I had twin girls in Oct 2019 and I took 3 months paid leave. If I didn’t do it full time during their infancy, my wife and I certainly would have been divorced or maybe dead. It was easily more work than my regular job lol
Ah, twins! I can barely imagine, just had one girl in Jan 2020 (right in time for the pandemic...) and took a few months of (sadly, unpaid) leave. It really was like a full-time job for two.
Do you estimate there are any scale benefits or is it about twice the work? Honest question. The worst part most be more interruptions of the sleep, or do they wake up at the same time during the nights?
I was an early stage founder and took the full time off to set an example for the company culture. On my first day back I was fundraising again and a few weeks later we brought the new baby to the developer camp we hosted. Company is doing great although I left years ago.
> I was an early stage founder and took the full time off to set an example for the company culture.
How many of your employees actually did the same thing? (I'm not asking if they were encouraged to do so, I'm asking how many of your employees did take full paternity leave when they fathered children). That would be a more relevant information about the company.
The main thesis of Morgenroth is that men and women are equal in terms of their ability to be communal… but are they?
No evidence offered, just some philosophical symmetry “it has to be” argument is concocted.
I don’t buy it: in western countries you are protected by law if you want to take parental leave, so if men want to do it they should do it regardless of what “society” thinks. The law gives them the power to do so, hence who cares about the hypothetical existence of these “deep prejudices”: even if it is as bad as they say, it’s not like anyone can fire them.
But you might miss out on your career: and that is logical… if you go away for 5 months, then your colleague who is ultra competitive and childless and was waiting for his chance will just snatch up your position and when you are back you will find yourself sidelined. I see zero issues with this: you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all. Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem. No one owes you anything in life: if you think otherwise, you are set for a disaster.
> men and women are equal in terms of their ability to be communal… but are they?
Even if the two populations aren't equal on average, undoubtedly some men are more communal, and some women are less so. You can't do comparisons on populations as though they were individuals!
But with a stereotype that becomes a norm, even especially-communal men, married to especially-non-communal women, will be pressured into not taking parental leave because people think the wife should do it. That pressure could include, for example, harsher career consequences than a woman would face for taking parental leave. And that's neither good nor fair.
So stereotypes are dangerous, even when they're accurate. (Which this one might not even be!)
Those aren't binary choices, there is a spectrum. (and of course I can eat some chocolate and then go for a swim, which leaves me more healthy than if I had done neither of those things)
It's a zero sum game. You only have so many hours in your life so valuing two things means you value each thing half as much as someone who values one thing.
Yes, and there's enough time for both - work is 35-40 hours, maybe some overtime if you're really dedicated. Even at 50 ( too much IMHO), with 54 for sleep (7x8), that still leaves you 68 for family.
Umm, yeah because nobody has chores to do. Cleaning, cooking, tidying, life admin, dealing with companies or people who are sucking away your time, home maintenance, etc etc
It doesn’t actually work that way - family can and will consume 100% of your time, just like work can. And some people can and will pick one of them and do just that.
If you’re ‘competitor’ is one of those people, well…..
Sure, you can value 100 things, but your time is limited. At some point you will make decisions that favour one of the things at the expense of the others.
> ... your colleague who is ultra competitive and childless ... will just snatch up your position and when you are back you will find yourself sidelined. I see zero issues with this
The major issue with this is that it discourages having children and that is a major social problem in many countries of the world. Many developed nations are on the cusp of devastating demographic decline and fertility rates have been falling in developing nations for decades which can't replace 100s of millions of retiring Europeans/Chinese etc.
Not having children is not a major societal problem, it would actually solve them. Many of the largest problems in the world would be fixed by a smaller human population. Food, housing scarcity, climate change...
> Many of the largest problems in the world would be fixed by a smaller human population. Food, housing scarcity, climate change...
What we’re seeing is the beginning of a sudden and massive drop in the working population across vast regions of the planet. That’s a recipe for famine, decaying infrastructure, war, burning wood and coal instead of maintaining sophisticated energy infrastructure.
Those problems you describe are not due to the number of people, it's due to how countries and communities are organized. We have more than enough land and food to house and feed everyone, and those do not need to come at the expense of obliterating the environment. These are essentially resource utilization and distribution issues, not raw number issues.
So at least in Sweden you have a right to get back to "the same or equal position" after parental leave. And most people here are away much longer than 5 months.
Most mothers take one year off. And most other half probably are in the 8-12 months as well.
But this isn't about entitlement; it's about society agreeing to set some extra rules to make life better for everyone. At the end of the day, you aren't entitled to anything at all: even the idea of not infringing on other peoples property is something we just all agreed on because it benefits everyone.
So why are you whining about "entitlement" here, but aren't also defending that "If you can take it, it's yours"?
Sure. But if the opportunity was available for more people to take paternal/maternal leave then the competitive advantage would reduce as others take up the leave themselves.
Only the childless would be at an advantage in the 'experience' world.
> But you might miss out on your career: and that is logical… if you go away for 5 months, then your colleague who is ultra competitive and childless and was waiting for his chance will just snatch up your position and when you are back you will find yourself sidelined
Sure, and I assume this is part of the reason men (and women!) feel concerned about taking parental leave. The law has no effect on people's perceptions. But...
> you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all.
... this is just a false dichotomy. People don't have to choose between total dedication to one or the other, and it's quite possible (and practically achievable) to be good at both.
> Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem.
You suggest it's entitlement when people want to have kids while also maintaining their careers, but I think you have it backwards - the real entitlement here is thinking you should be able to profit in a society that is fundamentally dependent on people who choose to raise another generation, while refusing to do so yourself or even acknowledge that what parents do is in general a service to society.
What do you think society would look like if everybody took your advice? The best minds would never want to reproduce, because they'd lose their careers, and many good minds who did choose to reproduce would be sidelined at great cost to their respective industries.
> ... this is just a false dichotomy. People don't have to choose between total dedication to one or the other, and it's quite possible (and practically achievable) to be good at both.
the previous post highlights that there's an issue with the entitlement of coming back at the same or even better job position which is just ludicrous from a business perspective if a colleague of yours has advanced in that same timeframe
>You suggest it's entitlement when people want to have kids while also maintaining their careers, but I think you have it backwards - the real entitlement here is thinking you should be able to profit in a society that is fundamentally dependent on people who choose to raise another generation, while refusing to do so yourself or even acknowledge that what parents do is in general a service to society.
Huh? As a business your only purpose is to make profit, I don't think I understand how the choices of individual employees should affect the overall direction of the corporation.
Historically, women chose/were forced to dedicate themselves to child rearing and now they have the option not to. Same goes with men, nowadays. It's a general service to society yes, but no one is imposing it on you today (in the west at least).
What I think really changed is this perception that because you __chose__ to be a parent __and__ you chose to stay away for x amount of time you should be still considered/thought as been on top of your game as an employee/career wise.
> What do you think society would look like if everybody took your advice? The best minds would never want to reproduce, because they'd lose their careers, and many good minds who did choose to reproduce would be sidelined at great cost to their respective industries.
I disagree, and without going into the "gender norms" discussion, I think an easy solution would be:
a) partners having kids earlier (like back in the days)
b) accepting/understanding that child rearing comes at a cost (especially as a woman) and setting lower expectations (or go back to point a really)
According to statistics, in women at least, the effect is the opposite: while there is an initial observable lag, women returning from maternity leave more than catch up career-wise with men and women without children, and in fact tend to surpass them.
(we know this incidentally from studies that were investigating the pay gap)
People want to have their cake and eat it too. People talk about choosing a career or children, but that's ridiculous. Raising children is a career. You could try to do both, but I think we can guess how well that's going to turn out.
It's extremely obvious why it tends to be women choosing to raise the children over men. Men value their work more and women value children more. It's as simple as that and if that seems wrong to you, look at the evidence and accept that truth.
In my anecdata at my workplace: I'm glad to say that taking 6 months shared parental leave is now seen as the norm. In every case the parent, in their return has come back and said that they feel more fulfilled (but of course very tired) . A downside follows shortly after, they discover the cost of childcare in the UK. It's almost the price of rent! And sadly some of my colleagues have left the country shortly after having a second child, citing the costs.
Flip side, we are slightly surprised if we come across men who aren't taking advantage of shared parental. It's very rare now but those who don't are unspokenly seen as "traditional".
Does anyone know how/when this has changed in tech? Every new father I know takes the leave, and if they aren’t taking the maximum, people ask when they will take the rest.
I met someone who took leave for their first three months at Amazon, because the baby was born just before their start date.
I’ve only been working for a little over 10 years, and I can’t imagine this has always been the case.
> Does anyone know how/when this has changed in tech?
I think the first-wave of modern startup land is having kids themselves - the change in most companies seem start with the founder - like Zuckerberg taking time off (the last generation feel like the opposite, with folks like Marissa Mayer having a nursery in the office).
That said, in my close circle, I was the only one who took the whole 3 months off work while being on a H1B visa.
There are folks who have the option, but did not take it because they are really worried about replacing themselves at work in an active fashion for a whole quarter.
On the career ladder path, there's a fair amount of ugly politics which goes along with this as well, with the same people who encouraged you to take time off also trying to disassemble your team for parts while you are out.
Because of that, I like the idea of taking paternity leave just like maternity leave (it's not the same, no baby was trying to extract my blood sugar).
It balances the inequalities of having children to be more fair between parents, but highlights the inequalities of being a parent (vs not having kids).
My job offered 4 months of of paternity leave with pay. And an optional 2 extra months off without pay. So you could think of it as 6 months at 2/3rds pay. It didn’t have to be taken at one time either. There was a small restriction that you had to start the leave within 1 year of the baby’s first birthday. The company also offered it for people adopting, so it applied for all people regardless of gender or lifestyle. You could only apply for it 3 times though. So no having 10 kids to escape working. :P
I took two months off when our baby was first born. Then I took 4 months off when the baby was about 9 months so we could spend New Years in Japan with my wife’s mother. While abroad on leave the pandemic hit, flights we canceled and we got stranded. Upon returning everyone was working remote so we stayed in Japan for about a year.
I’m so grateful for that time. We spent the mornings watching morning kids shows, paying with grandma, going to the park, etc. My daughter speaks Japanese as a first languages and has advanced in so many ways because of that time off.
I’ve heard stories of very senior people being pressured to take less time. The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? My advice from those people was the company puts it there for a reason, take your time, you earned it, everyone is jealous.
I was graciously allowed to take 4 weeks paid right at birth and I'll take another 4 weeks paid when he's 1 year old. I'm already so looking forward to it. In the beginning it was all about figuring everything out and surviving together. The next one is hopefully going to be more of a bonding and getting to know each other opportunity.
Again, super happy about that. And I feel grateful that that's what working in tech allows me.
> The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?
Well, yes, I think that's the crux of it. If you work in a place you like then - if you're smart - you'll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you're an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.
I don't think being valuable implies they can't get by without you. Not at all!
It means that you are worth your salary and that they'd rather take you back after some leave than not have you at all or replace you with someone else.
If things go awry when you leave it could mean there is a bus factor problem to be addressed.
It's a bit nuanced. There is a whole spectrum starting from Amazon warehouse workers who are easily replaceable (or, as we recently heard, will be replaced no matter what) to a guy who trenched himself so that he holds everybody hostage. I consider both extremes unethical because of power imbalance.
In any case, it's in the best interest of the company to reduce the bus factor to zero, and by the same token, it's in the best interest of the employee to keep it above zero. You can understand how much it is above zero during salary negotiations, or when you say "I quit" and you are offered a raise. It's mainly because in order to replace you, the new employee needs to be trained and this takes time usually proportional to your experience.
Now, in the case we're discussing (paternal leave), you don't just make a threat to leave, you actually just quit - you allow the company to test the scenario of working without you. So basically you lose some bargaining power.
I'm not saying this is how things should be, but similar thinking processes are going on in the heads of many people in management positions, especially recently, when you need to put some extra effort justifying your position.
I believe you have it backwards regarding the bus factor. The company wants the bus factor to be as high as possible. From Wikipedia:
“The "bus factor" is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.”
The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.
You're right, also the situation you describe is an ideal one. I might be skewed working for a company that is being "optimized" (it's been several years already). It's not like the financial results are bad, but the CEO assigned the middle management the aim of finding all non-essential jobs and do away with them. Before the pandemic we were throwing goodbye parties to a couple of people each month; now the most they can count are sad Teams meetings that make the thing even more depressing. The work of these people is being distributed among those left, with mixed results. The company is still great to work for for various reasons so basically everybody developed the skills and attitude I mentioned above.
If you run the business well, an employee being gone for 6 months is going to be fine - even when you are an amazing employee. You, as a business, should plan on it.
I mean, if doctors offices and hospitals can get through these periods (and do, in countries that give leave to everyone), then so can most other businesses. Temporary employment for educated people exists.
> If you work in a place you like then - if you’re smart - you’ll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you’re an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.
Yes, that’s why no institution gives valued employees extended sabbaticals, for instance.
Yes this. Most of us like to think we're special and hard to replace and some are harder than others to replace but we can all be replaced. Can the replacement do as good a job as you ? Who knows, could be same/better/worse and without access to the multiverse you will never know.
As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.
A colleague of mine died suddenly. This guy was a tech lead at my tiny satellite office for a major tech company. Within DAYS they already had an internal/external job posting to fill his position up.
I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.
A colleague of mine changed job recently. He was tech lead and had been working on the project for years and we other were quite new. It was obvious things would get harder from now on so half of us bailed, i.e. the three programmers with more then 6 month on the project, and the project collapsed.
I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget.
'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.
I think that it's an important lesson to internalize both about yourself and also your coworkers. My place has a saying that literally translates to something like "there's a full graveyard with irreplaceable people" - and that's how it is; no matter how hard is to replace someone, eventually they will (have to) be replaced anyway.
If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?
If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you.
If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for.
If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.
>If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?
I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.
This. I'm on a rather long paternity leave as of now, and I really hope everything runs as if I'd never left when I get back, otherwise, the bus factor is too low.
It also means that the normal day to day operation of the business must have a lot of overhead to have that kind of redundancy though. Redundancy is never free.
This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period.
