which is obviously silly, given a blank slate drug laws, marriage laws and tax breaks would all be different for a few examples.
It is pretty safe to assume the tyranny of the majority in a democratic system and it is a given that society chose what it did, if it did not it would have changed.
'Given a blank slate' is so far from practice that it might as well be fiction.
Utopia is not suddenly going to spring to life, if you want it there is only one way to get there: get into politics, and good luck because the one word you will learn very quickly once you've arrived there is 'compromise'.
No, the tyranny of the majority is NOT the safe thing to assume in a democratic system, or that that would be the right thing. Our systems are build to insulate decision making from 51% splits.
But we're not arguing that we're about to do something from a blank slate, the blank slate point is that just because society DOES something, doesn't mean that it WANTs to do something, for the same reasons as above we don't decide everything by referendum. The US numbers on single payer, medicaid for all, drug laws and etc are miles away from the policy, your argument is like looking at marijuana being illegal in most states a few years ago and using it as evidence that they want it to be illegal.
You now have 22 posts in this thread (and counting), it seems you are very much upset for having to pay for something that you do not feel that you benefit from. But if you consider that you too are a product of the societies that chose to support children and if you accept that once children are there it helps to have them well nourished, healthy and smart then maybe you'll come to the conclusion that your position is a pretty selfish one.
So when you write 'we' you can substitute 'I' and be closer to the truth, and you don't need to drag in a whole pile of other stuff that is hypothetical rather than real, why ignore the evidence in front of your eyes if you have it?
Hypotheticals are great to argue about things for which we do not have data, they suck at improving over reality when we do.
As or the tyranny of the majority not being the safe thing to assume in a democratic system: the democratic system pretty much codifies the tyranny of the majority, with a few exceptions about forming coalitions where some give-and-take allows a small minority to score some points because they can be the swing vote. But if you want to see the tyranny of the majority at work you need to look no further than that US that you write about.
Thanks for counting, if you'd read them you'd see that I've addressed your points already and you aren't moving the debate on. To reiterate though, supporting parents with a holiday is not the same as supporting children. My dad taking time off doesn't make me healthy, well nourished or smart. Healthy is healthcare, well nourished is money and only god can do smart. Immigration is an alternative to domestic population growth. Domestic population growth or even maintenance is not a positive or necessary outcome. There are alternative approaches such as state-funded childcare or a generally different work culture that would be more effective and fairer to help native-born children.
Hypotheticals aren't a silly debating tactic, they're an important component of logic and reason, see the discovery of SR.
You clearly do not understand the concept of the tyranny of the majority, it's not what this thread is about but since you asked...
The tyranny of the majority refers to the problem with voting systems where anything that 51% agrees to, no matter how unjust, will pass, especially where it harms the 10%. The reason why it does not apply to western democratic systems:
Major changes can require supermajorities.
Constutions and rights laws restrict the range of possible laws that can be passed.
Citizens do not vote directly on outcomes but elect a representative who is expected to consider things more deeply on their behalf.
You are making a claim that I don't think has substance. You keep susbstituting "holiday" for "leave". It is not a holiday to take care of a baby, it's work. You are not going to be traveling to nice places or drinking it up. You'll be sleep deprived and busy the whole time because babies are incapable of taking care of themselves. You don't necessarily need to be dealing with the baby 24/7 but someone needs to be available to react to the babies needs or their suicidal tendencies of trying to touch/eat every dangerous thing they see.
Our current setup puts this entirely on the wife and leaves the husband out of it. Requiring paternal leave would both equalize make and female employees in the eyes of employers _and_ allow for the parents to provide care to the child without driving themselves into poor health or depression
Except that right now women who don’t want children experience a hiring penalty that men who don’t want children (and even men who do want children) don’t experience - due to an assumption that any given woman will take parental leave that any given man won’t.
I'm a childless woman. This is by choice. I might consider adoption, but I have absolutely no desire to be pregnant nor give birth. I'm 40, by the way, and have known I didn't want children for at least 25 years.
I'm happy to give parents time off. I'm happy parents get more sick days where I'm at to take care of their young children. I'm happy my taxes, in part, go to this.
We actually need children. And parents have more responsibilities than I do. I want children to be educated and well cared for. The most selfish reason is that I want competent folks to take care of me when I'm old: The other is that I want humanity to be better when I leave the earth.
There are costs and benefits to everything. Besides, I had/have the choice of becoming a mother and getting those benefits - though there is a lot to lose as well. And it isn't me.
I agree. I just don’t understand why offering (and enthusiastically encouraging people to take) as much paternity leave as maternit leave would be a negative thing in this context.
I think some folks are reacting to the forced paternity leave bit. And in one sense, I understand - but women don't realistically have those choices and I think most doctors would rather women didn't get right back to work. The other bit, as you've said in another reply, is that women get stuck with the assumption that she's going to take maternity leave and there is nothing the company can do about it. If it is extended to males, companies would have to worry about that with everyone and they'd rather not, thank-you-very-much.
Offering is, I think, is both wonderful and not enough. If I understand correctly (immigrant here), Norway used to require some paternity leave and had a portion of parental leave that could be split between the two parents. At some point, the government quit making paternity leave a requirement, but still leaving it in place if the father wanted it and still allowing parental leave to be split between the parents.
... and fewer fathers took paternity leave at that point.
The thing with not only offering but requiring such things is that it helps to change societal norms and expectations as long as they are offered for enough time. When it is simply optional, safeguards need to be put into place. I'm not the one to ask what the safeguards should be at the moment :)
> And why should someone who wants to be a mother and a careerist have to accept more career penalties than someone who wants to be a father and careerist?
Because of clear biological differences you can’t simply substitute a man for a woman.
As such this article is suggesting that we can make men worse off career wise to even things up.
But that only makes sense from a narrow gender-equality perspective.
It makes much more sense to look at it from a family unit perspective where it’s a good thing for the man to take on the career burden to help his family.
> And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
Because it is critical to the basic maintenance of our society. The same reason I pay a penalty for a large number of government services I don’t use.
It pushes you towards having kids because you're effectively already paying for them. It wouldn't be enough to completely change someone who was very opposed to it but it's by no means neutral. The proposal the guy made in a different post of just enforcing sabbaticals is neutral.
How does it push you towards having kids, it just gives you the option. Giving someone choices is not, in any way, some kind of force.
The proposed change simply makes me and women both have the same cost to the employer up front. As it stands currently men are slightly cheaper due to the requirements of biology, and managers keep that in mind when comparing otherwise equal employees. It does not fix the difference between employees with kids and employees without so it is not a perfect solution
OK so I tax everybody enough to make indian food free for everybody.
Now I'm not forcing you to eat Indian food, technically. But if you hate curries you might feel a certain sense of injustice.
We're not cheaper due to the requirements of biology. (screaming) You don't have to have children. Even if you DO have children, and you're female, you DONT have to take extensive time off. I've known multiple successful women take almost no time off.
The injustice of paying for people who are already on average privileged (parents tend to be richer, etc etc) to be more privileged is far more greater than the imagined injustice of women being more likely to CHOOSE to have children then CHOOSE to take time off.
A women has to be there for the birth from what I understand, so they de facto have to take off time that men do not. As for your curry example, you might feel injustice but if Indian curry was required for society to continue then you'd have to just deal with it.
This undercurrent in this thread where people are outraged at having to spend a cent supporting parents just because they don't want children is mind boggling. I never plan to have children and yet I'd still support this. Do you expect there to be some sort of magical force supporting you in your old age, or making sure the economy doesn't shrink as the population declines?
From the viewpoint of a society, making sure that parents can raise the next generation is basic maintenance that we have to pay or face oblivion. I am sorry that you are appalled to have to share in that burden with the rest of us
1. Women have to be there for the birth, and let's say it's very hard to work immediately before and after, so that's a month generously. That has no connection with this idea, which is many months of leave.
2. As explained elsewhere, we do not need to raise the population for society to function. If we did, it would be better for everyone if we did it through immigration. The strongest argument you can make that we do need children is the social security setup, but this is artificial. It's very possible for social security to be funded for each generaion BY that generation itself, the system is just set up wrong.
3. Parents are on average far more privileged than me, I object to being forced to support anyone already above me socioeconomically, so should you.
4. I don't expect a magical force, as I said in point 2 the social security arrangement is artifical, and for a bonus point by the time I get to collecting requirement it will have been dramatically cut because even with flat population the current system is unsustainable. It will last just long enough for me to transfer a lot of wealth from the millenial to boomer generation (who are again on average more privileged). That's not a fringe perspective it's mainstream, look it up. So my retirement arrangement will be my savings and ascetism basically.
5. Parents can raise children without giving them lots of time off. We absolutely wouldn't face oblivion if the native American birthrate dropped to zero. It would blow a hole in social security that we'd plug with a wealth/corporate wealth grab tax, otherwise life would continue pretty well.
Bonus point - this isn't a tightness thing, most people who are opposed to this measure would probably be in favour of something that actually directly benefitted children, like a government run early years childcare for poorer children.
We don't control who comes here with immigration so it is an unreliable source to maintain the population. Today we have an inflow of immigrants but tomorrow that may have reversed.
