I guess this is one reason I'm lucky and happy to be in Canada: There is a total of 52 weeks of shared parental leave, then there's 2 weeks reserved individually for each parent. The parental leave can be split in any way the parents feel necessary.
And this isn't anything employers do; this is a governmental program. However, the first 6 months of leave are paid 70% regular salary, the rest is at 50%.
I think it's a great program, and I don't know that a lot of women have any issues returning to work after that time.
Quebec, as usually, is a bit different. There is a years worth of maternity (or paternity) leave. There is also 5 weeks given specifically to the other spouse (generally referred to as paternity leave). Anyways, You can take the 5 weeks whenever you want, up to a year from when the child is born.
Considering the many massive deficiencies in Quebec, this is one of the brighter spots.
And on a related note, in Quebec, public child care centers are 7$ a day. Though it's not all perfect, those programs sparked a mini baby boom and as a result there are not enough places for everybody. But private child care centers are usually around 25$ a day.
No, no it's not. Not in the slightest. I meant exactly that. If anything, it's less antagonistic then I how I usually describe Quebec, it's government and laws, and it's medical community. I usually associate them with child-abusers, and feel justified in doing so. Nor do I feel it's overly dramatic.
Simply put, if I knew years ago what I knew now, I would have left Quebec before having children.
Someone told me that in Canada, clinics often hire dentists as contractors ... this makes it so that you can't get maternity leave benefits, etc. Not sure how pervasive this is across different occupations. Would appreciate hearing experiences.
Just off the top of my head, from what I can remember, these are all different people:
"We're having to worry about money. We never had to do that before." (Router wrangler, left in 2008. One of the earlier casualties of the great shrinking.)
The whole China thing. (The office there, not the Christmas/Aurora attacks.)
The real names thing. (G+)
Hostile environment / "My boss was a dick" (This one was in a news story linked from HN not too long ago... and happens to have been said by one of my friends).
Bozos, bozos, everywhere. Plus, the new focus on the relentless pursuit of evil, and more. (Me, covered in my writing: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ )
Tired of being stuck as a go-nowhere sysadmin job with no hope of upward mobility. (Bailed out to go back to school to learn web stuff.)
Acqi-non-hired. (They bought a company and then put one of their dev relations people in a one-year fixed term because they didn't like her approach to tech.)
Really bad manager. Incompetent, unable to have a meaningful conversation, goes in circles. (Wound up being PIPped. Probably would have quit anyway.)
Sorry, I can't come up with any more right now. But that should be a start.
I don't have exact number, unfortunately. All I have are the experiences of working there for several years while watching people show up, get burned, and leave.
This means I can't really answer your question about proportions with hard data. I can tell you that the ratio in engineering, and particularly in the kernel team / cluster management area (where I was at the end) was seriously lopsided just by looking at things. This meant when a woman did leave, it was pretty obvious.
I know this isn't much to go on, so I started digging around. Lucky for you, I found a short video I shot when there was some kind of release celebration in September 2009. I counted 25 people in my shot (so I'm not including myself), all standing around in front of what used to be my office. Of those 25 people, there was one woman. So, add me behind the camera, and that's 8%.
That's the best I can do for now. Hope that helps.
I'm curious about that article about the relentless pursuit of evil, but for reasons that I don't understand, you linked to your blog's front page. Ctrl+f 'evil' didn't help. Could you maybe give us the actual URL(s)? I'm genuinely curious, because you're pushing a button that I didn't know I had.
That talks about Collabra eating Netscape from within by destroying its culture. You might argue that Doubleclick has been steadily doing that to Google.
Badging is when you take your ProxCard (which is glued between two photo badges) and pass it over a reader in front of the cafe. The attached laptop then plays the DING! noise from Gattaca. No, really, it does. Except when it played the vuvuzela sound.
As for Doubleclick, well, that one's harder to explain. It sure seems like the company ate something it couldn't handle. "Ugh, bad pie."