Seems like the correct fix is to make sure that men have the exact same rights to parental leave and all the same incentives to take them. If men and women are equally likely to disappear for similar amounts of time, then it becomes a wash. Of course it could then be difficult for men and women of a certain age range to find new employment, but I don't see how you can fix this aspect of things.
Equal paternity leave is a thing but it doesn't change the fact that women get pregnant and men don't which is why most employers still discriminate against hiring women and why the salary gap is still a thing.
Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
Are men taking the time as much as women? So basically the difference is the 1-2 months (or whatever the average is) women take off before giving birth? Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave?
If it was that simple, it would have been done already but just saying "everyone should have nice things" is easy until you get to implementing it and ask who's picking up the tab that is hard, as taxes are high already and budgets are tight in most of Europe.
There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least.
It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
Your original post asked how to make it so that women's career doesn't take a hit. The answer is obvious: make it so that the likelihood of men and women going on parental leave is roughly the same. It's totally doable. It would require some changes, but it's totally doable. If your concern is cost specifically, we could always _remove_ parental leave from women and allocate it to men instead. So this could even be done on a financial cost-neutral basis.
But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.
Some European countries "solved" this by having the child leave as a shared pool which the parents can split between themselves as they wish but it still doesn't solve the fact that women have a greater hit on their careers and income due to the baby-making capabilities of their bodies.
That's not "solved". They would have actually solved it if parents _couldn't_ split it as they wish. It should be allocated 50-50 (or at least reasonably close). If a mom or dad doesn't want to take their time off, they should lose that portion. This would balance the incentives and actually have a chance of evening things out over time.
The following is just an idea, but it would be prudent to consider all possible solutions to this problem before making widespread changes to labor law in this country [USA]…
Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.
Could it be that the reality is that women have a lot more stress under pregnancy and childbirth cuz they are actually the ones giving birth?
This would lead to a lot more time out of the workforce and probably reduced productivity whilst caring for an infant the first couple years.
What if we just removed all employment protections/protected groups/parental leave and replaced it with a universal basic income? This would solve our leave-inequality problem as you get the same UBI payment everywhere and the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
> Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.
The point of striving for equal parental leave in this instance is to even up the playing field economically for men and women. If they both have a roughly equal probability of going on parental leave and the time they'd take is roughly equal, then it makes no sense for a business to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age over men of child-having age (obviously it isn't as cut at dry, but generally there is a range of normal ages for men to dad's as well). It would of course not be perfect, but it has a chance of working at least.
Now if don't want to solve these issues (maybe you don't believe this is a problem) or if you want to look into entirely different ways of solving them (like universal basic income), then okay that's interesting but it's kind of a separate discussion.
> the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
Random aside. Why do we care if they use it as a selling point? If we want to remove that option we could also just make it national law. (Here I assume you're referring to the US since many countries have these laws already.)
This is a bit of a problem in Estonia. Estonia has conscription. An employer is not allowed to fire someone that's being conscripted or is doing training for the military after conscription. This means that any business that hires a man that has gone through conscription might have to be able to replace him at extremely short notice (a few days) for the duration of training.
I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
Is this really true though? From my experience in the job market in Berlin on both the hiring side and on the other side, it doesn't seem that there's a dearth of women being hired into individual contributor and management positions. Late 20's are women's starting years if they did a Masters or PhD, so we'd see that in the labor force participation numbers if it was true.
Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.
Don't know the Berlin job market but TBH Austria is way more conservative than hip and liberal Berlin as proven by having a conservative party at the helm and the lowest number of women in top management positions in Europe. The corporate world in Austria (excluding young start-ups) pretty much is the embodiment of the "old boys club" meme.
Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.
But “redundant” doesn’t mean “optional” if the fault-tolerance is actually valuable to the business. Sure, pretty much any company could gut payroll if the sole objective was to minimize costs over the next, say, 12 months. They could further minimize costs by ceasing to back up their data and not putting a fire sprinkler system in their new office building.
Normal day to day operation of a business should have enough slack to allow people to spend time on experiments and initiatives, or simply to do a particularly good job, rather than merely struggle with the strictly necessary part of their workload. Abnormal operation in which deadlines can be met by cutting corners and/or everything goes well and/or enough people are overworked appears to be more common. For example, think of the company culture in which multi-month projects can be planned without accounting for vacation time.
Lacking redundancy is also not free, the resulting downtime can happen unexpectedly, for unknown durations. Paying for the redundancy overhead is insurance against single points of failure.
I mean, that depends pretty heavily on your job. If your job is highest grossing salesperson in a large team or small forward for the Lakers I'm not sure the above breakdown is really applicable.
> If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing
That's not the point. In high-pressure, competitive environments being out of the loop for 6 months means that you have to catch-up for the next 3 months to get back to speed. It slows down people's careers.
I'm curious what job you're describing where this is the case. It seems like one where extensive long term planning is common, and adaptability is not required.
Everyone at my company who is good at their job would have their absence felt over the course of six months. For different positions, it would be different amounts of time, but I can't think of a single role from entry level to executive where someone could be so thoroughly good at their job that the company could ride along fine in their absence.
Oh wow, I was also in Japan in February 2020 when the pandemic hit, but being stranded didn't even enter my mind as a possibility. How did you adapt initially?
I loved it! I lived in Japan before so it wasn’t a struggle. Tokyo summers are brutal though!
What was your experience? Do you live there or was it just a visit?
I thought Japan handled the pandemic much more reasonable than what my friends reported in the US. Initially I was worried about the density of Tokyo but mask wearing was already high. Everyone used hand sanitizer, socially distanced, etc. Tokyo never went on full lock down, it was just very limited so we got to do things I don’t think we would have done otherwise. Eg. we went to Tokyo Disney / Disney Sea a couple times and at 20-50% capacity it was like having the place to yourself.
When my daughter was born, I was entitled to 2 weeks. I had saved 2 weeks of holiday so I could take a total of 4 weeks, but wasn't allowed to do so, because the company couldn't function without me for that long.
Two, four weeks, or whatever it is really isn't enough time, your partner needs support and you have a new child to look after.
Like you, the pandemic left us spending the first year+ at home with our daughter and it has been a benefit to each of us.
We call this the "lottery rule" or, when management are not around, the "bus rule".
If the company can not function without a single employee, they also need to ban employees from buying lottery tickets. Or walking on streets patrolled by homicidal buses (is there any other kind when it comes to key employees?).
Bad management is a sign they are going to experience running the company without key employees sooner rather than later.
I thought its a bus count factor - how many employees have to be in a bus accident for the company to suffer a fatal blow. Have never heard about the lottery one but that sounds like a nice positive spin!
Interesting, at my place it's the other way around: Suggesting someone might be unwillingly killed by chance is fine ("bus rule "), but suggesting someone could find the job materially useless ("lottery rule") or get fed up ("fuck-it rule") is gauche
If the company can't function without you for 4 weeks you should ask for a $300000 bonus for not taking paternity leave. Otherwise you could leave and the company would cease to exist.
> If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important?
If the work you're doing is important to the employer in any way, they need to have a backup plan on how to get that work done anyway. Because employees also switch jobs, get sick etc. Simulating a situation where an important worker becomes unavailable for an extended period of time is probably even a good exercise from organization point of view.
It's a reason why employers should encourage regular reasonably long holidays.as well. Stress testing failure modes in situations where you can plan ahead and can buy your way out of a crisis is better than finding out in circumstances where you can't.
If you're using paternity leave because "you've earned it", why should you get special leave? Just use annual leave! You've earned that too, and it leaves you on equal footing with everyone else without getting special brownie points for being a lucky husband.
At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage. We're in an era where not only do we expect a lot of people not to have kids, the ones who aren't having them are in some sense making a sacrifice of some very precious moments for the ones who are.
This is an expression of the same old arguments against maternity leave as well - at the end of the day, this is making private choices a problem for the company and (to some extent) the people working at the company. The effects of this sort of thing can already be seen in the differences between men and women's pay & career opportunities - it is a substantial handicap!
We should be winding back on this sort of thing, not encouraging it. People should earn their living and take time off at their own expense.
EDIT And, having thought about it a bit, it might favour wealthy workers. You end up with situations where effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.
I respect your opinion but on a nation-by-nation basis we benefit from having kids (although it could be discussed on a worldwide basis), and we benefit from having well-educated kids that are cared for by their parents.
It is a cost for people who don’t have kids, but a net gain for everyone. A bit like healthcare. People who chose not to smoke benefit from paying taxes used to heal smokers, although a cigarette brings a lot less joy and benefit than kids.
It is my opinion and I’m politically strongly against demographic shrinking.
Go with a cash handout provided by the government. It is better than paternity leave.
If there was a choice between a cash handout + keep on working vs. paternity leave a significant number of meant would prefer the cash handout.
The basic "this is the deal you get" for men is if they work hard for it & finance the operation then they get a happy & loving family. There are men who'd prefer the time & men who undervalue the time. But there are a lot of men who correctly identify that hard work, maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family and this scheme disadvantages them.
If people want unpaid time off I'm all for it. But paid vacation is not justified.
> maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family
Where do you live ?
In country with free education and health care I'd say people definitely prefer maximising family quality time than working hard. When you don't have to worry about getting bankrupt at any point for any reason you start to see things differently. You're not going to be a dad/mom if you drop your kids to a caregiver at 6am and pick them up at 6pm
What's the point of having kids if you don't even take part in their education and just slave away at the office, get a tamagotchi, much cheaper and lower maintenance.
Every cent spent on kids education, well being and providing them healthy family environments is paid 1000 time back to society
Money isn’t worth anything if you don’t use it to buy someone else’s time.
If money could solve all problems, why don’t companies just send all their employees home and let their money do the work?
No they really need the employees to be there, giving their time and attention to the company mission. For that they are willing to spend a lot of money.
Parental time, care and attention is the most valuable thing you could provide a child with in the first few years of their life. Unless the time machine is invented, all the money in the world is no substitute.
Unfortunately it's not simple enough to agree "i choose to have kids, i pay the price, i reap the rewards of my parental investment, leave me alone".
I am a father who was lucky to have a paid paternal leave.
I am also a former freelancer who is happy to take care of himself in all situations.
I agree that this sort of benefits which you reap by choice is controversial; i don't see what I'd possibly consider a "fair" amount of benefits here. But I can't agree that cancelling it would make it fair.
All societies typically provide various parenting benefits, but then society also reaps the benefits of having the kids - up to drafting them into the armed forces and sending them to war. Now, some countries don't have mandatory conscription nowadays, but it is not unheard of for countries to introduce it at critical times.
To summarize, you think it’s okay for the gov to subsidize people’s children so that they have an unspecified claim on them up to sending them to a violent death. Very humane business, having a monopoly on violence.
I don't like it but I have little hope that the humanity will abolish the "appoint others to die for the tribe" business anytime soon (within my lifetime, or in 1000 years, or at all). Coercion is still such a powerful tool in hands of so many, pervasive on all levels, no way we're going to abolish it. Not sure whether we've made any progress historically; maybe?
I guess we'll see the abolition of animals farming globally around the same time. This would be the expression of humanity's "sentiment" against coercion towards the weaker in general. I believe this may happen but not very soon. (I am myself a meat eater.)
I agree that is the deal I'd like to live with.
The problem is that most of countries don't offer such a deal, and are not rushing to change. Powers won't give away their coercive power, the populace doesn't want to pay the price of fighting for the transformation.
We have already realized that it is unprofitable to go to war.
What would happen if the USA and PRC China got into a hot war over the ROC Taiwan? That would destroy the economy. Much easier to just insult one another and play games with currency manipulation and tariffs.
Capitalism and the global markets interconnectedness will save us from going to war.
>At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage.
As they should, at least in most of the Western world. People who make kids in demographically challenged countries are contributing more to society than those who don't, and accordingly deserve more privileges.
It's not just about economics but about forming bonds with ones child. This is one of the most important things you can do if you're having a family.
Regarding the economics: In the end someone is going to have to look after the kids. Looking at how much it costs to have kids, your argument makes no sense, too. If you just work and don't have children, you get paid the whole time and you also don't have to pay the enormous amount of money an extra human life costs.
So actually in the society you're proposing, having children would be even more of an economic drain than it is now, while parents would also miss out on the opportunity to form bonds with their child, therefore significantly worsening the child's life and maybe also even damage its psyche permanently ("my parents where never there for me" etc). Because not even remotely everyone can afford unpaid leave.
In the end, what you're arguing for is to worsen everyone's life just so you don't feel treated unfairly, even of you are not.
For the argument that the company has a problem by so called private choices: this is life. People get children. Self reproduction is basically the purpose of humanity. If your company (or to an extent your society) does not have the productivity to pay for their workers temporarily leaving, maybe it's just a shitty company. If your workers don't care for each other well being, maybe the company is just not a place worth of existence. Humans gotta look out for each other. That's basic human social behavior. That's what we're here for. As an employer of 10 people, I'm always happy to allow my workers taking off time for their children. Happens about once a year since I'm in the organization. Also we don't pay the full amount of the costs because it's subsidized by the state.
Children are awesome. Parents are awesome. And giving both the opportunity to form a bond, to not be stressed out and depressed, to make a basis for all the things they will become, all the things they will achieve in their later lifes, because they are healthy, loving, social humans – that's awesome.
> this is making private choices a problem for the company
It really depends on how you look at it. In my view companies are here to support our lifestyle and societies, we're some robots working for a corporate overlord for the kick of it, having a kid isn't (or doesn't have to be) a "sacrifice" you have to pay a price for.
A company offering maternal/paternal leave is a company that supports its employees and society at large. We evolved in societies and its structures to support each-other, not to slave our life away for some faceless corporation.
Don't forget to live your life, like, out of the office, real life, with people, kids being born, parents dying, taking time of to breath, taking a few steps back, realising work isn't the be-all and end-all of life. Taking time to educate and bond with your kids is so much more important than a few months of typing shitty code no one will ever read or use in 5 years tops
> effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.
Salaries are usually not a zero-sum game.
Having kids is a full time job. When you get kids you can kiss all your free time goodbye, say goodnight to the side projects. Having kids is not good for your career, or other life goals. And if you are alone, eg. you have to pay for everything yourself, it also means a life in poverty.
This could be combined with the concept of reducing the 5 days work week to 4. Those that need paternity leave continue with 5 days after the leave until they have worked it off. In the end both would get the same amount of work days, and compared to today it would be the same(or better) as when there are paid paternity leave.