Parents are not a class of people that structurally have more wealth. A lot of prospective parents save up in preparation for having a child, but those resources are drained by taking care of the child, on top of all the unprepared parents.
Your points about social security are something I agree with but immaterial to the argument. I'm not discussing a younger generation supporting the elderly with social security. I'm discussing literally taking care of you. We don't have 70 year old nurses feeding people in nursing homes. We also need people to actually participate in the economy. If people are aging out work, there needs to be replacement workers.
>Parents can raise children without taking extensive time off
They could, but we don't see that as a good thing with women. This proposed change just makes men and women have an equal cost to the employer when it comes to child birth.
All of these points we are discussing are tangential to that fact really. If you are against parental leave, that's your opinion you have a right to have. While we have parental leave for women however, this change is attempting to fix the prisoners dilemma society has fallen into of valuing male workers more because they can be forced to not spend time with their new child
We don't control who comes here with childbirth, it's actually a far less controllable method. Immigration can have totally arbitrary rules, and until the world hits 11bn and wealth is equalised there will be an unlimited supply of immigration.
Men aren't forced not to take time off in most countries but they still generally choose not to. There are multiple ways to address the perceived gender pay gap effect of maternity leave, the most obvious is to have state funded (m|p)aternity leave. The alternative, in countries other than the US with very long maternity leaves, is to shorten it. If women aren't allowed to take 9 months off paid then there won't be any discrimination on that basis.
You obviously don't want children to be born for some reason. This change is still tangential to your goals. What is is doing is adding an interface of IParent to both men and women so that when companies do their cost benefit analysis men and women are treated equally.
That is the whole change, full stop. If you want to get rid of parental leave so that you don't have to pay a dollar to maintain society, that is a different situation that has nothing to do with this
I don't agree with the people who feel that there is some obligation to have kids, BUT:
If people have kids its in my interest that they are educated, well nourished, well brought up etc as these kids will eventually become voters, taxpayers, perhaps my doctor etc.
Yes, it's the parents' choice, but to some extent I have an interest in their implementation, specifically by making it easier to make the choices they want.
If you want to pick a "I don't want to pay for it" hill to fight for, pick something more useful like the abolition of the destructive special tax treatment for donations to "non-profits" (it just puts the government in a position to choose which qualify) or the mortgage interest deduction (which mathematically doesn't help homeowners at all but is simply a government subsidy to real estate agents and home builders).
This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting.
Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us.
Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.
It begins with “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap”. Not, what would be valuable for men.
A woman who just gave birth just spent an increasingly personally costly, and completely requisite (so long as the pregnancy is wanted), nine months simply getting to the maternity leave portion of the process. I can’t immagi how a woman would perceive for men to gawk at it even being suggested they be forced to take maternity leave. If a man won’t take maternity leave the woman must and that is after the pregnancy they just sacrificed during.
Given the SCOTUS hearing at the moment, for such a tone deaf comment to be on HN says all you need to know.
I meant valuable in terms of what I was contributing to the family ... when I took 9 months of part-time paternity leave. I feel like you didn’t really think about what I was saying. All of this was the result of lots of planning and long discussions between the two of us about how we would take care of our son, and how this would affect each of our careers — you really don’t need to lecture me here.
Narrowing the wage gap is not about the family. It’s about the wage gap. It’s about women getting less pay for the same work. It’s about women. Not the family.
That is an unedited opinion piece [1] from somebody who works for an antifeminist organization [2]. If that's what you count as proof, then maybe consider you're not being objective here.
Can you dispute the claims made? I grabbed the first Google result but there are many. I can’t find a single piece of data that says women are paid 70% of men for the same job. Can you?
You're seriously asking me to do free research for the guy who started with an opinion and uncritically posted the first Google hit that agreed with his position? Why would that be a good use of my time?
I’ve already done the research, but you don’t seem to believe me so I’m telling you to go look for yourself. The “wage gap” is not a thing and it’s inevitable people are going to tell you that if you try to promote it.
If you have done the research, then a) why did you cite an unreviewed opinion piece as your only evidence, and b) why did you ask me to do the work of disputing your claims instead of just providing the evidence?
That's a nice bit of PR but if you look at Salesforce's old blog, you'll see there was no gender pay gap:
"Our assessment showed that we needed to adjust some salaries—for both men and women. Approximately six percent of employees required a salary adjustment, and roughly the same number of women and men were impacted. Salesforce has spent nearly $3 million dollars to eliminate statistically significant differences in pay."
It's described as anti-feminist by some critics, namely the critics who are being disingenuous in their use of statistics lacking proper controls, or outright lying or misrepresenting what the statistics mean. It's not the brand of feminism they identify with, but it's still feminism.
Perhaps "proven" wasn't the best word for the parent, you can't ever prove a negative, but considering the wage gap vanishes to less than several cents with proper controls in every serious study, even those done by "pro-feminist" organizations that you claim would be objective[1], it's simply a myth.
Objectively, a gap of 4 to 7 cents may exist, but also may just need further statistical controls[2]. The 70 cent gap oft quoted is entirely meant to incite emotion, social unrest, government action, and is dismissive of the progress that has been made.
[2] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy... * "Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous
conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a
multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify
corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be
almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
It is described as antifeminist by most feminists. And by me, for what it's worth.
I think you're burying a lot in "proper controls". And quoting a Bush administration official suggesting it's all about "individual choice" as if it were a neutral statement is not even vaguely giving a fair picture.
Under capitalism, the whole point of market signals like wages and prices is to shape individual choice. So it's tautological to suggest that accounting for individual choice proves that there's no sexism embedded in the system.
The reasonable feminist critique of approaches like this is that women don't just magically prefer part-time, family-friendly work any more than they just happened to prefer to be homemakers through most of history. In that view, we have been removing structural impediments to a fair society for centuries, and the work is not done yet.
Could you please not up the ante like this on HN? This comment and the ones you added below take the thread into flamewar. Picking a gotcha phrase from what someone posted and giving them a smackdown leads straight to degraded discussion.
Instead, please follow the site guidelines and (a) assume good faith, and (b) react to the most plausible interpretation of what someone said, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Both of those are necessary for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here. That still leaves plenty of room to disagree, and then your disagreement will be much higher-quality, be more likely to convince others, and much more likely to lead to interesting (a.k.a. unpredictable) responses.
I think the primary point of the article is that this flexible planning is not functioning as an equalizer in the workplace (Title: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home...) and that it could, and should. To turn it into more direct phrasing; a woman has to take a significant chunk of time off during a pregnancy by virtue of the condition, and this has a net effect on her career.
When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing). So an employer accounts for the loss of that duty in different ways such as shifting responsibilities. And many of these ways become a limit to career success. Imagine she is closing a large sales deal but has to leave before close due to pregnancy - so she is no longer the clear performer in that sale, as it is closed by someone else. This reduces her effectiveness on paper (becomes a detractor) due to gender differences (becomes unequal).
A man has been given flexibility to give and take that same time in a way that permits some juggling of work and family supporting efforts - i.e your example case. You worked part time, she could really not do that in her case. This lets you stay active in your role (little effect on your responsibilities) when she could not.
> When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing).
So wouldn't it be ideal for the mother's partner to be able to participate 24-7 to help her recover and to help both parents bond closely with the child? And not be expected to be tugged back by ties to work?
FWIW I had a lawyer who was messaging with clients from the delivery room. So not sure about your stereotype.
I know for a fact pregnancy is hard on the body - my experience was nearly 12hrs delivery and my wife was in the ICU for 3 days following. It took months to recover completely.
In your rush to defend your personal 'stereotype'; I hope you understand that being able to message clients from the delivery room is unusual. No matter what your intent in saying this, never underestimate the serious nature of childbirth.
But women don't have to have children, in fact it would be much better if they didn't. You write your post as if it's all miraculous conception.
Women can make a choice to do something that will impact their career negatively. Men don't have that choice.
People who don't intend to have children subsidising people who do (who are on average already richer and more privileged) is deeply messed up. This only makes sense from a very narrow middle class upper-echelon-gender-equality is the most important thing in society lense.
So if being born means that I have to approve of any measure which causes more births, then logically I should be in favour of for example reducing contraceptive programs in Africa, etc.
Being born doesn't automatically force you to support population increase or be a hypocrite. Even if you had a moral obligation to maximise (total number of people that will ever live), then that number is probably larger (because of humanity surviving into the future) if we drastically cut population in the present.
But employers know that you might have children and if you are a woman that you will have a certain amount of time off work as a result. So they might choose to employ a man instead even if you don't plan to have children yourself. Obviously illegal in many jurisdictions but extremely hard to prove.
This is more of a problem of our current system of maternity leave being company funded rather than publically funded which would actually solve this problem overnight.
My point basically boils down to this: making parental leave about something other than enabling parents to recover and take care of their kids is really kludgey, and probably would have made our experience of raising our son more difficult unless it was really, really long (like one year long).
The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.
I see your meaning clearly now - but your point then is obviously tangential.