I think it's not a reason only because people's expectations in that regard are extremely low, and also, because anything remotely reasonable is seen as a perk. As such, women might might not leave over something they never knew they should have had. Just as a point of reference, several European countries measure maternity leave in years, not months.
How about not criticizing the article for what it's clearly not about? The title is misleading, but if you get past it and read the article, it becomes clear that the message is not "Google's sole initiative to retain women is to extend maternity leave", but rather "maternity leave is important and most employers are doing the wrong thing, kudos to Google for daring to do the right thing".
We just had the original posted yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4420056 and it explains several other steps Google has taken to increase the percentage of women hired and retained. Today.com ignored the rest of the article and made this clickbait to promote some social agenda.
How does paternity leave generally work at most companies? My company even has maternity leave for adoptions but they make sure to mention that men aren't eligible! (It seems to me men are just as capable of adoption as women, I'm not sure what would make them less eligible.)
0,2 or sometimes 7-8 weeks. Maternity leave is a combination of medical disability for late pregnancy and post-partum (should be covered by disability insurance) and family leave for a primary caregiver. There is absolutely no reason to enshrine sexism in the policy. Lay out a sex-blind policy, and accept if women tend to exercise it more than men, that's plenty of (acceptable) imbalance.
As some people have pointed out this is a bit of a simplistic analysis, but I find it encouraging that Google is doing this. The state of Maternity leave in the U.S. is frankly appalling. My wife (a nurse) is currently pregnant and her Maternity 'leave' is 8 weeks. She is _required_ to burn all but one week of her vacation time as well as all her sick leave. After that it's unpaid and if she were to stay on her employer's insurance we would have to pay for it out of pocket for the remaining duration of the leave.
Fortunately I have good insurance but this seems incredibly bizarre to me. Nurse's are already overworked. Long story short, when I see a high profile company treating pregnant mothers better it only makes me happy.
I actually like the way the U.S. does it. Citizens and companies shouldn't have to have their dollars used to pay other people to have and raise children.
That's somewhat naive in my opinion. Reducing maternity leave would lead to women leaving work rather than not having babies. So citizens and companies lose ultimately.
I prefer the approach of saving money to account for one parent being able to take extended time off from work/leaving their job for a period of time. Myself, I've saved money and could work from home.
As for my own mom, even though I live in a country where she could take a long maternity leave, she opted to go back to work after a very short time.
The thing is, you're viewing this from a moral rather than a business perspective. From a moral perspective, sure, people should plan ahead and not have children until they have the requisite resources with sustainable income.
From a business perspective, six months paid leave is worth it if you can avoid hiring and training a new employee.
It's interesting... On the one hand, I think it makes total sense, from a "treat your employees with respect and show them that you actually care about their welfare" perspective, to offer extended maternity leave and what-not. It's also probably good for retention and is probably a net win for the company (and therefore, the other employees) in the long run.
But you can also see the viewpoint of single / childless people who feel like they're being punished for being single / childless. Sorta like the way non-smokers sometimes feel like smokers get more "free breaks" by virtue of the fact that they smoke.
That said, once we get Fogbeam Labs to the point where we have paid employees and have to worry about issues like maternity/paternity leave, etc., I'd like to do the same thing Google is going (or better). The question I'm chewing on right now is, should we do something different for the childless people. Call it a "mental health break" or something.
Bear with me, I'm just thinking out loud here, but can we assume that childbirth is fairly infrequent, and that a given employee isn't likely to use maternity/paternity leave more than once every couple of years? If so, how about a policy for employees that you can take a "mental health break" (MHB) of n months, every y years, unless you've taken maternity/paternity leave in that time?
Of course, that opens the door to someone taking MHB and then show up pregnant a year and a half later, and wind up taking both...
Hmmm... like I said, just thinking out loud here. But it seems like there ought to be some way to construct a mechanism where the people without kids don't feel like "people who have kids get extra special treatment."