I don't think it is unreasonable for society to decide that supporting new parents is important and for "unfair" things to benefit them. In the US, even extremely generous vacation policies only accumulate like five weeks annually. That's nowhere near enough time to be functional for acting as a new parent. This is the difference between equity and equality. A system where we all just get paid and there is zero support structure is one that leads to ruin for those at the fringes.
This is a very self-centered view of the universe. No, you are not important nor you need to be.
I do my job, if I leave someone else is going to be hired to do it. That is how it works.
If you are "important" then you should be receiving a share of the profits, not a salary. A salary just means that you can be replaced, no matter how high it is.
I guess that it is a cultural thing, that many people have been convinced to work extra hours, to not take vacations, to slave away their lives for a sense of "self importance".
I get a fantastic salary, I enjoy my work, but I am not important. It is difficult to replace me, it took 2 years to get another person in my position. But, if I tomorrow leave, the company will manage. I bring value, but I am not the center of the universe. I bring value, but I am not irreplaceable. I bring value, but I have to take (by law) vacations and the company will continue running without me.
All jobs in a company bring value and the employees needs to be respected for that. It does not matter if you have a low-paid low-skilled job, you are still being paid because you bring value and you should be respected for it. And you should be able to go on vacations, because the goal of all this capitalist thing is to make our lives better, to be slaves we do not need capitalism. If in your society low-paid low-skill workers cannot take vacations, then you are failing at bringing well-being, health, and meaning to the members of your society. And for what? To produce another plastic shit that will be polluting the ocean in one month? To show more ads to people that cannot afford to buy more shit?
I guess that this is a difference in society values. But for me the question "are you really important" should be answered as "yes, because I have friends, family, children, hobbies, etc." and what you produce is only a small part of that value.
I also point out that any of us will be replaced fairly quickly if we were to drop dead suddenly too; but for whatever reason this logic only ever crops up when people are thinking about taking more time off rather than less.
In NZ, my wife took 6 months of parental leave (with a huge drop of salary...) and I took 2 weeks* (one unpaid and one paid by my company). So yeah, I did not take anything else because our mortgage is not going to repay itself and the pragmatic move was that I continue working.
Note*: in NZ, the partner is allowed 2 week unpaid if you are in your current job for more than 12 months, 1 week if you are in your job between 6 and 12, and 0 if you just join a new company. And it does not matter if you have been paying taxes and working several years before that. Silly system really.
At the same time, I WFH the full time so I was there for almost everything and my kid started to have full nights straight away so it was not that bad :).
My workplace updated their leave policy from 2 weeks to 3 months back in April, and in May my wife and I welcomed a new baby boy. I’ve taken the whole 3 months and it feels like one of the best choices I’ve ever made. Getting to spend so much time with him has been incredibly rewarding, I have so much confidence when dealing with anything that pops up, and I’ve been able to support my wife in recovery from a fairly traumatic birth. We’ve already decided that if we have another kid I’ll take 3 months off just the same, even if it has to be unpaid. If you have the opportunity to take the time, absolutely do it.
I’m reading the comments here and I’m flabbergasted. My work offered me one week of paternity leave. That was it. My child was born several weeks early and I can’t comprehend who came up with 5 days and thought “what a great benefit”
Not to put too fine a point on it: an idiot. As per the definition: a foolish or stupid person.
Imagine if you will, a society that didn't want to go extinct. A society that had discovered that birth rates were falling and that paternity leave was just one of many straightforward government sanctioned initiatives that could tip the balance.
Now imagine an individual or group that thought 5 days was enough. Yeah. About that.
This has changed a lot over recent decades (in the UK.)
My eldest son is nearly 30.
When we were expecting him, his mother was suddenly `managed out` of her job in IT working on GCOS7 systems; no problems whatsoever until she was pregnant.
When I told my boss (again in IT) I needed to plan in a weeks annual leave, he was clear that he was pissed off and fed up about it, because we were busy doing some technology transition.
Three decades later; I cheerfully cover for colleagues taking a couple of weeks of extra paid paternity leave.
My own archaic view about paternity leave is that it is designed for female equality; which I believe is a good thing.
> academics found that for heterosexual married couples, the father taking any paternity leave after the birth of a child can also cause the divorce risk to drop for up to six years after the birth.
I’d challenge the word “cause” here. My guess is it’s just a leading indicator signaling the dad is engaged in/places high priority on the family which extends to the marriage.
Yeah, and for a father to take paternity leave suggests the father's job and family's financial situation are doing reasonably well. Financial stability plays a huge factor in keeping couples together.
> The father bonding with the child and getting experienced with childcare could be a destressor for the marriage.
Aside from the cases where there is some kind of fundamental incompatibility being papered over by absence (which, sure, is a thing that happens, though), I fail to see how it could fail to be.
I suppose I view causation as a direct link. Not a secondary/tertiary side effect. I do agree with the sentiment of what you're saying and it makes sense in a "common sense"/hearsay type way but this is citing academic research which has a different burden of proof for determining causation.
That's not really a useful definition. A government mandating covid lockdown will almost immediately reduce the number of traffic accidents - a causal link - even thought there are intermediate steps of people not needing to drive to work, so there are less people driving. It's an indirect effect but still a causation.
If you were an academic studying traffic accidents you would talk about reduced traffic, relative risk of having an accident, and covid/wfh/shutdown would be a great context of why those things had changed.
For example, if covid reduced number of cars on road and thus absolute number of accidents. Your saying you'd determine it's safer to drive because covid. However, in a relative sense, maybe pre-covid you had a 1% chance of being in an accident and during covid you had a 5% chance of being in an accident. What caused that? You can't just said covid made everything screwy and caused it all. You need to dig deeper. Are people running red lights because there are fewer cars on the road? Are people distracted because TikTok? Are they racing around trying to find toilet paper? Sure covid did all those things, but simply blaming covid is not really a useful analysis except in casual conversation; not academic research.
to answer this, research needs to look at the factors causing divorce. a father not helping to take care of the kids could certainly be a factor. if the mother feels that the father is not helping she may be more willing to get divorced because it won't make her life much harder anyways.
a father bonding with his children may also be more willing to avoid divorce.
but are these really significant factors? only research can answer that.
After reading the linked paper[1] cited by the BBC and how they controlled for outside variables it looks like they just measured economic stability without saying they were. They controlled for race, education, part vs full time employment and nature of work (professional vs labor vs service) but not household income (!!!!!!). Though in their defense they admitted as much in the results.
Couples where finances are stable enough that the person who didn't just pop out a kid can justify taking the time off are going to have the spare resources to maintain a marriage. They can afford all sorts of lifestyle crap that puts less stress on a relationship than living paycheck to paycheck in a double wide with a toddler running around causing problems. The correlation between stable finances and a stable marriage has been studied written about at length.
When all of these (IMO, highly predictable) articles come out about paternity and maternity leave, I wish they would also highlight that these leave policies just show the gaping inequalities in the workforce, especially in the US where leave is not mandated.
I mean, the only reason the tech giants are able to offer such generous leave is because their businesses are almost unfathomably profitable, with limited competition, and because they are big enough that the work of any individual worker will not be missed that much. But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
In the USA, the cost of paternity leave have to be fully paid by the company? I thought it would be paid by both together (government and employer) at least.
My paternity leave was fully paid by the government, but it was capped. Moreover the amount of paid months is limited and I had to share them with my wife.
AFAIK (not American) paid maternal or paternal leave isn't mandatory by labour laws/regulations, so yeah, it's up to the employer to offer it and pay for it. Logically, only the huge and very well off companies in competitive ( for employment) branches will do so because the others have little incentive to "waste" money on the matter.
Thanks for the insight. It makes sense for small companies then to not offer paid parental leave, as they really cannot afford that most of the time (thinking of cafes, restaurants, small shops at the corner, etc.)
The more progressive states do have government funded parental leave, but it is not much compared to other countries. The west coast states and the northeast states offer paid parental leave, and the amount you get partially depends on what you used to earn (and hence contributed to the parental leave taxes). You get 18 to 20 weeks off after the baby is born within the first year of life, generally.
It's mandatory in Germany in the sense that employees are entitled to it, but they don't have to take it. The time off is paid by the state (in proportion to the previous year's salary and bonuses) not the employer.
However because sexism is more complicated than just lack of equal access, parental leave is still mostly taken by women and women still find it harder to get back into regular employment after extended periods of maternity leave.
I know several mothers who planned to have children and go on maternity leave and because of this accepted jobs that pay the bills but aren't places they enjoy working and now face the prospect of having to go back to a job they hate or have a second or third child (only to then have to either go back to a job they not only hate but also haven't done in years or find a new job with a multi-year gap in their resumé).
For this to really change will likely take generations because the behavior and the social expectation of that behavior are mutually reinforcing.
I'd say the opposite is true in terms of work: it's much easier to replace a waitress for a week/month/year of leave than it is an engineer or a project manager.
Google do it anyway because they and their employees like it and because they can afford to. The local restaurant could do it much MORE easily. But they have less profit margin (like you say). So we need a law to force them to do it, so everyone does it and puts their prices up to stay in business.
That's exactly why countries mandate it: mandating it allows less profitable companies to do it because they know their competitors have to as well.
It's not about replacements, it's about still getting paid. Try your argument again with the premise that that small restaurant now has to pay two people for that one position.
However, as someone who, for a short period of time, gave a small loan to an Italian friend (professional cook, very good too and able to produce in restaurant environment) so that he could (once again) open a restaurant, and also has another friend with a (better quality and very good environment) Mexican restaurant, and also other people managing hotels or restaurants and clubs/bars, in Germany, your argument about easy replacements does not hold water at least from what I witnessed. They struggled hard to keep people they knew, and any loss was not easy to replace at all.
We also have seen headlines recently that those kinds of jobs are harder to fill now, after over a year of shutdown or very limited restaurant business, with many workers having found other jobs, for example "Covid and jobs: Why are hospitality workers leaving the industry?" -- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-57241370
If the restaurant has to pay, it's a cost like any other and they charge accordingly. They can do that because all restaurants are charging a bit more because they all have to pay. That's no different to minimum wages or 101 other expenses.
Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation. That's what almost every other western country does. The effect is the same either way though: people pay a few cents more per meal and employees get parental leave and we all get on with our lives.
> If the restaurant has to pay, it's a cost like any other and they charge accordingly.
Restaurants have way too few employees so it would not "even out".
> They can do that because all restaurants are charging a bit more because they all have to pay
That is not what will happen.
I'm sorry, that would be nice, especially here in Germany food quality comes way after trying to save a penny (not my random Internet opinion, an Italian friend of mine representing Italian food makers arranging sales here in Germany said they sold the good stuff to Spain and France and only then to Germany - not because of bias, but because to German buyers the price matters more than anything else). I've got some money and quite a few diverse contacts in the restaurant and hotel business here. What do you base your argument on? It sounds idealistic but not very realistic. Even if you could avoid those small businesses not hiring anyone that could be a "danger", somehow, which restaurants would be impacted would be extremely uneven, only a few would have to pay.
Their margins, at least here, are already atrocious. Germans just stay home and get the cheapest stuff even if it's objectively bad food. I lived abroad, for example in the Bay Area for a few years, and that was paradise for going out (ignoring all the posh restaurants that want to appear to be better, when a lot of "ugly" places have far better food and atmosphere) for food, now I'm in the 3rd food world.
> Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation.
Yes, indeed.
But your idea that trying to force the small restaurant would work even remotely as well - no, it won't. In large companies the laws of large numbers start to work and it averages out, the variations in tiny businesses, who ends up with a parent that has to be paid, who doesn't, are different. Only a few will end up with that cost but much of their competition will not. Those are not exactly life-long employments when it would even out over time because most employees would be impacted at one time or another.
It's important to keep in mind that major tech companies also sometimes offer medical services like "freezing egg cells" which literally serve them no other purpose than encouraging women to delay family planning and spend more of their young adult life working for them.
Google doesn't want you to leave for two to three years to raise your kids. Google wants you (as a woman) to work yourself to the bone into your 30s and then either drop out over reduced performance from a burnout or take your family leave and leave the industry forever. Or alternatively, not to take your leave and instead use the free child care to maintain the illusion that you still get a fulfilling family life while living for the company.
I don't think that's fair. Google doesn't have to do anything for its US workers. They can work you to the bone, not pay for eggs to be frozen and tell anyone who gets pregnant to be back at their desk the same day or not come back.
The fact they choose to do anything shows at least some degree of decency. I'm sure there is a degree of calculation there too (we don't want to lose 30-something women who are skilled and well integrated because they want kids). But it's still positive and generous.
It's not decency, it's advertising. Google has a carefully cultivated public image of being the place to be. There's a reason people talk about "FANG" (with various extra letters depending on who you're talking to exactly) and it's not just salary brackets. It's not generous, it's strategic.
All the perks companies like Google offer are carefully optimized to increase productive time in the short term and extend the duration of that short term as much as possible. Only as you rise through the ranks does mid and long term become relevant and then they have perks to address those factors as well. But at no point is a company purposefully being generous except to extract as much value out of employees as possible. The purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value, not to make employees happy.
> If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
Yup, that's what the article says at the end:
> But ideally, says Banister, leave for fathers and financial support for that leave should be the state’s responsibility, because putting the onus on employers – as is the case in the US – can lead to a “two-tier system” where only certain sectors offer paternity leave.
[...]
“The government should offer an appropriate minimum package which encourages behaviours that support a more gender equal society,” says Banister.
> I mean, the only reason... Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
Businesses do exist and function perfectly fine in countries where these policies are universal, so I don't buy the argument. I've only encountered this belief in North America.
But yes, US tech giants pay voluntarily because they are quite profitable and hiring devs is (relatively) hard, and yes society should enforce it through government policy (I think whether it is taxpayer or company funded is a smaller detail IMO - e.g. annual leave and other entitlements are company funded - but yes 6 months paid leave for a very small business might be an expense it cannot pay, compared to predictable amounts of annual leave you can plan around, so it might make sense to "pool" the cost via taxation).
The parent posters point is actually agreeing with you I think?
Other countries mandate these leaves and spread them out as social programs, and therefore the small companies in those countries ARE able to function - because the costs are spread out.