To your argument I also personally don't know there is any reliable way to equalize this problem. Men and women are created differently, and nature is unfair - just ask the fly and the spider. The social contract means we so far mostly anyway agree it is better treat equally than to force equality (shades of Bergeron is poignant - and yes this inches us closer).
Any intervention like this won't be perfect for some people. Just like the status quo isn't perfect. The question is not, "Would change X be equally great for all people?" but "Is change X net less bad?"
If you think that there's a change X' that would be better yet, you should definitely propose it. But if you're just saying, "I don't care about fixing a problem that benefits me if the solution isn't perfect for me," you can see how that's not the most compelling of arguments.
Except that you have no way of proving that and it would be illegal for them to ask. What it actually does is leave you do the work/pay taxes for your colleagues reproduction holiday.
"Reproduction holiday". I can only assume you have never spent time around babies and small children. Holiday usually is the last word that springs to mind.
The guy thinks the one month is a generous amount of time to give a woman to recover from childbirth while taking of a baby at the same time. He seems adamant that people only take time off to relax and there's zero benefit to the child to having parents around. The arguments hes posting might hold more sway if he based them on the reality of having a child at all
Sounds like he just wants people to stop having kids at all. Like our society wouldn't collapse within a generation if we didn't. Somehow it's an individual's responsibility to maintain the future workforce and the rest of society in no way benefits.
Don’t enforce it. Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. Next make part of the parental leave shared between parents be allocated to the father. Now if they don’t use it they will lose a benefit they already paid taxes for. The last and most important step is to keep this system in place for a generation or more, after which any parent not doing a fair chunk of the parental leave will be considered a bad parent by their peers.
Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded.
I guess it'd be good for small businesses, but I'm not sure how I'd feel about paying $40,000,000 a year to Larry Ellison while he was on parental leave.
Yes. Cap for where I am (Sweden) is around the pay of a teacher, and the pay during the leave is 80% of that. This means I as a software dev is paid around 50% of my salary during the leave. Some employers fill this in up to e.g 80 or 90% as a benefit.
On our side of the pond you only get paid the corresponding of your full salary based on what you discount for social security. In your example, if he's getting 40m a year, then he's also paying the corresponding social security for a 40m/y income.
We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate, or live under fascist governments, or worse.
Much of the gains of two-income parents goes into house prices to be closer to good schools - i.e. zero sum competition, while company incentives are to encourage people not to have children, or defer children until too late to maintain population, and essentially stopping the next generation of employees from being born.
And then you mix migration driven by climate change into the mix, and it's very easy for populist politicians to whip up narratives of being overrun, not least because on a historical scale it's true (and of course it's always been true, everywhere has always been in the state of being overrun, with ebbs and flows).
The dynamics here aren't good and it's hard to see how they're going to change any time soon, short of a crisis.
>We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate
Except for Japan (probably China when it comes to it), most will import labor. Globalization (in terms of corporations) isn't just about taking jobs overseas it's also about brining people from overseas in (in the US H1Bs for professionals, for example).
>And then you mix migration driven by climate change
Do you seriously believe the migration is driven by climate change, not by the difference in life quality driven by political/cultural differences?
Do you seriously believe that climate change isn't a factor? One need look no further than the Maldives for an extreme example, but there are little examples all over. Obviously people migrate for lots of different reasons, but climate change is becoming a serious one for a lot of people.
I seriously think that differences between countries in factors like medical care, corruption, education, religious freedom/etc outweigh the climate issues by a huge margin. And climate-driven migration would normally mean moving to a different climate, not trying to offset the ~1 degree Celcius change that is observable as of today.
I don’t think this is legal. Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, so, if women are not also forced to take such leave, how can men be?
It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach.
One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies.
Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children.
Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.
Arguably, decreasing human kind's birthrate is a net positive. Even in the absence of that, being a dad, and knowing many dads, we've already made the choice to "disadvantage" ourselves -- and wish we could do it more. What stops us is the fact that we would lose our jobs which disadvantages our kids.
So I say bring on mandatory leave! The vast majority will be much happier.
One important tangent. There's a very significant nuance to birthrates you're not considering when it comes to reducing birthrates. Most of everybody knows birth rates in the developed world are decreasing, compared to the developing world. But what many do not know is that this sort of pattern holds true even within developed nations themselves. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year have 50% more children than those who earn $200k per year. [1] The slope of the inverse relationship between income and fertility is surprisingly and disconcertingly smooth.
Think about what this means. The things that correlate strongly with fertility are: low income, low education, high religiosity. If you look at the pool of all children being born they're going to end up ever more disproportionately in low income, low education, highly religious households over higher income secular households in developed nations. I used to feel similarly to you, but in considering this the very people 'responsibly' choosing not to have children are the exact people that should be reproducing to no end if we want a better tomorrow for everybody. And this is without even considering genetic factors. Responsible fertility is, paradoxically, anything but responsible for those who would have the wherewithal to consider such things in the first place.
I don’t see how increasing the birth rate of people making over $200k per year leads to a better tomorrow (not that such an idealistic notion even exists). You’d be increasing the number of mega consumers, international flights, mc mansions...
What you really seem to be saying is you’d like people who aren’t like you to stop reproducing and people who are like you to reproduce more.
This hypothesis made a lot of sense in the past. It was logical and mapped to the data reasonably well. But I'm not sure it does anymore. Part of the reason that I mentioned the developed world is that people earning < $10k are not pumping out children in some sort of attempt to create a family that can provide sustenance and a strong lineage. Far from it - in today's urban societies, children are often more of an indefinite burden than a future tool for wealth creation. Maybe even more clear is considering the sharp decline in the middle class fertility over the past decades. Again it's not like those born in e.g. the 70s were that much less likely to survive to coming of age driving their parents to have that many more children. And again, the urbanization problem was also present then as well in any case.
But it disproportionately affects those who choose to have children. This doesn't eliminate an imbalance, it would simply shift some of the burden around.
The he whole point is to eliminate one of the primary causes of gender inequality in the workplace. Spreading the burden of parenting is exactly the right thing to do.
AFAIK, no American authority demands mothers take maternity leave, it's something that American mothers ask for (and tend to complain that it's not generous enough).
> how are these factors different for men than for women?
For the sake of this argument, they aren't. It's not about which gender they impact. It's about what percentage of relationship participants they impact.
Right now ~50% of relationship partners face credible career setbacks as a result of post-childbirth leave. Changing that percentage to 100% is probably going to have some ripples.
That's not to say it might not be worthwhile, just that it's unlikely to be as simple as "flip a switch, everybody acts the same".
The downside is that it forces people who don't want children to pay for other people's children, at a time when we should be trying to reduce the population and not increase it. Having children is not a public service, it's closer to pollution and I object so much to subsidising it.
This is a choice we made in how we structure our governments though that doesn't make much sense on it's own.
We could easily have a system where each generation pays for its OWN social security, you just let the government screw you by spending the current account on wars.
Population is a much bigger question than a specific, stupid government fiscal policy.
Unless you "save for retirement" by putting canned food in a basement, all you're doing is arranging for some sort of entitlement to a share of the production of a future generation of workers. That's true whether you're talking about social security paid with tax dollars, dividends paid on stock holdings, etc. Those are all abstractions over an arrangement in which a working generation gives up some of the surplus of its labor to the retired generation.
That's a good point and fairly true I think but there are some caveats that limit it's application to this argument as in (do we want more american kids).
1. It's not only the production, we also work for tangibleassets, mostly housing like you said storable food, machinery etc. That's relevant because if population decreased all of these would become cheaper. To take to the extreme - 1000,000 humans in the near future could probably sustain an incredible standard of living assisted by robots. Pragmatically, if I owned a house my outgoings would be tiny.
2. You're paying for the work of ANY future generation, it absolutely doesn't have to be American. Most of the most expensive things (electronics, cars) are already produced abroad. Food, haircuts and social care are a fraction and only decreasing.
So social security doesn't have to be that shape and an equally large young American population isn't necessary to sustain the current older population. Deeper than this thread but I guess relevant, a lot of hours go into producing products for the 1%, or jobs which don't make sense which our system protects because it's built around having 100% employment so we force you into a min. wage job in order to pay the rest of your income in benefits from taxes on the top percent. If our system didn't optimize to 100% employment and had more extensive welfare you'd see much higher unemployment and the trains would still run.
That's very short sighted. Population doesn't permeate the ether like a perfect gas, and we're not all indistinct like the molecules of such a gas.
Whether the current global population levels are unsustainable is up for debate. What is not up for debate, and is already apparent in Western nations as well as other booming economies such as China and Japan are the severe implications of demographic change and the disruptive effect of an aging population on a nation's economy.
This is why making babies in rich countries makes economic sense. If you want to fight overpopulation, then you need to fight for women's rights and education in countries where birth rates are too high. For every baby that you're not having, 20 others are born into poverty.
It's only "economic sense" in a VERY narrow viewpoint where you assume that you're going to disallow immigration AND assume that your social security system is offset by a generation AND assume that economic measures like GDP/etc are important. I'd change those three before pushing the "increase population" button.
Japan had low growth and higher happiness for a couple of decades now.
Even taking all that, economically useful != right. It's economically useful to burn the forests and raise the oceans but it's not right.
Immigration is not disallowed. In many European economies, birth rates have been below replacement for decades, and immigration has been the only thing propping up populations. Recent events notwithstanding.
Japan is facing a demographic crisis[1]. Among developed nations, their problem is the most extreme because of very low rates of immigration, and a continuously dwindling replacement rate.
Nobody's talking about increasing population. We're well below replacement rate, and that's terrifying. The environment is not going to be helped by developed nations collapsing under their own demographic weight.
To reiterate my point: abstaining from having children in the West does a) nothing to reduce overpopulation b) severely impacts local economic capacity without benefit to the environment. Said economic capacity is currently at the forefront of developing sustainable energy models.
In order to reduce overpopulation, fighting for women's education and women's rights has proven far more valuable.
That's one way to look at it, as if children are some sort of luxury good like a BMW or a labradoodle. The other way to look at it is that all adults were once children, so anything we do to support all children is fair.
I think the flaw with your framing is it's essentially ahistorical. The only way we all got here is by having ancestors. We all consumed quite a lot of resources getting to adulthood. If you're all that concerned about improper subsidies, surely you're eager pay back, with interest, the large one that you've received?
One: Your parents taking time off benefits them a lot more than you. It might benefit you a bit but it doesn't benefit you to see your dad from 0-3 months and not your mum, you're too young to know. People assume that it's a big benefit but actually I'd imagine having your parents somewhat around from the ages of 1-3 is far more important than constantly around from 0-1.
The other flaw is bigger really, basically it's a logical fallacy. Read my point to the other comment with this argument, it doesn't actually make sense. You can't expect people to be in favour of the conditions that lead to their existence, if you were the product of rape you should be pro rape? What if we were a species where all birth was via the rape and murder of the father, you'd still be telling people they're ethically obliged to be in favour of reproduction? Just because someone has benefited from something which had something else in the chain of causation doesn't mean that they have to be in favour of that thing. I benefitted massively from the colonial history of my country, for example.
Oh, well if your best evidence is you imagining things, you can see how I'm not going to invest a lot in this reply.
I'll clear up one misunderstanding, though. The point isn't that one should be in favor of the particular conditions of one's birth. It's that one should be in favor of the continued existence of humanity, and do so such that the conditions for future humans are at least as good. Basically, Rawls' veil of ignorance.
By the way, I don't think your misunderstanding was an honest one. If you get to the point that you're suggesting your opponents must be pro-rape, maybe that's a sign you're too wound up to have a good discussion.
Why should we be reducing the population? I’ve seen this mentioned a few times in this thread and I just don’t get it.
Also, so many things are subsidised by governments that if you were to pick and chose what you approve of by you paying for it and not using it then you’ll not use much.
On the softer side of things, having kids is a good thing, supporting people as much as possible when they have kids with flexible paid leave is a good thing, and I hope more companies and countries continue to improve levels of support for new parents.
Everyone is talking about needing to control population, but according to current figures, the population will level our around 11b people around 2100. Check out www.gapminder.org for more info, but a lot of what people think about the world is wrong.
2. This isn't uniform across the globe. Japan's population is shrinking due to a very low birth rate, and that may be a bad thing (loss of cultural and genetic diversity, for example). And this is the more relevant aspect given the context.
Color me skeptical. If previous prognostications are and indicator, humanity in general cannot predict the future more than 5-10 years out with reasonable accuracy.
Another way of saying this is that the confidence interval on global population estimates 80 years into the future is most likely large enough to render the estimate meaningless.
An excellent way to destroy a country's productivity.
Listen, if you want the government to incentivize having children, then establish tax consequences. Same way as the government can force you to pay a tax penalty, the government could force people older than a certain age who are still childless to pay a "societal development" tax. The proceeds of the tax go towards paying for free childcare.
With regular police visits to ensure you're not secretly using this time to work, or get education, or self-improve, because that would be unfair. In fact, it would be more efficient to just put such people in a low-security prison. With video games and well-stocked mini-bar of course, after all they are not criminals!
Comparing Sweden, which has mandatory paternity leave, to other countries with parental leave, the the amount of money you get paid during leave is the major factor in whether someone takes it or not.
I took 12 weeks of paternity leave after my wife went back to work, and definitely recommend it if you can swing it. Partly just that spending time with a kid small enough to nap inside your hoodie is worth doing -- but honestly I'm not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent and that's not why I'm a fan of paternity leave. More that it helped so much with setting us up for parenting together.
One reason is that it's hard to understand just how much work it is if you haven't done it on your own for long stretches, and it helps for both partners to know that both partners know how hard it is and have taken a turn at it.
Another is the self-reinforcing competence thing -- if one partner always packs for going out, say, then the other partner is likely to take longer and do a worse job when they try packing, so it's easier for everyone if they don't, and you end up thinking only one person is good at parenting. To some extent it's fine to specialize, but having to do everything during the day on my own for a few months made it really clear that both of us can be good at any given thing if need be.
One thing I was surprised by (but shouldn't have been) is just how much wealth you're showing off by taking paternity leave. Telling people you're taking 12 weeks of paternity leave in America is basically telling them you have plenty of money and a job you can afford to walk away from, which pretty much crosses the line into boasting about things you shouldn't boast about. I ended up playing it down more than I expected, which kind of sucks, since it's an awesome thing that more folks should be able to do.
I'm in favour of a set amount of parental leave that can be shared between spouses in whatever ratio they choose. I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing.
Example: You and your husband would like to breastfeed your baby for the first 6 months but you are unable to express? Too bad, your husband has to take paternity leave and you will have to go back to work.
From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth that is nurtured and strengthened through breastfeeding. I would vehemently oppose the state enforcing any interruption in my child's wellbeing as we see fit as parents.
I'm not thinking-of-the-children, I'm thinking-of-my-children. I don't care how other parents choose to allocate their parental leave. If they want it to be more equitable, then more power to them. And it's not dogma it's just a biological fact that men can't breastfeed and thus women spend more time with the child. There is a snowball effect to this that makes the connection stronger which seems to be pretty self-evident.
> And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence
Did you understand the point about not being able to express? If the mother can't express (which many find too painful or just can't) how are the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding supposed to be delivered to the child?
I don't understand how depriving families
of choices is going to be a good thing.
There are loads of situations where being deprived of choices is a good thing.
Consider the prisoners' dilemma [1], where the global optimum is for neither side to defect, but the Nash equilibrium is for both sides to defect. If both sides could be deprived of the choice to defect, both would enjoy a better outcome.
The state already imposes interruptions in what parents see as their childs well being. Requiring vaccinations to attend school, preventing parents from including children in dangerous religious events like snake handling, stopping underage marriages even when the parent thinks it's in the child best economic interest, etc.
Unless you are against state intervention in cases like these, then you are already accepting that the state can interfere. At that point the question is a matter of degree
> Unless you are against state intervention in cases like these, then you are already accepting that the state can interfere.
Okay, fair enough. I will vehemently oppose any state interruption that goes against medical recommendations. You will not believe the string of NHS nurses and caregivers who tried to ensure that we breastfed our child.
Yeah that makes sense. I dont see how giving father's the same parental leave as women is an issue there though. Companies aren't going to give extra leave to women instead of giving it to men
Unless you are against state intervention in cases like these, then you are already accepting that the state can interfere. At that point the question is a matter of degree
I just can't be charitable with the whole "well the state already does..." arguments.
In free societies, the state interfering with child rearing is a serious matter.
If you read the article you see why: men who take it are liable to face consequences ("what, you are so unimportant that the company can do with out you?") that clearly also affect women.
The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.
The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.
It will never not affect your career. Even if you work for a wonderfully enlightened company that is happy to have you take six months off at full pay, the people who are continuing to work in that time are going to be gaining experience and increasing their skills, and will have a better shot at raises and promotions.
Or you end up with companies that discriminate against parents of either sex. Then birth rates plummet even more and companies of the future struggle to find skilled workers.
There should be a system that every n years you get a 6-month paid sabbatical that can be used for any purpose - studying, traveling, having a kid, anything. Because consider two women, one who wants kids and one who doesn’t. Why should woman 2 be disadvantaged? Isn’t that the exact opposite of equality?
Well it’s already illegal to sack a woman immediately that she announces she’s pregnant, so I guess this would come under the same thing. For both men and women obv.
But it's not about that, it's about a proposed law. Anything to do with how to run companies isn't hacker culture, we don't spam posts about the best offshore tax arrangements and the advantages of different board structures. Company stuff is mostly to do with startups and this practise is both less relevant to and less favoured by startups.
As I said, we generally don't post company minutae unless there's a link to tech or startups. It's not opposition to seeing the post, it's opposition to the general trend of putting gender culture war articles otherwise disconnected to hacker news on the forum because gender activists chose to make SV a battleground.
It's not culture war to be bored of the culture war.
This board posts things constantly that don't have a link to tech. The only requirement is that it would be interesting to hackers. If this article got upvoted, then it's obviously interesting to the board.