In the US that is not the case, because the spreading of costs and mandating of leaves isn’t universal, and they can’t afford to take it on themselves.
The issue is market effects. If there is one company offering paternity leave, and one which doesn't, which one can offer cheaper prices? If both companies have to offer paternity leave, they are both in the same situation. Still however, one employee becoming pregnant is often a big problem for very small companies, because the effect is highly discretized. If you have 5 employees, then a pregnant employee means 20% of your company's workforce is gone. So you really need social programs that pay instead of the employer during the time of the absence.
Absolutely agree. People need to understand that abuse works well. And so, if it's forbidden in a hard rule that everyone obeys, those who don't obey come out ahead. Sometimes so much that competition is nigh possible without playing the same game.
Just to give a data point on how other countries handle it. In Germany there’s mandatory time off for mothers 6 weeks before the estimated birth until 8 weeks (12 weeks for twins) after the actual birth. (This is strict, there’s no option to voluntarily work during this time. Students can’t even take university exams).
Afterwards both parents can take up to 3 years time-off each while their job will be protected. Between both parents up to 14 months are paid, each parent has to take at least 2 months off or only 12 months will be paid. Note this is not full salary but 65% of the net salary (and not taxed) plus a cap that TBH huts as a tech worker but is fine for most people.
Now here’s what the employer is on the hook for:
- Need to keep your job available during all the time taken off. You need to be able to renter at the same level and salary.
- Time off during the mandatory protective leave for mother’s is paid by the employer but fully reimbursed by the public health insurance (so net 0). Companies pay into this system a small percentage of payroll, currently between 0,14% and 0,88% depending on the employers chosen insurance.
- The 14 months paternity leave are fully paid for by taxes and the employer has to apply for it themselves
This is still a burden for very small companies but overall it creates a situation where there’s almost no financial impact for companies when people become parents. Society as a whole shoulders that.
Paternity leave, to have any effect on societal norms, must of course be universally offered. To be universally offered it almost certainly needs to be mandated and/or subsidized (partially or fully). One can imagine different schemes where large employers are responsible for bearing more of the cost than small and so on, but in the end it almost has to be a national (at least partially) tax-funded scheme. To be accepted for fathers to use, a significant portion of it must be usable by each parent (non-transferable).
> But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
With a good parental leave system, any business no matter how small must be ready for any employee to disappear for 3-12 months. It’s just the reality of running a business. But again (and this is what’s important) if it’s universally used then the same applies to the restaurant across the street too! It’s not a competitive disadvantage.
The same applies for employees: if your manager with 99% certainty took 6-12 months paternal leave with each child, just like every man in the company, then your taking 6-12 months will not be a disadvantage for your career as a man either.
> If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
Absolutely 100% agree. This isn’t a benefit for the parent it’s a benefit for the child. Non-transferable tax funded leave of at least 3 months per parent should be par for the course.
> With a good parental leave system, any business no matter how small must be ready for any employee to disappear for 3-12 months. It’s just the reality of running a business. But again (and this is what’s important) if it’s universally used then the same applies to the restaurant across the street too! It’s not a competitive disadvantage.
Except it is because your business is the one that hired the young woman and the other business did not, so now you have 4 people working for a year and the other business has 5 at the same cost.
For small businesses, if this is not tax funded, this is a huge liability and an incentive to discriminate when hiring.
> because your business is the one that hired the young woman and the other business did not, so now you have 4 people working for a year and the other business has 5 at the same cost.
For small businesses, if this is not tax funded, this is a huge liability and an incentive to discriminate when hiring.
Oh absolutely. It has to be tax funded. The damage to the employer has to be limited to finding a temp/replacement - no more.
IIRC, Norway pays for most sick leave and maternity/paternity leave through taxes. For sick leave, I think the employer pays for a small amount (a week or two), then it shifts. (Am an immigrant, and could be misunderstanding).
Vacations are kind of a tax too: They take a portion of your income, and give it to you in June of the next year.
Not everything has to make things rough on the employer. Though, to be fair, if people and companies are taxed fairly, the richest people and companies would still be paying a larger share simply because they can afford to do so without slipping into despair.
Yeah even this article doesnt offer any framework, it just says “men in leadership roles take less paternity leave because they feel they must lead the team, hmmmmmmmmmmmmm so mysterious” and offers no solution to how such a team would have redundancy or operate
> […] especially in the US where leave is not mandated.
Slightly meta, but I wish people would stop saying "the US" as if it's a monolith. It's not. It's a federation of smaller entities. It's saying "the EU" parental leave policy as a monolith: it's non-sensical.
The EU has a whole bunch of different countries which do their own thing, and the US has a whole bunch of states that do their own thing.
Just like people might compare Denmark versus Spain on weeks given, you have to compare (e.g.) Illinois to Oregon.
The EU as a whole has federalism, and so does the US.
Or, maybe, force businesses to pay for this benefit themselves as a recognition that it’s workers are human, and having a family is an important piece of a stable life.
Or better yet, fix the economy so that the average worker gets paid enough that they can actually save wealth and exercise some economic power. Then people could take as much leave as they themselves would like, rather than needing to fit into the mold of what corporate policies allow.
Taking 5 months off is pretty much same as changing a company or at very least the internal department/team. A lot happens in 5 months and from my experience no one who comes back from maternity or paternity leave stays with our company for long. I think this is because people think that they are coming back to whatever team and position they left, but that position has been refilled in that time and when they come back they are seated in which ever team has room. Which usually means completely new colleagues and usually new project as well. At which point they realize that they might as well just look for another job and often leave within the next 6 months.
It is easy to see why this kind of thing can have affect on your carreer development. Especially when people who have kids and take timeoff tend to have multiple kids and thus multple paternity leaves. If you take 10 months off work your carreer development drags behind 10 months and everytime you change your employer unless you can trade up your title you will be resetting whatever progress you've made towards the next job title (you might catch up faster to the same point you were in at the new job, but the progress still gets reset).
I don't think there is anything that can be done about this. This is how human brains work. Think about our ancestors. Someone goes away for long time and comes back. We might be glad that they are back, but they've missed out from the struggles and successes of that time, so we are less likely to promote them to the next leader of our group than someone who has been there while they were absent.
One way to address this is to have roles filled by secondment. That way the same position (on the same team) re-opens for the parent when they return. Additionally, the person who fills the secondment (and is usually a more junior member of the company) gets an opportunity to train for a more senior role and usually ends up as a top choice when that team needs to hire.
In my experience teams are usually continually hiring, so the person on secondment can often go straight into a permanent role on the team when the parent returns.
Thats not really fair for new people. Think how it feels to get into a team, then just as you start to be productive member some guy you've never even heard of comes back from paternity leave and you are bounched to another team that might be doing something completely different.
If you're on secondment you made an agreement to fill a role for a specific purpose and period of time. You will likely have met the person who is taking leave before they left, and their return isn't likely to come as a surprise.
I've been at my current company for three years and literally every woman who has taken maternity leave has left the company shortly after returning. Some don't even return at all. It would be disastrous if men did this too.
I do not believe that at any point paternity leave will work for men.
I do understand push and how it’s beneficial to woman and to children, but in my opinion the whole idea ignores men, how they feel about it and how men function in society in general.
On paper everything looks great: Mother gets an opportunity to get back to her career, children gets some bonding time with father that might benefit for years to come and father gets insight in the life of the child and caring for his family. Reality, however, for many men is different.
Often men's only friends are at work. Taking paternity leave not only detaches father from his friends but also creates a gap in father's group. If they have problem to whom they will come? Absent-at-work father will slowly get pushed out of the social group only because groups naturally seek opportunity to fill the void. Men aren't good at expressing emotions and everyone agrees that on paper paternity leave looks good. So what happens is that "oh yeah, relationship naturally deteriorated, and Tom really helped us with this project" but in reality it didn't and Tom hadn't. It's social dynamic that changed. Father knows what's up, his workgroup know what's up and yet no one will say "You know what, we missed you, you didn't even call us, so we were angry and decided Tom is our new friend and screw you". Yet while men don't really talk about emotions they can feel social dynamics and so it takes usually 1 or 2 fathers in workgroup and observation how social dynamics change around them after they come back. It's not ostracism, it's just when you're leaving your group for couple of months you cannot expect that they'll welcome you back even if you decided to leave them for a very sound reason.
Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child. They don't get the same hormones woman and because of that experience of caring for the child is by default vastly different[*]. Men's bodies don't help them preserve the specie by releasing a number of happiness hormones as mothers body do. For men it's quite often the chore without positive feedback. And of course no one will ever complain about it as strong men are responsible and caring so it's not right thing to do, but I have yet to hear a man in my circle who will describe it as magical experience [1]. We live in an age where some fathers already took paternity leave and their children are teenagers and not adults and even those parents don't speak out outside of the "parenting improvement circles".
There are of course, many other factors, like the concept of breadwinner, strength of the partner relation etc., etc., but all of that combined makes me not believing it will ever take off on the big scale.
Anecdotal note: I spent 18 months taking care of my child during day while their mother worked and then for 1 year I was working in the evenings.
[1]: As with social dynamics there are always some outliers, response spectrums, variables and knobs so if that's you (and I do believe that HN hosts quite a lot of outliers on various topics) please take that into consideration :-)
Yeah well, it's hard to make friends outside of work if you spent practically all your time there. It's exactly the same for women with 40+ hour work weeks.
When you're on paternity leave you'll spend a lot of time pushing a pram around the neighbourhood, going to small parks, and gardens.
Soon enough you'll find you've got a whole bunch of other parents to talk to, as you try to stop your child from eating all the sand in the sandbox at your local park.
Later still when you take your child to pre-school, daycare, or similar, you'll also find more parents to hang around with. Especially if your child/children wants to play with particular kids in the evening/weekend.
TLDR; Even if you're a workaholic and all your friends were previously from work, parenting will give you a lot of new friends.
I'm not sure what you mean by "not work for men". In Sweden parental leave is just a normal part of society for both partners and it works great (indeed I'd go so far and say that all of my male colleagues that have gone on parental leave have all looked forward to it).
I think the main thing to make it work is just to have a society that values people being able to spend time with their children. If it is a normal everyday part of life where society supports it (for example financially) it works great.
Multiple months of paternity leave for men is well established in Norway (and other Nordic countries), and has been for a long time.
When given a real choice, men are eager to and capable of caring for their small ones. Even from the first month.
Any amount of rehashing, thinking-really-hard-about and mashing preconceptions and stereotypes together in new and interesting ways to form an opinion on how well this would work, is moot. It already works.
I'm full month at work after having "1 year" of paternity leave (actually was working 40hrs per month), government paid.
Luckily, didn't feel any of those issues article lists there. Nor from others, nor myself. CEO said something along the lines: of course we like when people work, but your decision. As almost everyone was almost work from home, some even didn't notice :)
When people tell me that paternity leave is bad for your career, I always tell them that being a dad has made me a better manager. And I've noticed the same transformation in others. More empathy, ability to
relativise, balance.
This of course nothing for the fact that bad employers may not see it that way.
The Germany is offering generous 12+2 months paid leave. The only problem is that during that time the parental money (Elterngeld) is limited up to 1800€. It’s like one third of the former salary, so that’s perfect hidden barrier and I seriously hate this. I am jealous about hearing friends and relatives being offered 1-3 months fully paid leave by their American employers. Having mortgage and baby a parental leave is impossible and couple paid months at home with family would be super cool.
Yeah same story in NZ. You can take a decent parental but the payout is limited ($500 NZD/pw). Of course, you need a cap but you might end up leaving quite a lot on the table.
And on top of that, your value of your annual also depreciates ("You work only half a year full salary, so your annual leave is now 1/2 its origina value")...
In sweden you get an instant 10 days leave after birth, and then about 400 days more to split as you want between the parents. You get about 80% of your salary during this time, up to some breakpoint.
I think that means the wife takes the vast majority of leave in almost every case. That's fine, though, if that's the parent's choice. I think I like this policy.
I recently become a father and I'm aiming to take some months of parental leave at least. Of the 480 days of paid leave you get in Sweden, goverment insurance give you up to around 3000USD a month for the first 390 days of Leave. My employeer then offer a benefit to cover the rest so that I get 90% of my usual salary, which is pretty common.
A key here is that one does not need to take all days at once. You can choose to work half time etc. for some years if you prefer and use half-days of parental Leave, making them last twice as long.
It's also pretty common to save days to use them in conjunction with vacation each year up to the child reach 12 years of age (100 days can be save after child reacheas 4 years of age).
This means you can extend the vacation from 1 months to 2-3 months a year instead and the the full summer to hang out with your kid. Very nice.
Both parents are even allowed to be on parental leave simultaneously for 1 months in case you want to go on a longer trip together.
You're welcome:) The drawback is that goverment takes around 65% tax cut (income tax + employment tax) on any incomes of emplyement above 6000USD a month.
The only way to get rich in Sweden is through capital gains. There taxes as still very low :)
> Ricardo Duque says that this [men not taking Shared Parental Leave] might be partly a result of fathers simply not knowing their rights.
I've taken SPL twice, and while people not knowing about it might be a problem, the real issue is that it is insanely complicated. I have a PhD and still struggled to understand the forms you have to fill in. I imagine most people would just give up.
The article also doesn't consider that there are definitely genetic factors that make women more interested in babies. I have experienced none of the supposed shaming or career effects, but I still don't want to do paternity leave for more than a few months.
I suppose the article doesn't mention the real reason: that it is the privilege of mothers to spend time with their children, because they invested and risked more to have them (or simply because having the womb gives them the better negotiation position).
While a small percentage of mothers can not relate well to their kids and prefer to get back to work asap, the reality is that most mothers prefer to spend time with their kids.
Who should get to spend time with the kids? The person who spent 10 seconds injecting their semen into the womb, or the person who toiled for 9 months letting the child grow in their womb, often risking their life to do so? In many cases, the discussion does not even make sense. It is even more ridiculous when feminist men pride themselves for taking "the burden" off their wives. All they did is take away their natural privilege.
This also becomes even less surprising if one looks outside of the academic box and realizes that most people don't have exiting creative jobs where they change the world, but mostly mundane stuff like being supermarket cashiers, or, at best, nurses - which is a nice job, but should women really leave their kids so that the can change the diapers of strangers instead?