This isn't a gender war article either as far as I can see
It doesn't tell you how to work less or how to improve your life. It's specifically about legislation to try and reduce the gender pay gap by changing the law.
In academia, some studies have shown than mandatory paternity leave may not close gaps in productivity:
The authors compared promotion rates before and after these gender-neutral parental policies were adopted, relative to trends in comparable institutions that did not alter their policies, while also accounting for an array of influences, like where each economist was trained. They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists.
In Norway mother and father each have 15 weeks paid leave from work after childbirth, e.i. 30 weeks total. If the father chooses not not use his paid leave it cannot normally be transferred to the mother.
I'm surprised this has had such a good reception. Hobbling men in the name of equality is just bizarre. It's mixture of "Hansel and Gretel" and "Harrison Bergeron". Instead of weights just fatten them up with sweets.
I didn't push a human being out from between my legs. Because of that I'm capable of working. I would like to be useful to my family. Working is one way I can do that.
If I work while my wife is on leave and the gender pay gap is worsened. I don't care. If my wife stays home to recover from her ordeal and the gender wage gap is worsened. She doesn't care.
The gender wage gap is so abstract and cynical at this point. It is beyond meaning. People aren't allow to live their lives the way they see fit because of some stupid number.
Shocking I know but there is no such thing as the "average woman". If her wage is different from the "average man" it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits.
It's not leave to just fuck off and do nothing. Taking care of a baby is an incredibly demanding task which is why most human societies we're built around having multiple generations of family, or other members of your tribe, helping with childcare. Foisting all of that onto a mother without any assistance is a relatively new thing in human history. If you took parental leave, most people would expect to be an actual parent to the child.
Beyond all of that, this change isn't about what the right level of child care is. It's about the fact that managers and companies discount women workers of child bearing age to a degree that they do not for men, because if a couple is having a child the woman is going to have to take some amount of time off. The suggestion from this article would be like adding an interface of IParent over the male and female classes, and having the employers make hiring/firing/promotion decisions based off of the interface rather than the concrete class. If you don't do this the two groups of people, men and women, will be treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth. As a culture we've made a value judgement that this sort of discrimination is a bad thing, so why would we not mitigate it?
The first and simple reason is that you're applying rules categorically. If I live in a multi-generational household I don't need to stay home and care for the children to the same degree as a more "typical" family. Compelling me to stay home reduces my earnings with no added benefit to my wife or family. In fact you've hindered my family's ability to progress economically. You've hurt a specific woman to help the average woman. As I've illustrated above, the average woman does not exist. Mandatory leave helps a statistical category but not women.
The second more complex reason has more to do with economics.
We already know that women who have never married earn more than men of the same category (the gap is not large or worth considering).
> As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.[1]
From this we can gleam two things. 1: Women are not being "treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth" (at least in a way that disadvantages them in terms of salary). 2: Mothers are being treated differently based on their behaviors.
I hope the first statement is self-explanatory but the second might need additional context.
How does an employer know if a women will give birth in the next five years? The obvious answer is "they don't". So if that's the case how do businesses know to pay mothers less than never-married women? Because they're not paying mothers less. They're paying never-married women more. People with more continuous years of service are more able to capitalize on opportunities in the workplace and are never in a position to be rendered redundant by a replacement.
If you compel men to take paternal leave, you open them up to all the detriments that mothers face. You take a family who's member has already taken an earnings hit and doubled down.
The gender wage gap (as it exists in the United States in 2018) is not a concern. Efforts to fix the gap will result in lower wages for fathers not higher wages for women (the terms "fathers" and "women" were chosen with significant care).
tl;dr: Fixing the pay gap between never-married women and mothers will solve the gender pay gap as a corollary.
My understanding is that this idea would imply paid mandatory leave. It would be bad for the individuals if it was mandatory unpaid leave.
>From this we can gleam two things. 1: Women are not being "treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth" (at least in a way that disadvantages them in terms of salary). 2: Mothers are being treated differently based on their behaviors.
I hope the first statement is self-explanatory but the second might need additional context.
Women are being treated differently here because when a man and woman decide to have a child, the woman is guaranteed to have to take leave and that is known and accounted for before hand. Mandatory parental leave makes that cost be the same regardless of gender. It is disingenuous to say women aren't being treated differently and only mothers are, when men don't get the same treatment despite being fathers
>If you compel men to take paternal leave, you open them up to all the detriments that mothers face
I view this more as spreading the burden of child rearing across society which I agree would increase the burden on men and companies. It is a completely necessary part of being biological life and continuing our society, but as we currently stand we just demand that a subset of society takes care of it on their own dime. If paternal leave was mandatory for children we would be treating men and women equally, because women have no choice but taking leave when they have a child, and we would be promotion better care for the children which is in our own best interests. We are k type breeders, not r type, and we have shown a better return on investment by giving better care to less children.
>The gender wage gap (as it exists in the United States in 2018) is not a concern.
> My understanding is that this idea would imply paid mandatory leave. It would be bad for the individuals if it was mandatory unpaid leave.
That was understood in my post. Long periods of paid leave inhibits earnings growth and leaves you vulnerable to replacement regardless of gender.
This is what was meant by "Fixing the pay gap between never-married women and mothers will solve the gender pay gap as a corollary."
> Women are being treated differently here because when a man and woman decide to have a child, the woman is guaranteed to have to take leave.
Yes there is a guaranteed recovery period. And, yes, depending on how long you are absent this leave will effect earnings. But...
> men don't get the same treatment despite being fathers
Men who take long paternity leave suffer the same income stagnation as women.
"Still, most men can’t afford to take more than a few days off after the birth of a new child. Especially because parental leave can depress long-term earnings [...] regardless of gender."[1]
Compelling paternity leave does not increase the earnings of mothers. It decreases the earnings of fathers. Which may very well shrink the gender wage gap but it makes families poorer and less able to provide for themselves and their children.
To be trite, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
> I view this more as spreading the burden
This, I believe, is our fundamental disagreement. You think a burden is being spread more thinly whereas I think you've created additional burdens. In my opinion, and I believe the data backs me up, this strategy reduces fathers and does nothing to help mothers (economically).
Let's stop discriminating against people who have a family or other things to do except work.
Start by enforcing 40 hour work week and make overtime paid 150%.
Employers prefer frugal workaholics with no obligations but these individuals impose externality on "normal people". We're rich enough, no need working above 8h/day.
I'd go all the way and make it illegal to provide work without compensation (internships, 80h work weeks etc). And I'd to try limit oversupply of labour by further limiting standard workweek below 40h.
Is there mandatory maternity leave? No. Women want their freebees. So now of course forcibly keeping men from working more MUST be done. Busy body nonsense.
That doesn't apply here in Canada. If I were a new father in the US, faced with taking a massive pay cut for forced paternity leave, I'd pick up the insurance for my child at retail.
Heck, in high pressure firms where anyone taking parental leave is inviting career stagnation or termination (fully justified by having HR set up a paper trail of unsatisfactory performance evaluations), you'd be downright crazy to disclose the birth of your child.
2) Historically, no one bought insurance on the individual market. It's been absurdly expensive. That was why the individual mandate under Obamacare is/was important. It forced healthy people to buy insurance, and thus drive down the price.
3) It's illegal discriminate based on parental status.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadI think it wasn't worth it because of an arbitration clause or whatever, but I wasn't going to risk my time, money, and energy required when I just had a baby.
It's not mandated (yet) by law, so why bother to set-up bad goodwill? Just to bait people into joining?
It seems a very poisonous scheme with little benefit for anyone.
Sounds like you need a group lawsuit. Firing one person - could be coincidence. Firing three? Starting to look like a pattern of punishment. The more people you can get on the lawsuit, the stronger your case.
Superrationality provides nicer solutions to classic problems like the Prisoners Dilemma, but superrationality "is not mainstream". (Economists don't get it.)
And why should someone who wants to be a mother and a careerist have to accept more career penalties than someone who wants to be a father and careerist?
And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
For the same reason that men do. After all, society as a whole has decided for some reason that children are a good thing, and that the cost of having them should be born by all, even those without.
Is this not a thread about how society has NOT yet decided such a thing?
The argument is "should we subsidize children" and you're substituting "does society want to subsidize children" and then for THAT you're substituting "do we currently subsidize children".
You can only go from 1 to 2 by assuming something like tyranny of the majority.
You can only go from 2 to 3 by assuming that the current system is exactly what society would choose if they decided now. Which is obviously silly, given a blank slate drug laws, marriage laws and tax breaks would all be different for a few examples.
'Given a blank slate' is so far from practice that it might as well be fiction.
Utopia is not suddenly going to spring to life, if you want it there is only one way to get there: get into politics, and good luck because the one word you will learn very quickly once you've arrived there is 'compromise'.
But we're not arguing that we're about to do something from a blank slate, the blank slate point is that just because society DOES something, doesn't mean that it WANTs to do something, for the same reasons as above we don't decide everything by referendum. The US numbers on single payer, medicaid for all, drug laws and etc are miles away from the policy, your argument is like looking at marijuana being illegal in most states a few years ago and using it as evidence that they want it to be illegal.