Feminism want us to believe that taking care of kids is a burden that men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work. And huge parts of society have swallowed it.
Here in Europe, many governments think they have to force men to take paternity leave, to further equality. They think men don't want to spend time with their kids because of role models or whatsoever.
The reality is probably in most cases that the the issue is mostly financial. Even with paid paternity leave, there usually is less money on the table than with full time work, specially since women tend to choose less well paid careers (another privilege - they don't have to provide for the family, so they can afford to trade income for convenience and social status).
I think it is great if fathers can take paternity leave and recommend everybody to try to do it. but there are actual real world issues preventing it, not just memes ("societal expectations").
I am on parental leave right now together with my wife. Financially it's OK- we had some time to prepare.
The most basic issue is breastfeeding. A newborn wants to drink about every two hours. My wife just can't leave the house if she wants to breastfeed. Bottled up milk is an option when the child is about 4 months old.
At this stage the bond between them both is so thick, that they are basically inseparable. As man you basically spend a whole year to catch up.
So even with enough money and leeway from my employer to take parental leave there are still issues why childcare is mainly the part of the mothers.
I guess most of the feminists don't have children. Oh and try to have two children. Guess what: it does not scale well! And it takes more than two persons to even raise one child.
I would encourage you all to try it yourself. It is really rewarding to be a parent and also so exhausting - even with all the privileges in the world.
I'm not so sure that fathers need to "catch up", but I guess it depends on the child/family. I know I was always better at calming our child, mostly because it was bloody difficult to learn what he liked and how to help in all the various situations.
My wife never really learned that, she'd give him boobs and he'd feed/sleep. That worked perfectly for the first six-ten months, and then it didn't.
I'd never had those to fall back on, and was always the one who took over when he was being "difficult". Then again I was also the one that pushed him in his pram for a walk around the block at 2AM, in sub-zero temperatures, to help him fall back to sleep. They were hell on my sleeping patterns, but also some of the best early memories I have. Talking and singing as the snow fell .. magical.
Same here! This times where great and terrible - I took our boy for walks in his pram for hours for here to catch some sleep.
With two kids this obviously doesn't work anymore.
Sometimes when I returned my wife told me she couldn't sleep cause she missed him. I guess they just where very close. Sometimes I envied that - now that he is bigger we have a lot father- son activities, so that makes up for that.
Men and women are just different parents and I believe kids need both parts or even more. Grandparents and aunts and cousins, friends and teachers. The kids are always happier in a crowd that just with one parent or even both parents. Nowadays everyone threats parenting as a two person job but everyone will agree the saying that it takes a village to raise a child...
I didn't have the same experience. I took a lot of time off and think/hope I bonded just fine. I feel I was privileged to be ale to afford it, or rather, I just decided to afford it to dismay of my wife. That is another underrated factor: mothers actually WANT security, including financial security. Another factor is that it can get annoying if the other parent injects their opinions on rising children. It is not as if mothers in general are keen for the fathers to be around all the time. The feminist narrative (as usual) is absurdly wrong.
Breastfeeding is another example of why it is more "natural" for mothers to stay home than fathers, though.
I don't understand why you got downvoted. Much of the ideology does not translate on to the real world. Not everyone will fit in the narrative. Mothers and Fathers usually enjoy being with their children. In our society one has to work for a living. So one parent has to do it.
This has nothing to do with feminism. Why should men or women be defined by their jobs? Why is money defining the worth of a women or a man? Feminism is just a strawman for the underlying problem that we are fixated on money
> Feminism want us to believe that taking care of kids is a burden that men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work. And huge parts of society have swallowed it.
No, the feminist position is that childcare is an activity that does not have to be done exclusively by the mother. And so there should be equal and generous time off available for both partners regardless of sex (or if a same-sex relationship, relation to child).
Of course there are biological considerations too. The mother having the opportunity to breastfeed, in particular. So the schedule of leave may be organized around optimizing for this as well.
So what is the feminist theory why men don't share equally? So feminists believe women should give away some of their privilege of time with their children, for the benefit of men?
Or do they believe going off to work and "have a career" (never mind the aforementioned supermarket cashiers) is the better part, that men unfairly claim for themselves?
I have never seen feminists to call on mothers to give fathers more time with children, to tbh.
It is not about men being able to take care of children. Nobody sane doubts that.
> Feminism want us to believe that taking care of kids is a burden that men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work.
No, feminism (except perhaps some weird subcategory of bourgeois feminism) does not want you to believe work is fun. And most feminism places the blame here on institutional patriarchy (which binds both men and women with restrictive gender roles, harming both) not men pushing restrictive gender roles on women.
You do seem to describe a common right-wing caricature of feminism, though.
Really? Then why do governments feel they have to force men to take time off?
Men in the relationship are typically seen as the "arm" of the patriarchy.
It is true that in this case it would benefit men if they were granted more time with their children (at the expense of the mothers and the family finances). But that is more accidental.
Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women, with regard to that subject, if you believe you know feminism so much better.
> Then why do governments feel they have to force men to take time off?
Instead of arbitrarily deciding the reason is “feminism” and then trying to invent attributes of feminism that make that make sense, tou could probably do the minimal research it would take to find the actual reasons cited by any one of the governments in adopting the rule. I feel safe in the assumption that it is “men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work” in precisely zero of them.
> Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women
Uh, okay: “Yet, the proportion of men who take more than a few days off work when their child is born is tiny.
Most cite fears of being discriminated against professionally, missing out on pay rises and promotions, being marginalised or even mocked as reasons for not taking time off. Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender” [0]
"I feel safe in the assumption that it is “men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work” in precisely zero of them."
But you don't actually know the reasons?
"yes, the article we’re already discussing in this thread."
Is that a feminist article? What makes it so?
"Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender"
As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege). It is not "just" societal constructs, it is the negotiation position of the wombs.
I know the reasons that have been cited for some policies aimed at encouraging men to take more maternity leave, including the workplace expectations/social pressure one cited in this article , which has been cited prominently around the Swedish policy with 90-days for each partner that is non-transferable plus a large pool that can be used by either partner. I haven't cataloged every argument cited for every policy of this type in every country. If you can find one that supports your characterization, you are welcome to present it.
> As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege)
So now you are not only arguing that “feminist want us to believe X” without any evidence of feminists suggesting that, you also have added a hidden motive with similarly no evidence.
Your unsupported ideological fantasy is getting more elaborate, but not any more supported.
The ideology is that differences in behavior are merely the result of oppression (via social norms) by the mythical patriarchy (which apparently isn't perpetrated by men, according to you, so who is it?). Not that behavioral differences have a biological foundation.
However, there is no point in arguing. I don't know what kind of feminist literature you encounter. Maybe you just choose to read it with pink tinted glasses, or you only see the moderate ones. You get to choose your own view of the world, of course.
I had a conversation with my cousin a bit ago talking about the gender pay gap being a bit misleading because of the .7/1 ratio not taking into account previous experience and hours worked. To the extent that sexism is the cause of that gap, it's actually a good business decision to not rely on young women for leadership roles due to the realities of biology.
Since there is no changing biology, my proposed solution is to make paternal leave mandatory.
I think it's counterintuitive at first blush to help women by forcing men not to work but that absence is exactly what puts young women behind the eightball at the beginning of their careers and they play catch-up for the rest of their lives.
Make leave mandatory even for people who don't have children, or you're selecting for childless people of either gender. Sometime between 20 and 40 you have to take half a year off.
Nah, the idea is not that it's the leave that sets any single woman's career back, it's that the expectation of the leave being taken by women causes them to not be hired/promoted/... before having children that the OP is concerned with if I understood them correctly. If suddenly all parents were to take leave, regardless of gender, then discriminating young people by gender would no longer make economical sense.
There should definitely also be mandated minimum vacation days in my opinion (where I live, four weeks of paid leave per year are the legal minimum for full-time jobs), but that's quite unrelated to the issue at hand.
Then what about the gap that will now emerge between men who have kids and have been forced to take leave, and the people who have not had kids? Is that a gap that doesn't matter simply because it doesn't show up in gendered statistics but is instead hidden?
I am extremely against enforced handicaps on people as a way to achieve equality. I can't think of precedent where this has led to anything positive (I'm reminded of the Harrison Bergeron short story as a write this). If the man (or woman) can afford childcare, then why should the government force them out of the workforce, exactly who is benefiting from this handicap?
From a Darwinian perspective, those who do not have any offspring are complete failures. Dead ends in the gene pool. Don't worry about it: in just a few generations the problem will take care of itself.
The pay gap is a political tool, it doesn't have any scientific basis. There are way too many variables to account for.
There are studies finding women below 30s earn more then men in the same age bracket. I still don't think there is a pay gap in any direction, every case is individual.
There are several trends the can explain why there are differences in the aggregates (old generations had a more traditional family/work split, old rich men are over represented in the market, more families could survive on one salary in the past, young women have better qualifications than young men, women don't start a family before 30 these days) and there are also tons of biological reasons that make men and women different.
On the subject of paternity leave; while I was grateful to have extra paid time off (it does push your pay per day up), I didn't really enjoy my paternity leave and ended up using it as a work 3 days per week for a long time.
A mandatory paternity solution sounds like a terrible idea for the men who don't want it and it just reduces men's freedom for the increase of a meaningless metric.
The pay gap is grossly exaggerated and misrepresented as a political tool but it's not made up. The numbers are meaningful if you understand the context.
i didn't enjoy staying at home with my first son either. i just didn't know what to do with him. i didn't have any role models. it got better when the kids got older...
but do you think all mothers enjoy to stay at home? mandatory maternity leave sounds like terrible idea for women who don't want it and just reduces a womans freedom...
the leave is not just for you but for your child too.
btw: the pay gap is not in the pay levels for equal work in equal time, but in the fact that on average women spend less time working and get promoted less into higher paying positions. and especially that last point is a problem.
I didn't say it was. But it is evidence for my hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis is that women don't go into management positions because of maternity. I am merely applying Occam's razor here.
It's really difficult to have conversations with people who hear something different to what is said every single time. I say "people with good leadership skills tend to be male", you hear "men make better leaders". I say "this is evidence to support my hypothesis", you hear "my hypothesis is irrefutable because of this evidence". I say "men and women aren't the same", you hear "men are better than women" (because everything needs to be ranked, things can't simply be different).
I think you might have some fundamental problems with how you phrase and present your points, because a lot of people are misunderstanding you. You might also just be backtracking on what you said.
That said, just because you present something as evidence, doesn't mean that it actually supports your hypothesis.
This whole thread started with me asking for evidence to support an alternative hypothesis given that there is a perfectly simple and obvious theory available. Nobody provided such evidence.
People intentionally or unintentionally hear what they want to hear all the time, especially on these kinds of issues. It's sometimes called a straw man argument, although in this case nobody even bothered to argue against the straw man after erecting it.
> I think what's more likely is people who are good leaders go into leadership and good leaders are far more common in men.
This thread is a reaction to this statement. You didn't really back it up, so no-one bothered to pick at it with any care.
People tending to pursue leadership because they're skilled at it is an ok statement. But, you saying that that's why there's more men in leadership positions is a leap. For starters, you're ignoring the possibility of a patriarchal society, and gender roles more specifically, limiting the choices of the men and women involved. As long as gender roles affect the participants, actions between genders cannot be directly compared.
Imagine a woman thinking that she shouldn't be a leader, due to social conditioning, even though her faculties are otherwise suited for it. Imagine an older white male being perceived as leadership material, not due to true merit, but because of social conditioning.
Why is it a leap? Why do you think gender roles exist? Do you really think men have enslaved women? Look around you. Do you really think that?
In our highly competitive world do you really think "patriarchy" or "gender roles" would trump merit? That not a single company in the history of the world would have got a competitive edge by shunning gender roles and having more women in charge?
You should have started with that. No one would have had any doubts about your viewpoints. I'm tired of you walking your position back and forth between ambiguity and sexism.
It's a leap, because there's other possibilities you don't account for. I don't pretend to know why we have a patriarchal society, but I do believe that history is largely random and far from optimal, which is what you argue for. That is what I think is naive.
You describe the world as a meritocracy, governed by the skilled. Believe me, you're in the minority in thinking that.
> do you really think [...] That not a single company in the history of the world would have got a competitive edge by shunning gender roles and having more women in charge?
Do you really see companies as the pinacles of human history? What if we still had racial slavery? Would you argue in favor of that as well? Is history the true judge of what is a good idea?
History is what we do. To say that something is right, because it's prevalent in history, is to say that what we do is right, because we do it.
If you want your close ones to fulfill some social dictates, I find it sad, but it's fine. I'm not interested in that, and I don't see it as anything more than useless dogma.
Along with the US, India is another large country with no mandated paternity leave for employees in the private sector. My current employer allowed for a measly TWO days.
I'm personally gonna share it 50% and looking super forward to it. There's a reason most kids prefer their mothers over their fathers. They were there for them. I want to be there for my kids.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadCongrats btw!
How many of your employees actually did the same thing? (I'm not asking if they were encouraged to do so, I'm asking how many of your employees did take full paternity leave when they fathered children). That would be a more relevant information about the company.
No evidence offered, just some philosophical symmetry “it has to be” argument is concocted.
I don’t buy it: in western countries you are protected by law if you want to take parental leave, so if men want to do it they should do it regardless of what “society” thinks. The law gives them the power to do so, hence who cares about the hypothetical existence of these “deep prejudices”: even if it is as bad as they say, it’s not like anyone can fire them.
But you might miss out on your career: and that is logical… if you go away for 5 months, then your colleague who is ultra competitive and childless and was waiting for his chance will just snatch up your position and when you are back you will find yourself sidelined. I see zero issues with this: you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all. Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem. No one owes you anything in life: if you think otherwise, you are set for a disaster.
Even if the two populations aren't equal on average, undoubtedly some men are more communal, and some women are less so. You can't do comparisons on populations as though they were individuals!
But with a stereotype that becomes a norm, even especially-communal men, married to especially-non-communal women, will be pressured into not taking parental leave because people think the wife should do it. That pressure could include, for example, harsher career consequences than a woman would face for taking parental leave. And that's neither good nor fair.
So stereotypes are dangerous, even when they're accurate. (Which this one might not even be!)