So when you write 'we' you can substitute 'I' and be closer to the truth, and you don't need to drag in a whole pile of other stuff that is hypothetical rather than real, why ignore the evidence in front of your eyes if you have it?
Hypotheticals are great to argue about things for which we do not have data, they suck at improving over reality when we do.
As or the tyranny of the majority not being the safe thing to assume in a democratic system: the democratic system pretty much codifies the tyranny of the majority, with a few exceptions about forming coalitions where some give-and-take allows a small minority to score some points because they can be the swing vote. But if you want to see the tyranny of the majority at work you need to look no further than that US that you write about.
Hypotheticals aren't a silly debating tactic, they're an important component of logic and reason, see the discovery of SR.
You clearly do not understand the concept of the tyranny of the majority, it's not what this thread is about but since you asked...
The tyranny of the majority refers to the problem with voting systems where anything that 51% agrees to, no matter how unjust, will pass, especially where it harms the 10%. The reason why it does not apply to western democratic systems: Major changes can require supermajorities. Constutions and rights laws restrict the range of possible laws that can be passed. Citizens do not vote directly on outcomes but elect a representative who is expected to consider things more deeply on their behalf.
Our current setup puts this entirely on the wife and leaves the husband out of it. Requiring paternal leave would both equalize make and female employees in the eyes of employers _and_ allow for the parents to provide care to the child without driving themselves into poor health or depression
I'm happy to give parents time off. I'm happy parents get more sick days where I'm at to take care of their young children. I'm happy my taxes, in part, go to this.
We actually need children. And parents have more responsibilities than I do. I want children to be educated and well cared for. The most selfish reason is that I want competent folks to take care of me when I'm old: The other is that I want humanity to be better when I leave the earth.
There are costs and benefits to everything. Besides, I had/have the choice of becoming a mother and getting those benefits - though there is a lot to lose as well. And it isn't me.
I think some folks are reacting to the forced paternity leave bit. And in one sense, I understand - but women don't realistically have those choices and I think most doctors would rather women didn't get right back to work. The other bit, as you've said in another reply, is that women get stuck with the assumption that she's going to take maternity leave and there is nothing the company can do about it. If it is extended to males, companies would have to worry about that with everyone and they'd rather not, thank-you-very-much.
Offering is, I think, is both wonderful and not enough. If I understand correctly (immigrant here), Norway used to require some paternity leave and had a portion of parental leave that could be split between the two parents. At some point, the government quit making paternity leave a requirement, but still leaving it in place if the father wanted it and still allowing parental leave to be split between the parents.
... and fewer fathers took paternity leave at that point.
The thing with not only offering but requiring such things is that it helps to change societal norms and expectations as long as they are offered for enough time. When it is simply optional, safeguards need to be put into place. I'm not the one to ask what the safeguards should be at the moment :)
Because of clear biological differences you can’t simply substitute a man for a woman.
As such this article is suggesting that we can make men worse off career wise to even things up.
But that only makes sense from a narrow gender-equality perspective.
It makes much more sense to look at it from a family unit perspective where it’s a good thing for the man to take on the career burden to help his family.
> And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
Because it is critical to the basic maintenance of our society. The same reason I pay a penalty for a large number of government services I don’t use.
The proposed change simply makes me and women both have the same cost to the employer up front. As it stands currently men are slightly cheaper due to the requirements of biology, and managers keep that in mind when comparing otherwise equal employees. It does not fix the difference between employees with kids and employees without so it is not a perfect solution
Now I'm not forcing you to eat Indian food, technically. But if you hate curries you might feel a certain sense of injustice.
We're not cheaper due to the requirements of biology. (screaming) You don't have to have children. Even if you DO have children, and you're female, you DONT have to take extensive time off. I've known multiple successful women take almost no time off.
The injustice of paying for people who are already on average privileged (parents tend to be richer, etc etc) to be more privileged is far more greater than the imagined injustice of women being more likely to CHOOSE to have children then CHOOSE to take time off.
This undercurrent in this thread where people are outraged at having to spend a cent supporting parents just because they don't want children is mind boggling. I never plan to have children and yet I'd still support this. Do you expect there to be some sort of magical force supporting you in your old age, or making sure the economy doesn't shrink as the population declines?
From the viewpoint of a society, making sure that parents can raise the next generation is basic maintenance that we have to pay or face oblivion. I am sorry that you are appalled to have to share in that burden with the rest of us
Bonus point - this isn't a tightness thing, most people who are opposed to this measure would probably be in favour of something that actually directly benefitted children, like a government run early years childcare for poorer children.
Parents are not a class of people that structurally have more wealth. A lot of prospective parents save up in preparation for having a child, but those resources are drained by taking care of the child, on top of all the unprepared parents.
Your points about social security are something I agree with but immaterial to the argument. I'm not discussing a younger generation supporting the elderly with social security. I'm discussing literally taking care of you. We don't have 70 year old nurses feeding people in nursing homes. We also need people to actually participate in the economy. If people are aging out work, there needs to be replacement workers.
>Parents can raise children without taking extensive time off
They could, but we don't see that as a good thing with women. This proposed change just makes men and women have an equal cost to the employer when it comes to child birth.
All of these points we are discussing are tangential to that fact really. If you are against parental leave, that's your opinion you have a right to have. While we have parental leave for women however, this change is attempting to fix the prisoners dilemma society has fallen into of valuing male workers more because they can be forced to not spend time with their new child
Men aren't forced not to take time off in most countries but they still generally choose not to. There are multiple ways to address the perceived gender pay gap effect of maternity leave, the most obvious is to have state funded (m|p)aternity leave. The alternative, in countries other than the US with very long maternity leaves, is to shorten it. If women aren't allowed to take 9 months off paid then there won't be any discrimination on that basis.
That is the whole change, full stop. If you want to get rid of parental leave so that you don't have to pay a dollar to maintain society, that is a different situation that has nothing to do with this
If people have kids its in my interest that they are educated, well nourished, well brought up etc as these kids will eventually become voters, taxpayers, perhaps my doctor etc.
Yes, it's the parents' choice, but to some extent I have an interest in their implementation, specifically by making it easier to make the choices they want.
If you want to pick a "I don't want to pay for it" hill to fight for, pick something more useful like the abolition of the destructive special tax treatment for donations to "non-profits" (it just puts the government in a position to choose which qualify) or the mortgage interest deduction (which mathematically doesn't help homeowners at all but is simply a government subsidy to real estate agents and home builders).
No screaming here, please. That includes not using uppercase for emphasis, which amplifies it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us.
Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.
It begins with “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap”. Not, what would be valuable for men.
A woman who just gave birth just spent an increasingly personally costly, and completely requisite (so long as the pregnancy is wanted), nine months simply getting to the maternity leave portion of the process. I can’t immagi how a woman would perceive for men to gawk at it even being suggested they be forced to take maternity leave. If a man won’t take maternity leave the woman must and that is after the pregnancy they just sacrificed during.
Given the SCOTUS hearing at the moment, for such a tone deaf comment to be on HN says all you need to know.
I’m not lecturing you. And I’m not a woman.
[1] https://www.cjr.org/innovations/newsrooms_boost_traffic.php and also https://www.joshsteimle.com/writing/how-being-a-forbes-contr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Women%27s_Forum
I obviously have looked and do believe it's a thing. Even individual CEOs discover it's a thing within their companies. For example, Salesforce: https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/the-ceo-of-salesforce-f...
If it didn't exist, it's certainly surprising that companies keep finding it internally and correcting it.
"Our assessment showed that we needed to adjust some salaries—for both men and women. Approximately six percent of employees required a salary adjustment, and roughly the same number of women and men were impacted. Salesforce has spent nearly $3 million dollars to eliminate statistically significant differences in pay."
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/03/equality-at-salesfor...
Perhaps "proven" wasn't the best word for the parent, you can't ever prove a negative, but considering the wage gap vanishes to less than several cents with proper controls in every serious study, even those done by "pro-feminist" organizations that you claim would be objective[1], it's simply a myth.
Objectively, a gap of 4 to 7 cents may exist, but also may just need further statistical controls[2]. The 70 cent gap oft quoted is entirely meant to incite emotion, social unrest, government action, and is dismissive of the progress that has been made.
[1] http://history.aauw.org/files/2013/01/AAUWGraduatingtoaPayGa... * It's tucked in here, there's dozens of pages going on about the pay gap, but you'll see that in several figures that they talk about the gap with controls versus without them.
[2] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy... * "Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
I think you're burying a lot in "proper controls". And quoting a Bush administration official suggesting it's all about "individual choice" as if it were a neutral statement is not even vaguely giving a fair picture.
Under capitalism, the whole point of market signals like wages and prices is to shape individual choice. So it's tautological to suggest that accounting for individual choice proves that there's no sexism embedded in the system.
The reasonable feminist critique of approaches like this is that women don't just magically prefer part-time, family-friendly work any more than they just happened to prefer to be homemakers through most of history. In that view, we have been removing structural impediments to a fair society for centuries, and the work is not done yet.