Hold on - this doesn't follow.
It's entirely possible that you value both your family and your career.
It would be good to talk with people who are actually in this situation in order to verify the assumptions you've listed.
If you give priority to your health,then you shouldn't care about the fat guy eating chocolate restlessly.
I forgot cocoa has health benefits, should have used cigarettes as example.
If you’re ‘competitor’ is one of those people, well…..
Sure, you can value 100 things, but your time is limited. At some point you will make decisions that favour one of the things at the expense of the others.
The major issue with this is that it discourages having children and that is a major social problem in many countries of the world. Many developed nations are on the cusp of devastating demographic decline and fertility rates have been falling in developing nations for decades which can't replace 100s of millions of retiring Europeans/Chinese etc.
What we’re seeing is the beginning of a sudden and massive drop in the working population across vast regions of the planet. That’s a recipe for famine, decaying infrastructure, war, burning wood and coal instead of maintaining sophisticated energy infrastructure.
Most mothers take one year off. And most other half probably are in the 8-12 months as well.
So why are you whining about "entitlement" here, but aren't also defending that "If you can take it, it's yours"?
Only the childless would be at an advantage in the 'experience' world.
Sure, and I assume this is part of the reason men (and women!) feel concerned about taking parental leave. The law has no effect on people's perceptions. But...
> you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all.
... this is just a false dichotomy. People don't have to choose between total dedication to one or the other, and it's quite possible (and practically achievable) to be good at both.
> Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem.
You suggest it's entitlement when people want to have kids while also maintaining their careers, but I think you have it backwards - the real entitlement here is thinking you should be able to profit in a society that is fundamentally dependent on people who choose to raise another generation, while refusing to do so yourself or even acknowledge that what parents do is in general a service to society.
What do you think society would look like if everybody took your advice? The best minds would never want to reproduce, because they'd lose their careers, and many good minds who did choose to reproduce would be sidelined at great cost to their respective industries.
the previous post highlights that there's an issue with the entitlement of coming back at the same or even better job position which is just ludicrous from a business perspective if a colleague of yours has advanced in that same timeframe
>You suggest it's entitlement when people want to have kids while also maintaining their careers, but I think you have it backwards - the real entitlement here is thinking you should be able to profit in a society that is fundamentally dependent on people who choose to raise another generation, while refusing to do so yourself or even acknowledge that what parents do is in general a service to society.
Huh? As a business your only purpose is to make profit, I don't think I understand how the choices of individual employees should affect the overall direction of the corporation.
Historically, women chose/were forced to dedicate themselves to child rearing and now they have the option not to. Same goes with men, nowadays. It's a general service to society yes, but no one is imposing it on you today (in the west at least).
What I think really changed is this perception that because you __chose__ to be a parent __and__ you chose to stay away for x amount of time you should be still considered/thought as been on top of your game as an employee/career wise.
> What do you think society would look like if everybody took your advice? The best minds would never want to reproduce, because they'd lose their careers, and many good minds who did choose to reproduce would be sidelined at great cost to their respective industries.
I disagree, and without going into the "gender norms" discussion, I think an easy solution would be:
a) partners having kids earlier (like back in the days) b) accepting/understanding that child rearing comes at a cost (especially as a woman) and setting lower expectations (or go back to point a really)
(we know this incidentally from studies that were investigating the pay gap)
It's extremely obvious why it tends to be women choosing to raise the children over men. Men value their work more and women value children more. It's as simple as that and if that seems wrong to you, look at the evidence and accept that truth.
Flip side, we are slightly surprised if we come across men who aren't taking advantage of shared parental. It's very rare now but those who don't are unspokenly seen as "traditional".
I met someone who took leave for their first three months at Amazon, because the baby was born just before their start date.
I’ve only been working for a little over 10 years, and I can’t imagine this has always been the case.
I think the first-wave of modern startup land is having kids themselves - the change in most companies seem start with the founder - like Zuckerberg taking time off (the last generation feel like the opposite, with folks like Marissa Mayer having a nursery in the office).
That said, in my close circle, I was the only one who took the whole 3 months off work while being on a H1B visa.
There are folks who have the option, but did not take it because they are really worried about replacing themselves at work in an active fashion for a whole quarter.
On the career ladder path, there's a fair amount of ugly politics which goes along with this as well, with the same people who encouraged you to take time off also trying to disassemble your team for parts while you are out.
Because of that, I like the idea of taking paternity leave just like maternity leave (it's not the same, no baby was trying to extract my blood sugar).
It balances the inequalities of having children to be more fair between parents, but highlights the inequalities of being a parent (vs not having kids).
I took two months off when our baby was first born. Then I took 4 months off when the baby was about 9 months so we could spend New Years in Japan with my wife’s mother. While abroad on leave the pandemic hit, flights we canceled and we got stranded. Upon returning everyone was working remote so we stayed in Japan for about a year.
I’m so grateful for that time. We spent the mornings watching morning kids shows, paying with grandma, going to the park, etc. My daughter speaks Japanese as a first languages and has advanced in so many ways because of that time off.
I’ve heard stories of very senior people being pressured to take less time. The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? My advice from those people was the company puts it there for a reason, take your time, you earned it, everyone is jealous.
Well, yes, I think that's the crux of it. If you work in a place you like then - if you're smart - you'll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you're an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.
It means that you are worth your salary and that they'd rather take you back after some leave than not have you at all or replace you with someone else.
If things go awry when you leave it could mean there is a bus factor problem to be addressed.
In any case, it's in the best interest of the company to reduce the bus factor to zero, and by the same token, it's in the best interest of the employee to keep it above zero. You can understand how much it is above zero during salary negotiations, or when you say "I quit" and you are offered a raise. It's mainly because in order to replace you, the new employee needs to be trained and this takes time usually proportional to your experience.
Now, in the case we're discussing (paternal leave), you don't just make a threat to leave, you actually just quit - you allow the company to test the scenario of working without you. So basically you lose some bargaining power.
I'm not saying this is how things should be, but similar thinking processes are going on in the heads of many people in management positions, especially recently, when you need to put some extra effort justifying your position.
The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.
It's like the learning curve. A steep one is supposed to mean something is easy to learn, but more people have it backwards.
I mean, if doctors offices and hospitals can get through these periods (and do, in countries that give leave to everyone), then so can most other businesses. Temporary employment for educated people exists.
Yes, that’s why no institution gives valued employees extended sabbaticals, for instance.
Oh, wait...
The truth is that you're never that important and eventually you'll go away from this place, so what is really important to you?
As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.
I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.
I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget.
'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.
If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you.
If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for.
If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.
I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.
This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period.
That's the hidden cost.
Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?
There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least.
It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.
Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.
Could it be that the reality is that women have a lot more stress under pregnancy and childbirth cuz they are actually the ones giving birth?
This would lead to a lot more time out of the workforce and probably reduced productivity whilst caring for an infant the first couple years.
What if we just removed all employment protections/protected groups/parental leave and replaced it with a universal basic income? This would solve our leave-inequality problem as you get the same UBI payment everywhere and the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
The point of striving for equal parental leave in this instance is to even up the playing field economically for men and women. If they both have a roughly equal probability of going on parental leave and the time they'd take is roughly equal, then it makes no sense for a business to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age over men of child-having age (obviously it isn't as cut at dry, but generally there is a range of normal ages for men to dad's as well). It would of course not be perfect, but it has a chance of working at least.
Now if don't want to solve these issues (maybe you don't believe this is a problem) or if you want to look into entirely different ways of solving them (like universal basic income), then okay that's interesting but it's kind of a separate discussion.
> the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
Random aside. Why do we care if they use it as a selling point? If we want to remove that option we could also just make it national law. (Here I assume you're referring to the US since many countries have these laws already.)
I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.
Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.
That's not the point. In high-pressure, competitive environments being out of the loop for 6 months means that you have to catch-up for the next 3 months to get back to speed. It slows down people's careers.
Everyone at my company who is good at their job would have their absence felt over the course of six months. For different positions, it would be different amounts of time, but I can't think of a single role from entry level to executive where someone could be so thoroughly good at their job that the company could ride along fine in their absence.
What was your experience? Do you live there or was it just a visit?
I thought Japan handled the pandemic much more reasonable than what my friends reported in the US. Initially I was worried about the density of Tokyo but mask wearing was already high. Everyone used hand sanitizer, socially distanced, etc. Tokyo never went on full lock down, it was just very limited so we got to do things I don’t think we would have done otherwise. Eg. we went to Tokyo Disney / Disney Sea a couple times and at 20-50% capacity it was like having the place to yourself.
Two, four weeks, or whatever it is really isn't enough time, your partner needs support and you have a new child to look after.
Like you, the pandemic left us spending the first year+ at home with our daughter and it has been a benefit to each of us.
If the company can not function without a single employee, they also need to ban employees from buying lottery tickets. Or walking on streets patrolled by homicidal buses (is there any other kind when it comes to key employees?).
Bad management is a sign they are going to experience running the company without key employees sooner rather than later.
If the work you're doing is important to the employer in any way, they need to have a backup plan on how to get that work done anyway. Because employees also switch jobs, get sick etc. Simulating a situation where an important worker becomes unavailable for an extended period of time is probably even a good exercise from organization point of view.
At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage. We're in an era where not only do we expect a lot of people not to have kids, the ones who aren't having them are in some sense making a sacrifice of some very precious moments for the ones who are.
This is an expression of the same old arguments against maternity leave as well - at the end of the day, this is making private choices a problem for the company and (to some extent) the people working at the company. The effects of this sort of thing can already be seen in the differences between men and women's pay & career opportunities - it is a substantial handicap!
We should be winding back on this sort of thing, not encouraging it. People should earn their living and take time off at their own expense.
EDIT And, having thought about it a bit, it might favour wealthy workers. You end up with situations where effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.
It is a cost for people who don’t have kids, but a net gain for everyone. A bit like healthcare. People who chose not to smoke benefit from paying taxes used to heal smokers, although a cigarette brings a lot less joy and benefit than kids.
It is my opinion and I’m politically strongly against demographic shrinking.
If there was a choice between a cash handout + keep on working vs. paternity leave a significant number of meant would prefer the cash handout.
The basic "this is the deal you get" for men is if they work hard for it & finance the operation then they get a happy & loving family. There are men who'd prefer the time & men who undervalue the time. But there are a lot of men who correctly identify that hard work, maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family and this scheme disadvantages them.
If people want unpaid time off I'm all for it. But paid vacation is not justified.
Where do you live ?
In country with free education and health care I'd say people definitely prefer maximising family quality time than working hard. When you don't have to worry about getting bankrupt at any point for any reason you start to see things differently. You're not going to be a dad/mom if you drop your kids to a caregiver at 6am and pick them up at 6pm
What's the point of having kids if you don't even take part in their education and just slave away at the office, get a tamagotchi, much cheaper and lower maintenance.
Every cent spent on kids education, well being and providing them healthy family environments is paid 1000 time back to society
If money could solve all problems, why don’t companies just send all their employees home and let their money do the work?
No they really need the employees to be there, giving their time and attention to the company mission. For that they are willing to spend a lot of money.
Parental time, care and attention is the most valuable thing you could provide a child with in the first few years of their life. Unless the time machine is invented, all the money in the world is no substitute.
No one is deciding though to have kids or not based on the father getting paid time off.
I think it is an easier argument that a knowledge worker who has been up all night taking care of a screaming baby is not effective anyway.
I think we should give fathers paid time off out of pity basically.
I am a father who was lucky to have a paid paternal leave. I am also a former freelancer who is happy to take care of himself in all situations.
I agree that this sort of benefits which you reap by choice is controversial; i don't see what I'd possibly consider a "fair" amount of benefits here. But I can't agree that cancelling it would make it fair.
All societies typically provide various parenting benefits, but then society also reaps the benefits of having the kids - up to drafting them into the armed forces and sending them to war. Now, some countries don't have mandatory conscription nowadays, but it is not unheard of for countries to introduce it at critical times.
I guess we'll see the abolition of animals farming globally around the same time. This would be the expression of humanity's "sentiment" against coercion towards the weaker in general. I believe this may happen but not very soon. (I am myself a meat eater.)
What would happen if the USA and PRC China got into a hot war over the ROC Taiwan? That would destroy the economy. Much easier to just insult one another and play games with currency manipulation and tariffs.
Capitalism and the global markets interconnectedness will save us from going to war.
Who is this ‘WE’ to whom you refer?
War is immensely profitable to many companies and individuals.
When those interests have the reins of power, there will be war.
As they should, at least in most of the Western world. People who make kids in demographically challenged countries are contributing more to society than those who don't, and accordingly deserve more privileges.
Regarding the economics: In the end someone is going to have to look after the kids. Looking at how much it costs to have kids, your argument makes no sense, too. If you just work and don't have children, you get paid the whole time and you also don't have to pay the enormous amount of money an extra human life costs.
So actually in the society you're proposing, having children would be even more of an economic drain than it is now, while parents would also miss out on the opportunity to form bonds with their child, therefore significantly worsening the child's life and maybe also even damage its psyche permanently ("my parents where never there for me" etc). Because not even remotely everyone can afford unpaid leave.
In the end, what you're arguing for is to worsen everyone's life just so you don't feel treated unfairly, even of you are not.
For the argument that the company has a problem by so called private choices: this is life. People get children. Self reproduction is basically the purpose of humanity. If your company (or to an extent your society) does not have the productivity to pay for their workers temporarily leaving, maybe it's just a shitty company. If your workers don't care for each other well being, maybe the company is just not a place worth of existence. Humans gotta look out for each other. That's basic human social behavior. That's what we're here for. As an employer of 10 people, I'm always happy to allow my workers taking off time for their children. Happens about once a year since I'm in the organization. Also we don't pay the full amount of the costs because it's subsidized by the state.
Children are awesome. Parents are awesome. And giving both the opportunity to form a bond, to not be stressed out and depressed, to make a basis for all the things they will become, all the things they will achieve in their later lifes, because they are healthy, loving, social humans – that's awesome.
It really depends on how you look at it. In my view companies are here to support our lifestyle and societies, we're some robots working for a corporate overlord for the kick of it, having a kid isn't (or doesn't have to be) a "sacrifice" you have to pay a price for.