Instead, please follow the site guidelines and (a) assume good faith, and (b) react to the most plausible interpretation of what someone said, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Both of those are necessary for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here. That still leaves plenty of room to disagree, and then your disagreement will be much higher-quality, be more likely to convince others, and much more likely to lead to interesting (a.k.a. unpredictable) responses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing). So an employer accounts for the loss of that duty in different ways such as shifting responsibilities. And many of these ways become a limit to career success. Imagine she is closing a large sales deal but has to leave before close due to pregnancy - so she is no longer the clear performer in that sale, as it is closed by someone else. This reduces her effectiveness on paper (becomes a detractor) due to gender differences (becomes unequal).
A man has been given flexibility to give and take that same time in a way that permits some juggling of work and family supporting efforts - i.e your example case. You worked part time, she could really not do that in her case. This lets you stay active in your role (little effect on your responsibilities) when she could not.
So wouldn't it be ideal for the mother's partner to be able to participate 24-7 to help her recover and to help both parents bond closely with the child? And not be expected to be tugged back by ties to work?
FWIW I had a lawyer who was messaging with clients from the delivery room. So not sure about your stereotype.
I know for a fact pregnancy is hard on the body - my experience was nearly 12hrs delivery and my wife was in the ICU for 3 days following. It took months to recover completely.
In your rush to defend your personal 'stereotype'; I hope you understand that being able to message clients from the delivery room is unusual. No matter what your intent in saying this, never underestimate the serious nature of childbirth.
Women can make a choice to do something that will impact their career negatively. Men don't have that choice.
People who don't intend to have children subsidising people who do (who are on average already richer and more privileged) is deeply messed up. This only makes sense from a very narrow middle class upper-echelon-gender-equality is the most important thing in society lense.
So if being born means that I have to approve of any measure which causes more births, then logically I should be in favour of for example reducing contraceptive programs in Africa, etc.
Being born doesn't automatically force you to support population increase or be a hypocrite. Even if you had a moral obligation to maximise (total number of people that will ever live), then that number is probably larger (because of humanity surviving into the future) if we drastically cut population in the present.
The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.
To your argument I also personally don't know there is any reliable way to equalize this problem. Men and women are created differently, and nature is unfair - just ask the fly and the spider. The social contract means we so far mostly anyway agree it is better treat equally than to force equality (shades of Bergeron is poignant - and yes this inches us closer).
As submitted and on article: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home
Updated: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
If you think that there's a change X' that would be better yet, you should definitely propose it. But if you're just saying, "I don't care about fixing a problem that benefits me if the solution isn't perfect for me," you can see how that's not the most compelling of arguments.
Much of the gains of two-income parents goes into house prices to be closer to good schools - i.e. zero sum competition, while company incentives are to encourage people not to have children, or defer children until too late to maintain population, and essentially stopping the next generation of employees from being born.
And then you mix migration driven by climate change into the mix, and it's very easy for populist politicians to whip up narratives of being overrun, not least because on a historical scale it's true (and of course it's always been true, everywhere has always been in the state of being overrun, with ebbs and flows).
The dynamics here aren't good and it's hard to see how they're going to change any time soon, short of a crisis.
Except for Japan (probably China when it comes to it), most will import labor. Globalization (in terms of corporations) isn't just about taking jobs overseas it's also about brining people from overseas in (in the US H1Bs for professionals, for example).
Are the limousine leftists unable to handle it? You can control it here, but not (yet) in the voting booth.
One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies.
Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children.
Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.
So I say bring on mandatory leave! The vast majority will be much happier.
Think about what this means. The things that correlate strongly with fertility are: low income, low education, high religiosity. If you look at the pool of all children being born they're going to end up ever more disproportionately in low income, low education, highly religious households over higher income secular households in developed nations. I used to feel similarly to you, but in considering this the very people 'responsibly' choosing not to have children are the exact people that should be reproducing to no end if we want a better tomorrow for everybody. And this is without even considering genetic factors. Responsible fertility is, paradoxically, anything but responsible for those who would have the wherewithal to consider such things in the first place.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
What you really seem to be saying is you’d like people who aren’t like you to stop reproducing and people who are like you to reproduce more.
https://youtu.be/YwZ0ZUy7P3E
The richer you are, the higher chance of success of your offspring, so you don't need to roll the dice as much.
Fixed it for you.
> Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact...
As the article states: how are these factors different for men than for women?
The he whole point is to eliminate one of the primary causes of gender inequality in the workplace. Spreading the burden of parenting is exactly the right thing to do.
For the sake of this argument, they aren't. It's not about which gender they impact. It's about what percentage of relationship participants they impact.
Right now ~50% of relationship partners face credible career setbacks as a result of post-childbirth leave. Changing that percentage to 100% is probably going to have some ripples.
That's not to say it might not be worthwhile, just that it's unlikely to be as simple as "flip a switch, everybody acts the same".
Cue George Carlin: https://amp.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/33jmhl/george_carli...
We could easily have a system where each generation pays for its OWN social security, you just let the government screw you by spending the current account on wars.
Population is a much bigger question than a specific, stupid government fiscal policy.
So social security doesn't have to be that shape and an equally large young American population isn't necessary to sustain the current older population. Deeper than this thread but I guess relevant, a lot of hours go into producing products for the 1%, or jobs which don't make sense which our system protects because it's built around having 100% employment so we force you into a min. wage job in order to pay the rest of your income in benefits from taxes on the top percent. If our system didn't optimize to 100% employment and had more extensive welfare you'd see much higher unemployment and the trains would still run.
Whether the current global population levels are unsustainable is up for debate. What is not up for debate, and is already apparent in Western nations as well as other booming economies such as China and Japan are the severe implications of demographic change and the disruptive effect of an aging population on a nation's economy.
This is why making babies in rich countries makes economic sense. If you want to fight overpopulation, then you need to fight for women's rights and education in countries where birth rates are too high. For every baby that you're not having, 20 others are born into poverty.
Japan had low growth and higher happiness for a couple of decades now.
Even taking all that, economically useful != right. It's economically useful to burn the forests and raise the oceans but it's not right.
Japan is facing a demographic crisis[1]. Among developed nations, their problem is the most extreme because of very low rates of immigration, and a continuously dwindling replacement rate.
Nobody's talking about increasing population. We're well below replacement rate, and that's terrifying. The environment is not going to be helped by developed nations collapsing under their own demographic weight.
To reiterate my point: abstaining from having children in the West does a) nothing to reduce overpopulation b) severely impacts local economic capacity without benefit to the environment. Said economic capacity is currently at the forefront of developing sustainable energy models.
In order to reduce overpopulation, fighting for women's education and women's rights has proven far more valuable.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.de/japan-fertility-crisis-2017-4...
I think the flaw with your framing is it's essentially ahistorical. The only way we all got here is by having ancestors. We all consumed quite a lot of resources getting to adulthood. If you're all that concerned about improper subsidies, surely you're eager pay back, with interest, the large one that you've received?
One: Your parents taking time off benefits them a lot more than you. It might benefit you a bit but it doesn't benefit you to see your dad from 0-3 months and not your mum, you're too young to know. People assume that it's a big benefit but actually I'd imagine having your parents somewhat around from the ages of 1-3 is far more important than constantly around from 0-1.
The other flaw is bigger really, basically it's a logical fallacy. Read my point to the other comment with this argument, it doesn't actually make sense. You can't expect people to be in favour of the conditions that lead to their existence, if you were the product of rape you should be pro rape? What if we were a species where all birth was via the rape and murder of the father, you'd still be telling people they're ethically obliged to be in favour of reproduction? Just because someone has benefited from something which had something else in the chain of causation doesn't mean that they have to be in favour of that thing. I benefitted massively from the colonial history of my country, for example.
I'll clear up one misunderstanding, though. The point isn't that one should be in favor of the particular conditions of one's birth. It's that one should be in favor of the continued existence of humanity, and do so such that the conditions for future humans are at least as good. Basically, Rawls' veil of ignorance.
By the way, I don't think your misunderstanding was an honest one. If you get to the point that you're suggesting your opponents must be pro-rape, maybe that's a sign you're too wound up to have a good discussion.
Also, so many things are subsidised by governments that if you were to pick and chose what you approve of by you paying for it and not using it then you’ll not use much.
On the softer side of things, having kids is a good thing, supporting people as much as possible when they have kids with flexible paid leave is a good thing, and I hope more companies and countries continue to improve levels of support for new parents.
1. 11 billion may be too much.
2. This isn't uniform across the globe. Japan's population is shrinking due to a very low birth rate, and that may be a bad thing (loss of cultural and genetic diversity, for example). And this is the more relevant aspect given the context.
Color me skeptical. If previous prognostications are and indicator, humanity in general cannot predict the future more than 5-10 years out with reasonable accuracy.
Another way of saying this is that the confidence interval on global population estimates 80 years into the future is most likely large enough to render the estimate meaningless.
Listen, if you want the government to incentivize having children, then establish tax consequences. Same way as the government can force you to pay a tax penalty, the government could force people older than a certain age who are still childless to pay a "societal development" tax. The proceeds of the tax go towards paying for free childcare.
/not sure if I'm serious about the above or not
Comparing Sweden, which has mandatory paternity leave, to other countries with parental leave, the the amount of money you get paid during leave is the major factor in whether someone takes it or not.
https://qz.com/587763/how-swedens-daddy-quota-parental-leave...
One reason is that it's hard to understand just how much work it is if you haven't done it on your own for long stretches, and it helps for both partners to know that both partners know how hard it is and have taken a turn at it.
Another is the self-reinforcing competence thing -- if one partner always packs for going out, say, then the other partner is likely to take longer and do a worse job when they try packing, so it's easier for everyone if they don't, and you end up thinking only one person is good at parenting. To some extent it's fine to specialize, but having to do everything during the day on my own for a few months made it really clear that both of us can be good at any given thing if need be.
One thing I was surprised by (but shouldn't have been) is just how much wealth you're showing off by taking paternity leave. Telling people you're taking 12 weeks of paternity leave in America is basically telling them you have plenty of money and a job you can afford to walk away from, which pretty much crosses the line into boasting about things you shouldn't boast about. I ended up playing it down more than I expected, which kind of sucks, since it's an awesome thing that more folks should be able to do.
Example: You and your husband would like to breastfeed your baby for the first 6 months but you are unable to express? Too bad, your husband has to take paternity leave and you will have to go back to work.
From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth that is nurtured and strengthened through breastfeeding. I would vehemently oppose the state enforcing any interruption in my child's wellbeing as we see fit as parents.
That's not "experience", it's just the 1950's dogma on the role of men and women dressed up in think-of-the-children.
And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence, or men could choose a period after weaning for their leave.
> And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence
Did you understand the point about not being able to express? If the mother can't express (which many find too painful or just can't) how are the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding supposed to be delivered to the child?
Consider the prisoners' dilemma [1], where the global optimum is for neither side to defect, but the Nash equilibrium is for both sides to defect. If both sides could be deprived of the choice to defect, both would enjoy a better outcome.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
Unless you are against state intervention in cases like these, then you are already accepting that the state can interfere. At that point the question is a matter of degree
Okay, fair enough. I will vehemently oppose any state interruption that goes against medical recommendations. You will not believe the string of NHS nurses and caregivers who tried to ensure that we breastfed our child.
I just can't be charitable with the whole "well the state already does..." arguments.
In free societies, the state interfering with child rearing is a serious matter.
In totalitarian regimes, it's par for the course.
The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.
It will never not affect your career. Even if you work for a wonderfully enlightened company that is happy to have you take six months off at full pay, the people who are continuing to work in that time are going to be gaining experience and increasing their skills, and will have a better shot at raises and promotions.
I don't see a clear link to hacker culture, if anything it's less relevant to developers as we often have some form of flexible working already.
The link I can see is that it's part of the gender culture war that has somehow become focussed on SV.
It's good advice for how to run my company.
Your opposition to even seeing this post because it includes gender seems like more of a culture war artifact than the post itself
It's not culture war to be bored of the culture war.
This isn't a gender war article either as far as I can see
If you don't like mosquitoes then don't put your company headquarters in the swamp.
This is called politician's syllogism.
1. We must do something 2. This is something 3. Therefore, we must do this.
It's a logical fallacy.
The authors compared promotion rates before and after these gender-neutral parental policies were adopted, relative to trends in comparable institutions that did not alter their policies, while also accounting for an array of influences, like where each economist was trained. They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension...
I didn't push a human being out from between my legs. Because of that I'm capable of working. I would like to be useful to my family. Working is one way I can do that.
If I work while my wife is on leave and the gender pay gap is worsened. I don't care. If my wife stays home to recover from her ordeal and the gender wage gap is worsened. She doesn't care.
The gender wage gap is so abstract and cynical at this point. It is beyond meaning. People aren't allow to live their lives the way they see fit because of some stupid number.
Shocking I know but there is no such thing as the "average woman". If her wage is different from the "average man" it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits.
But who cares about individual women and what they want? We want the top level statistics to be equal!
/s
Beyond all of that, this change isn't about what the right level of child care is. It's about the fact that managers and companies discount women workers of child bearing age to a degree that they do not for men, because if a couple is having a child the woman is going to have to take some amount of time off. The suggestion from this article would be like adding an interface of IParent over the male and female classes, and having the employers make hiring/firing/promotion decisions based off of the interface rather than the concrete class. If you don't do this the two groups of people, men and women, will be treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth. As a culture we've made a value judgement that this sort of discrimination is a bad thing, so why would we not mitigate it?
For two reasons. One simple and one complex.
The first and simple reason is that you're applying rules categorically. If I live in a multi-generational household I don't need to stay home and care for the children to the same degree as a more "typical" family. Compelling me to stay home reduces my earnings with no added benefit to my wife or family. In fact you've hindered my family's ability to progress economically. You've hurt a specific woman to help the average woman. As I've illustrated above, the average woman does not exist. Mandatory leave helps a statistical category but not women.
The second more complex reason has more to do with economics.
We already know that women who have never married earn more than men of the same category (the gap is not large or worth considering).
> As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description. As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.[1]
From this we can gleam two things. 1: Women are not being "treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth" (at least in a way that disadvantages them in terms of salary). 2: Mothers are being treated differently based on their behaviors.
I hope the first statement is self-explanatory but the second might need additional context.
How does an employer know if a women will give birth in the next five years? The obvious answer is "they don't". So if that's the case how do businesses know to pay mothers less than never-married women? Because they're not paying mothers less. They're paying never-married women more. People with more continuous years of service are more able to capitalize on opportunities in the workplace and are never in a position to be rendered redundant by a replacement.
If you compel men to take paternal leave, you open them up to all the detriments that mothers face. You take a family who's member has already taken an earnings hit and doubled down.
The gender wage gap (as it exists in the United States in 2018) is not a concern. Efforts to fix the gap will result in lower wages for fathers not higher wages for women (the terms "fathers" and "women" were chosen with significant care).
tl;dr: Fixing the pay gap between never-married women and mothers will solve the gender pay gap as a corollary.
1. https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/pay-gap-studies-dispr...
>From this we can gleam two things. 1: Women are not being "treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth" (at least in a way that disadvantages them in terms of salary). 2: Mothers are being treated differently based on their behaviors.
I hope the first statement is self-explanatory but the second might need additional context.
Women are being treated differently here because when a man and woman decide to have a child, the woman is guaranteed to have to take leave and that is known and accounted for before hand. Mandatory parental leave makes that cost be the same regardless of gender. It is disingenuous to say women aren't being treated differently and only mothers are, when men don't get the same treatment despite being fathers
>If you compel men to take paternal leave, you open them up to all the detriments that mothers face
I view this more as spreading the burden of child rearing across society which I agree would increase the burden on men and companies. It is a completely necessary part of being biological life and continuing our society, but as we currently stand we just demand that a subset of society takes care of it on their own dime. If paternal leave was mandatory for children we would be treating men and women equally, because women have no choice but taking leave when they have a child, and we would be promotion better care for the children which is in our own best interests. We are k type breeders, not r type, and we have shown a better return on investment by giving better care to less children.
>The gender wage gap (as it exists in the United States in 2018) is not a concern.
That is an opinion, not a fact.
That was understood in my post. Long periods of paid leave inhibits earnings growth and leaves you vulnerable to replacement regardless of gender.
This is what was meant by "Fixing the pay gap between never-married women and mothers will solve the gender pay gap as a corollary."
> Women are being treated differently here because when a man and woman decide to have a child, the woman is guaranteed to have to take leave.
Yes there is a guaranteed recovery period. And, yes, depending on how long you are absent this leave will effect earnings. But...
> men don't get the same treatment despite being fathers
Men who take long paternity leave suffer the same income stagnation as women.
"Still, most men can’t afford to take more than a few days off after the birth of a new child. Especially because parental leave can depress long-term earnings [...] regardless of gender."[1]
Compelling paternity leave does not increase the earnings of mothers. It decreases the earnings of fathers. Which may very well shrink the gender wage gap but it makes families poorer and less able to provide for themselves and their children.
To be trite, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
> I view this more as spreading the burden
This, I believe, is our fundamental disagreement. You think a burden is being spread more thinly whereas I think you've created additional burdens. In my opinion, and I believe the data backs me up, this strategy reduces fathers and does nothing to help mothers (economically).
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/12/the-ris...
Employers prefer frugal workaholics with no obligations but these individuals impose externality on "normal people". We're rich enough, no need working above 8h/day.
I'd go all the way and make it illegal to provide work without compensation (internships, 80h work weeks etc). And I'd to try limit oversupply of labour by further limiting standard workweek below 40h.
Heck, in high pressure firms where anyone taking parental leave is inviting career stagnation or termination (fully justified by having HR set up a paper trail of unsatisfactory performance evaluations), you'd be downright crazy to disclose the birth of your child.
2) Historically, no one bought insurance on the individual market. It's been absurdly expensive. That was why the individual mandate under Obamacare is/was important. It forced healthy people to buy insurance, and thus drive down the price.
3) It's illegal discriminate based on parental status.