A company offering maternal/paternal leave is a company that supports its employees and society at large. We evolved in societies and its structures to support each-other, not to slave our life away for some faceless corporation.
Don't forget to live your life, like, out of the office, real life, with people, kids being born, parents dying, taking time of to breath, taking a few steps back, realising work isn't the be-all and end-all of life. Taking time to educate and bond with your kids is so much more important than a few months of typing shitty code no one will ever read or use in 5 years tops
Salaries are usually not a zero-sum game.
Having kids is a full time job. When you get kids you can kiss all your free time goodbye, say goodnight to the side projects. Having kids is not good for your career, or other life goals. And if you are alone, eg. you have to pay for everything yourself, it also means a life in poverty.
This is a very self-centered view of the universe. No, you are not important nor you need to be.
I do my job, if I leave someone else is going to be hired to do it. That is how it works.
If you are "important" then you should be receiving a share of the profits, not a salary. A salary just means that you can be replaced, no matter how high it is.
I guess that it is a cultural thing, that many people have been convinced to work extra hours, to not take vacations, to slave away their lives for a sense of "self importance".
I get a fantastic salary, I enjoy my work, but I am not important. It is difficult to replace me, it took 2 years to get another person in my position. But, if I tomorrow leave, the company will manage. I bring value, but I am not the center of the universe. I bring value, but I am not irreplaceable. I bring value, but I have to take (by law) vacations and the company will continue running without me.
All jobs in a company bring value and the employees needs to be respected for that. It does not matter if you have a low-paid low-skilled job, you are still being paid because you bring value and you should be respected for it. And you should be able to go on vacations, because the goal of all this capitalist thing is to make our lives better, to be slaves we do not need capitalism. If in your society low-paid low-skill workers cannot take vacations, then you are failing at bringing well-being, health, and meaning to the members of your society. And for what? To produce another plastic shit that will be polluting the ocean in one month? To show more ads to people that cannot afford to buy more shit?
I guess that this is a difference in society values. But for me the question "are you really important" should be answered as "yes, because I have friends, family, children, hobbies, etc." and what you produce is only a small part of that value.
Note*: in NZ, the partner is allowed 2 week unpaid if you are in your current job for more than 12 months, 1 week if you are in your job between 6 and 12, and 0 if you just join a new company. And it does not matter if you have been paying taxes and working several years before that. Silly system really.
At the same time, I WFH the full time so I was there for almost everything and my kid started to have full nights straight away so it was not that bad :).
Imagine if you will, a society that didn't want to go extinct. A society that had discovered that birth rates were falling and that paternity leave was just one of many straightforward government sanctioned initiatives that could tip the balance.
Now imagine an individual or group that thought 5 days was enough. Yeah. About that.
My eldest son is nearly 30.
When we were expecting him, his mother was suddenly `managed out` of her job in IT working on GCOS7 systems; no problems whatsoever until she was pregnant.
When I told my boss (again in IT) I needed to plan in a weeks annual leave, he was clear that he was pissed off and fed up about it, because we were busy doing some technology transition.
Three decades later; I cheerfully cover for colleagues taking a couple of weeks of extra paid paternity leave.
My own archaic view about paternity leave is that it is designed for female equality; which I believe is a good thing.
I’d challenge the word “cause” here. My guess is it’s just a leading indicator signaling the dad is engaged in/places high priority on the family which extends to the marriage.
Aside from the cases where there is some kind of fundamental incompatibility being papered over by absence (which, sure, is a thing that happens, though), I fail to see how it could fail to be.
For example, if covid reduced number of cars on road and thus absolute number of accidents. Your saying you'd determine it's safer to drive because covid. However, in a relative sense, maybe pre-covid you had a 1% chance of being in an accident and during covid you had a 5% chance of being in an accident. What caused that? You can't just said covid made everything screwy and caused it all. You need to dig deeper. Are people running red lights because there are fewer cars on the road? Are people distracted because TikTok? Are they racing around trying to find toilet paper? Sure covid did all those things, but simply blaming covid is not really a useful analysis except in casual conversation; not academic research.
a father bonding with his children may also be more willing to avoid divorce.
but are these really significant factors? only research can answer that.
Couples where finances are stable enough that the person who didn't just pop out a kid can justify taking the time off are going to have the spare resources to maintain a marriage. They can afford all sorts of lifestyle crap that puts less stress on a relationship than living paycheck to paycheck in a double wide with a toddler running around causing problems. The correlation between stable finances and a stable marriage has been studied written about at length.
[1] http://paa2019.populationassociation.org/uploads/190145
I mean, the only reason the tech giants are able to offer such generous leave is because their businesses are almost unfathomably profitable, with limited competition, and because they are big enough that the work of any individual worker will not be missed that much. But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
My paternity leave was fully paid by the government, but it was capped. Moreover the amount of paid months is limited and I had to share them with my wife.
However because sexism is more complicated than just lack of equal access, parental leave is still mostly taken by women and women still find it harder to get back into regular employment after extended periods of maternity leave.
I know several mothers who planned to have children and go on maternity leave and because of this accepted jobs that pay the bills but aren't places they enjoy working and now face the prospect of having to go back to a job they hate or have a second or third child (only to then have to either go back to a job they not only hate but also haven't done in years or find a new job with a multi-year gap in their resumé).
For this to really change will likely take generations because the behavior and the social expectation of that behavior are mutually reinforcing.
Google do it anyway because they and their employees like it and because they can afford to. The local restaurant could do it much MORE easily. But they have less profit margin (like you say). So we need a law to force them to do it, so everyone does it and puts their prices up to stay in business.
That's exactly why countries mandate it: mandating it allows less profitable companies to do it because they know their competitors have to as well.
It's not about replacements, it's about still getting paid. Try your argument again with the premise that that small restaurant now has to pay two people for that one position.
However, as someone who, for a short period of time, gave a small loan to an Italian friend (professional cook, very good too and able to produce in restaurant environment) so that he could (once again) open a restaurant, and also has another friend with a (better quality and very good environment) Mexican restaurant, and also other people managing hotels or restaurants and clubs/bars, in Germany, your argument about easy replacements does not hold water at least from what I witnessed. They struggled hard to keep people they knew, and any loss was not easy to replace at all.
We also have seen headlines recently that those kinds of jobs are harder to fill now, after over a year of shutdown or very limited restaurant business, with many workers having found other jobs, for example "Covid and jobs: Why are hospitality workers leaving the industry?" -- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-57241370
Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation. That's what almost every other western country does. The effect is the same either way though: people pay a few cents more per meal and employees get parental leave and we all get on with our lives.
Restaurants have way too few employees so it would not "even out".
> They can do that because all restaurants are charging a bit more because they all have to pay
That is not what will happen.
I'm sorry, that would be nice, especially here in Germany food quality comes way after trying to save a penny (not my random Internet opinion, an Italian friend of mine representing Italian food makers arranging sales here in Germany said they sold the good stuff to Spain and France and only then to Germany - not because of bias, but because to German buyers the price matters more than anything else). I've got some money and quite a few diverse contacts in the restaurant and hotel business here. What do you base your argument on? It sounds idealistic but not very realistic. Even if you could avoid those small businesses not hiring anyone that could be a "danger", somehow, which restaurants would be impacted would be extremely uneven, only a few would have to pay.
Their margins, at least here, are already atrocious. Germans just stay home and get the cheapest stuff even if it's objectively bad food. I lived abroad, for example in the Bay Area for a few years, and that was paradise for going out (ignoring all the posh restaurants that want to appear to be better, when a lot of "ugly" places have far better food and atmosphere) for food, now I'm in the 3rd food world.
> Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation.
Yes, indeed.
But your idea that trying to force the small restaurant would work even remotely as well - no, it won't. In large companies the laws of large numbers start to work and it averages out, the variations in tiny businesses, who ends up with a parent that has to be paid, who doesn't, are different. Only a few will end up with that cost but much of their competition will not. Those are not exactly life-long employments when it would even out over time because most employees would be impacted at one time or another.
Maybe you can Google-translate, it's in German, how it works here in Germany for small businesses: https://www.personal-wissen.de/7414/arbeitsrecht-in-kleinbet... -- The business does not have to pay it, it is paid by the state, in summary (also see - again in German - https://www.arbeitsrechte.de/elternzeit-gehalt/). Over a third of workers only work part-time though.
Google doesn't want you to leave for two to three years to raise your kids. Google wants you (as a woman) to work yourself to the bone into your 30s and then either drop out over reduced performance from a burnout or take your family leave and leave the industry forever. Or alternatively, not to take your leave and instead use the free child care to maintain the illusion that you still get a fulfilling family life while living for the company.
The fact they choose to do anything shows at least some degree of decency. I'm sure there is a degree of calculation there too (we don't want to lose 30-something women who are skilled and well integrated because they want kids). But it's still positive and generous.
All the perks companies like Google offer are carefully optimized to increase productive time in the short term and extend the duration of that short term as much as possible. Only as you rise through the ranks does mid and long term become relevant and then they have perks to address those factors as well. But at no point is a company purposefully being generous except to extract as much value out of employees as possible. The purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value, not to make employees happy.
Yup, that's what the article says at the end:
> But ideally, says Banister, leave for fathers and financial support for that leave should be the state’s responsibility, because putting the onus on employers – as is the case in the US – can lead to a “two-tier system” where only certain sectors offer paternity leave.
[...]
“The government should offer an appropriate minimum package which encourages behaviours that support a more gender equal society,” says Banister.
Businesses do exist and function perfectly fine in countries where these policies are universal, so I don't buy the argument. I've only encountered this belief in North America.
But yes, US tech giants pay voluntarily because they are quite profitable and hiring devs is (relatively) hard, and yes society should enforce it through government policy (I think whether it is taxpayer or company funded is a smaller detail IMO - e.g. annual leave and other entitlements are company funded - but yes 6 months paid leave for a very small business might be an expense it cannot pay, compared to predictable amounts of annual leave you can plan around, so it might make sense to "pool" the cost via taxation).
Other countries mandate these leaves and spread them out as social programs, and therefore the small companies in those countries ARE able to function - because the costs are spread out.
In the US that is not the case, because the spreading of costs and mandating of leaves isn’t universal, and they can’t afford to take it on themselves.
Afterwards both parents can take up to 3 years time-off each while their job will be protected. Between both parents up to 14 months are paid, each parent has to take at least 2 months off or only 12 months will be paid. Note this is not full salary but 65% of the net salary (and not taxed) plus a cap that TBH huts as a tech worker but is fine for most people.
Now here’s what the employer is on the hook for: - Need to keep your job available during all the time taken off. You need to be able to renter at the same level and salary. - Time off during the mandatory protective leave for mother’s is paid by the employer but fully reimbursed by the public health insurance (so net 0). Companies pay into this system a small percentage of payroll, currently between 0,14% and 0,88% depending on the employers chosen insurance. - The 14 months paternity leave are fully paid for by taxes and the employer has to apply for it themselves
This is still a burden for very small companies but overall it creates a situation where there’s almost no financial impact for companies when people become parents. Society as a whole shoulders that.
> But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
With a good parental leave system, any business no matter how small must be ready for any employee to disappear for 3-12 months. It’s just the reality of running a business. But again (and this is what’s important) if it’s universally used then the same applies to the restaurant across the street too! It’s not a competitive disadvantage.
The same applies for employees: if your manager with 99% certainty took 6-12 months paternal leave with each child, just like every man in the company, then your taking 6-12 months will not be a disadvantage for your career as a man either.
> If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
Absolutely 100% agree. This isn’t a benefit for the parent it’s a benefit for the child. Non-transferable tax funded leave of at least 3 months per parent should be par for the course.
Except it is because your business is the one that hired the young woman and the other business did not, so now you have 4 people working for a year and the other business has 5 at the same cost.
For small businesses, if this is not tax funded, this is a huge liability and an incentive to discriminate when hiring.
Oh absolutely. It has to be tax funded. The damage to the employer has to be limited to finding a temp/replacement - no more.
Vacations are kind of a tax too: They take a portion of your income, and give it to you in June of the next year.
Not everything has to make things rough on the employer. Though, to be fair, if people and companies are taxed fairly, the richest people and companies would still be paying a larger share simply because they can afford to do so without slipping into despair.
Slightly meta, but I wish people would stop saying "the US" as if it's a monolith. It's not. It's a federation of smaller entities. It's saying "the EU" parental leave policy as a monolith: it's non-sensical.
The EU has a whole bunch of different countries which do their own thing, and the US has a whole bunch of states that do their own thing.
Just like people might compare Denmark versus Spain on weeks given, you have to compare (e.g.) Illinois to Oregon.
The EU as a whole has federalism, and so does the US.
It is easy to see why this kind of thing can have affect on your carreer development. Especially when people who have kids and take timeoff tend to have multiple kids and thus multple paternity leaves. If you take 10 months off work your carreer development drags behind 10 months and everytime you change your employer unless you can trade up your title you will be resetting whatever progress you've made towards the next job title (you might catch up faster to the same point you were in at the new job, but the progress still gets reset).
I don't think there is anything that can be done about this. This is how human brains work. Think about our ancestors. Someone goes away for long time and comes back. We might be glad that they are back, but they've missed out from the struggles and successes of that time, so we are less likely to promote them to the next leader of our group than someone who has been there while they were absent.
In my experience teams are usually continually hiring, so the person on secondment can often go straight into a permanent role on the team when the parent returns.
I do understand push and how it’s beneficial to woman and to children, but in my opinion the whole idea ignores men, how they feel about it and how men function in society in general.
On paper everything looks great: Mother gets an opportunity to get back to her career, children gets some bonding time with father that might benefit for years to come and father gets insight in the life of the child and caring for his family. Reality, however, for many men is different.
Often men's only friends are at work. Taking paternity leave not only detaches father from his friends but also creates a gap in father's group. If they have problem to whom they will come? Absent-at-work father will slowly get pushed out of the social group only because groups naturally seek opportunity to fill the void. Men aren't good at expressing emotions and everyone agrees that on paper paternity leave looks good. So what happens is that "oh yeah, relationship naturally deteriorated, and Tom really helped us with this project" but in reality it didn't and Tom hadn't. It's social dynamic that changed. Father knows what's up, his workgroup know what's up and yet no one will say "You know what, we missed you, you didn't even call us, so we were angry and decided Tom is our new friend and screw you". Yet while men don't really talk about emotions they can feel social dynamics and so it takes usually 1 or 2 fathers in workgroup and observation how social dynamics change around them after they come back. It's not ostracism, it's just when you're leaving your group for couple of months you cannot expect that they'll welcome you back even if you decided to leave them for a very sound reason.
Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child. They don't get the same hormones woman and because of that experience of caring for the child is by default vastly different[*]. Men's bodies don't help them preserve the specie by releasing a number of happiness hormones as mothers body do. For men it's quite often the chore without positive feedback. And of course no one will ever complain about it as strong men are responsible and caring so it's not right thing to do, but I have yet to hear a man in my circle who will describe it as magical experience [1]. We live in an age where some fathers already took paternity leave and their children are teenagers and not adults and even those parents don't speak out outside of the "parenting improvement circles".
There are of course, many other factors, like the concept of breadwinner, strength of the partner relation etc., etc., but all of that combined makes me not believing it will ever take off on the big scale.
Anecdotal note: I spent 18 months taking care of my child during day while their mother worked and then for 1 year I was working in the evenings.
[1]: As with social dynamics there are always some outliers, response spectrums, variables and knobs so if that's you (and I do believe that HN hosts quite a lot of outliers on various topics) please take that into consideration :-)
Yeah well, it's hard to make friends outside of work if you spent practically all your time there. It's exactly the same for women with 40+ hour work weeks.
Soon enough you'll find you've got a whole bunch of other parents to talk to, as you try to stop your child from eating all the sand in the sandbox at your local park.
Later still when you take your child to pre-school, daycare, or similar, you'll also find more parents to hang around with. Especially if your child/children wants to play with particular kids in the evening/weekend.
TLDR; Even if you're a workaholic and all your friends were previously from work, parenting will give you a lot of new friends.
I think the main thing to make it work is just to have a society that values people being able to spend time with their children. If it is a normal everyday part of life where society supports it (for example financially) it works great.
> Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child.
Two things that I've never seen or heard of in my environment or in general, and things that seem deep into stereotype territory.
> As with social dynamics there are always some outliers
And sometimes, you are one of them!
When given a real choice, men are eager to and capable of caring for their small ones. Even from the first month.
Any amount of rehashing, thinking-really-hard-about and mashing preconceptions and stereotypes together in new and interesting ways to form an opinion on how well this would work, is moot. It already works.
Luckily, didn't feel any of those issues article lists there. Nor from others, nor myself. CEO said something along the lines: of course we like when people work, but your decision. As almost everyone was almost work from home, some even didn't notice :)
This of course nothing for the fact that bad employers may not see it that way.
And on top of that, your value of your annual also depreciates ("You work only half a year full salary, so your annual leave is now 1/2 its origina value")...
That's at least the case in NZ - and if you are on tech salary you'll be loosing like 90% of your income.
If I remember right, in Denmark you can't split the days and so men has a much more equal parental leave compared to Sweden.
A key here is that one does not need to take all days at once. You can choose to work half time etc. for some years if you prefer and use half-days of parental Leave, making them last twice as long.
It's also pretty common to save days to use them in conjunction with vacation each year up to the child reach 12 years of age (100 days can be save after child reacheas 4 years of age).
This means you can extend the vacation from 1 months to 2-3 months a year instead and the the full summer to hang out with your kid. Very nice.
Both parents are even allowed to be on parental leave simultaneously for 1 months in case you want to go on a longer trip together.
The only way to get rich in Sweden is through capital gains. There taxes as still very low :)
I've taken SPL twice, and while people not knowing about it might be a problem, the real issue is that it is insanely complicated. I have a PhD and still struggled to understand the forms you have to fill in. I imagine most people would just give up.
The article also doesn't consider that there are definitely genetic factors that make women more interested in babies. I have experienced none of the supposed shaming or career effects, but I still don't want to do paternity leave for more than a few months.
While a small percentage of mothers can not relate well to their kids and prefer to get back to work asap, the reality is that most mothers prefer to spend time with their kids.
Who should get to spend time with the kids? The person who spent 10 seconds injecting their semen into the womb, or the person who toiled for 9 months letting the child grow in their womb, often risking their life to do so? In many cases, the discussion does not even make sense. It is even more ridiculous when feminist men pride themselves for taking "the burden" off their wives. All they did is take away their natural privilege.
This also becomes even less surprising if one looks outside of the academic box and realizes that most people don't have exiting creative jobs where they change the world, but mostly mundane stuff like being supermarket cashiers, or, at best, nurses - which is a nice job, but should women really leave their kids so that the can change the diapers of strangers instead?
Feminism want us to believe that taking care of kids is a burden that men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work. And huge parts of society have swallowed it.
Here in Europe, many governments think they have to force men to take paternity leave, to further equality. They think men don't want to spend time with their kids because of role models or whatsoever.
The reality is probably in most cases that the the issue is mostly financial. Even with paid paternity leave, there usually is less money on the table than with full time work, specially since women tend to choose less well paid careers (another privilege - they don't have to provide for the family, so they can afford to trade income for convenience and social status).
I think it is great if fathers can take paternity leave and recommend everybody to try to do it. but there are actual real world issues preventing it, not just memes ("societal expectations").
At this stage the bond between them both is so thick, that they are basically inseparable. As man you basically spend a whole year to catch up.
So even with enough money and leeway from my employer to take parental leave there are still issues why childcare is mainly the part of the mothers. I guess most of the feminists don't have children. Oh and try to have two children. Guess what: it does not scale well! And it takes more than two persons to even raise one child. I would encourage you all to try it yourself. It is really rewarding to be a parent and also so exhausting - even with all the privileges in the world.
My wife never really learned that, she'd give him boobs and he'd feed/sleep. That worked perfectly for the first six-ten months, and then it didn't.
I'd never had those to fall back on, and was always the one who took over when he was being "difficult". Then again I was also the one that pushed him in his pram for a walk around the block at 2AM, in sub-zero temperatures, to help him fall back to sleep. They were hell on my sleeping patterns, but also some of the best early memories I have. Talking and singing as the snow fell .. magical.
Sometimes when I returned my wife told me she couldn't sleep cause she missed him. I guess they just where very close. Sometimes I envied that - now that he is bigger we have a lot father- son activities, so that makes up for that.
Men and women are just different parents and I believe kids need both parts or even more. Grandparents and aunts and cousins, friends and teachers. The kids are always happier in a crowd that just with one parent or even both parents. Nowadays everyone threats parenting as a two person job but everyone will agree the saying that it takes a village to raise a child...
Breastfeeding is another example of why it is more "natural" for mothers to stay home than fathers, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village
No, the feminist position is that childcare is an activity that does not have to be done exclusively by the mother. And so there should be equal and generous time off available for both partners regardless of sex (or if a same-sex relationship, relation to child).
Of course there are biological considerations too. The mother having the opportunity to breastfeed, in particular. So the schedule of leave may be organized around optimizing for this as well.
Or do they believe going off to work and "have a career" (never mind the aforementioned supermarket cashiers) is the better part, that men unfairly claim for themselves?
I have never seen feminists to call on mothers to give fathers more time with children, to tbh.
It is not about men being able to take care of children. Nobody sane doubts that.
No, feminism (except perhaps some weird subcategory of bourgeois feminism) does not want you to believe work is fun. And most feminism places the blame here on institutional patriarchy (which binds both men and women with restrictive gender roles, harming both) not men pushing restrictive gender roles on women.
You do seem to describe a common right-wing caricature of feminism, though.
Men in the relationship are typically seen as the "arm" of the patriarchy.
It is true that in this case it would benefit men if they were granted more time with their children (at the expense of the mothers and the family finances). But that is more accidental.
Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women, with regard to that subject, if you believe you know feminism so much better.
Instead of arbitrarily deciding the reason is “feminism” and then trying to invent attributes of feminism that make that make sense, tou could probably do the minimal research it would take to find the actual reasons cited by any one of the governments in adopting the rule. I feel safe in the assumption that it is “men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work” in precisely zero of them.
> Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women
Uh, okay: “Yet, the proportion of men who take more than a few days off work when their child is born is tiny.
Most cite fears of being discriminated against professionally, missing out on pay rises and promotions, being marginalised or even mocked as reasons for not taking time off. Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender” [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210712-paternity-leav... (yes, the article we’re already discussing in this thread.)
But you don't actually know the reasons?
"yes, the article we’re already discussing in this thread."
Is that a feminist article? What makes it so?
"Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender"
As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege). It is not "just" societal constructs, it is the negotiation position of the wombs.
I know the reasons that have been cited for some policies aimed at encouraging men to take more maternity leave, including the workplace expectations/social pressure one cited in this article , which has been cited prominently around the Swedish policy with 90-days for each partner that is non-transferable plus a large pool that can be used by either partner. I haven't cataloged every argument cited for every policy of this type in every country. If you can find one that supports your characterization, you are welcome to present it.
> As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege)
So now you are not only arguing that “feminist want us to believe X” without any evidence of feminists suggesting that, you also have added a hidden motive with similarly no evidence.
Your unsupported ideological fantasy is getting more elaborate, but not any more supported.
However, there is no point in arguing. I don't know what kind of feminist literature you encounter. Maybe you just choose to read it with pink tinted glasses, or you only see the moderate ones. You get to choose your own view of the world, of course.
By the same logic, women in Saudia Arabia have the "privilege" of not being allowed to drive a car.
Was your comment serious? Do you truly believe women in the west are so oppressed that they can't freely choose their careers?
Since there is no changing biology, my proposed solution is to make paternal leave mandatory.
I think it's counterintuitive at first blush to help women by forcing men not to work but that absence is exactly what puts young women behind the eightball at the beginning of their careers and they play catch-up for the rest of their lives.
There should definitely also be mandated minimum vacation days in my opinion (where I live, four weeks of paid leave per year are the legal minimum for full-time jobs), but that's quite unrelated to the issue at hand.
I am extremely against enforced handicaps on people as a way to achieve equality. I can't think of precedent where this has led to anything positive (I'm reminded of the Harrison Bergeron short story as a write this). If the man (or woman) can afford childcare, then why should the government force them out of the workforce, exactly who is benefiting from this handicap?
Young women don't get promoted before they have kids and that hurts their future earnings.
To answer the second question, I think the children would benefit.
I am, however, pretty nonplussed about the idea of forcing people to... do anything really. I'm with you on that.
Ask any recruiter or whoever is doing hiring at your company.
Eg. In the UK it's illegal to discriminate by gender / race, unless it's done in favour of a category that is deemed unrepresented.
We routinely had recruiters bringing only female / non-white candidates to make our quota look good.
Childless people will still get sick, depressed, burned out, they'll quit... They're not robots. How much more productive will they be, 1%?
There are several trends the can explain why there are differences in the aggregates (old generations had a more traditional family/work split, old rich men are over represented in the market, more families could survive on one salary in the past, young women have better qualifications than young men, women don't start a family before 30 these days) and there are also tons of biological reasons that make men and women different.
On the subject of paternity leave; while I was grateful to have extra paid time off (it does push your pay per day up), I didn't really enjoy my paternity leave and ended up using it as a work 3 days per week for a long time.
A mandatory paternity solution sounds like a terrible idea for the men who don't want it and it just reduces men's freedom for the increase of a meaningless metric.
but do you think all mothers enjoy to stay at home? mandatory maternity leave sounds like terrible idea for women who don't want it and just reduces a womans freedom...
the leave is not just for you but for your child too.
btw: the pay gap is not in the pay levels for equal work in equal time, but in the fact that on average women spend less time working and get promoted less into higher paying positions. and especially that last point is a problem.
I think what's more likely is people who are good leaders go into leadership and good leaders are far more common in men.
The evidence of good leaders being more common in men is that there are more men in leadership positions than women.
Either way, it is a huge leap to go from leaders being more commonly men, to men being better leaders.
It's really difficult to have conversations with people who hear something different to what is said every single time. I say "people with good leadership skills tend to be male", you hear "men make better leaders". I say "this is evidence to support my hypothesis", you hear "my hypothesis is irrefutable because of this evidence". I say "men and women aren't the same", you hear "men are better than women" (because everything needs to be ranked, things can't simply be different).
That said, just because you present something as evidence, doesn't mean that it actually supports your hypothesis.
People intentionally or unintentionally hear what they want to hear all the time, especially on these kinds of issues. It's sometimes called a straw man argument, although in this case nobody even bothered to argue against the straw man after erecting it.
This thread is a reaction to this statement. You didn't really back it up, so no-one bothered to pick at it with any care.
People tending to pursue leadership because they're skilled at it is an ok statement. But, you saying that that's why there's more men in leadership positions is a leap. For starters, you're ignoring the possibility of a patriarchal society, and gender roles more specifically, limiting the choices of the men and women involved. As long as gender roles affect the participants, actions between genders cannot be directly compared.
Imagine a woman thinking that she shouldn't be a leader, due to social conditioning, even though her faculties are otherwise suited for it. Imagine an older white male being perceived as leadership material, not due to true merit, but because of social conditioning.
In our highly competitive world do you really think "patriarchy" or "gender roles" would trump merit? That not a single company in the history of the world would have got a competitive edge by shunning gender roles and having more women in charge?
Now that's a leap.
It's a leap, because there's other possibilities you don't account for. I don't pretend to know why we have a patriarchal society, but I do believe that history is largely random and far from optimal, which is what you argue for. That is what I think is naive.
You describe the world as a meritocracy, governed by the skilled. Believe me, you're in the minority in thinking that.
> do you really think [...] That not a single company in the history of the world would have got a competitive edge by shunning gender roles and having more women in charge?
Do you really see companies as the pinacles of human history? What if we still had racial slavery? Would you argue in favor of that as well? Is history the true judge of what is a good idea?
History is what we do. To say that something is right, because it's prevalent in history, is to say that what we do is right, because we do it.
If you want your close ones to fulfill some social dictates, I find it sad, but it's fine. I'm not interested in that, and I don't see it as anything more than useless dogma.
At the end of the day, it was my comment asking for evidence that was flagged.
California is pursuing gender equality by enforcing female presence in the board of directors (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) and yet there's no mandatory maternity/paternity leave.
https://bel-india.com/what-is-the-state-of-paternity-leave-i...