Or you could think about it a different way. Maternity/paternity leave is a social service for a fellow (albeit new) citizen who is unable to care for itself--kind of like disability benefits. It's a way to level the playing field at the very beginning for this new little citizen, or it could be if the US offered a universal policy like Canada's.
Those children you are paying other people to have and raise? Just think of them as the future tax base for the Social Security benefits you will be collecting one day.
> Citizens and companies shouldn't have to have their dollars used to pay other people to have and raise children.
Except that society as a whole DOES already pay for this indirectly. Not providing decent support for people having babies effectively forces people to either have the family they want or keep working. Given that women disproportionately are expected to be the primary caregiver for children, this is a big pressure to keep women out of the work force.
In terms of morality, it is really unethical to punish people for living their lives and exercising their basic biology.
I'm fine with people (be it men or women) taking extended unpaid leave to take care of their babies, as well as underlining the necessity for potential parents and individuals to save money ahead of time in order to have a child. That is reliant on personal responsibility rather than outsourcing that responsibility to corporations or the state.
Of course, the people most able to take unpaid time off or save for having a child are people that already have access to decent jobs or the ability to save more than they take in and spend. For many people, that is not realistic or is outright impossible. An appeal to personal responsibility is saying that we should ignore people that do not have the means or opportunity to save or prepare for having a child. It is basic human decency to not punish people for being human and wanting to have a family.
What Google's numbers determined is that they are already paying for it in attrition. Women don't stop having babies if you don't give them sufficient maternity leave - they leave.
By increasing from 3 months at 50% pay to 5 months, their attrition post-maternity leave dropped by 50%. That sounds like a low cost to reduce the amount of new hiring and training they need to do
Well, in the developed world we depend on people having children in order for our economy to be sustainable. This is not just for things such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, parents spend more money on their children (generally a lot more) than they receive in subsidies. In terms of GDP, it's a net win. That does not even include the benefits from avoiding the productivity loss (especially at the high end) that an economy experiences by putting serious obstacles in the way of half of its population when it comes to advancing their career.
I don't have any insight into Google, but is is a smart thing to do.
My wife and I recently had our first child, who thankfully has no serious health issues and is a great sleeper. My wife's employer provides 3 months leave at half pay, but only after she uses her PTO accruals.
So that left us in a position where we would have to find quality, expensive infant care, while simultaneously dealing with taking FMLA time without pay for baby doctor's appointments or when daycare sends the child home due to illness or other issues. (My job unfortunately requires travel, so much of that burden falls on my wife.)
End result is that we ran the numbers and talked about what we really wanted, and it made sense for my wife to stop working.
Just a somewhat offtopic request: on an international site like this one, would you please be so kind to translate non-international terms such as "PTO" and "FMLA" to something more general? I really want to understand your comment, but I have a hard time at it.
And just to expand on that a bit further. The FMLA allows you to take up to 12 weeks unpaid leave for health reasons, and protects you from being terminated by your employer during that time.
My wife and I had to face similar decisions when our first son was born.
I really applaud Google for doing this. I certainly understand that employers walk a thin line on giving benefits without employees simply taking advantage of the company. But a good maternity/paternity leave program really helps build loyalty to a company.
PTO is your vacation/sick accruals. In most US companies, having a baby means that a mother will use all of her accrued sick and vacation time for maternity leave. The problem with that is that you come back to work with no time... But you need to take days or afternoons off to care for your infant. (pediatrician visits, kid is sick from daycare, etc)
FMLA is a federal law that requires most employers to allow you to take time off to deal with medical problems that you or your immediate family have. If you use all of the time, it is almost certainly unpaid.
Perspective from outside the US: In Sweden the parents are given 400something days of paid leave on top of 10 required days off after the child is born. The 400something days is divided between the parents (married or not, doesn't matter AFAIK) but each parent is required to take a minimum of 3 months (I think).
Management in the company I work for (and I've heard anecdotes about others) even encourage their employees to have children.
Some people abuse it but for the most part it makes people happy and, like most advanced western cultures, most families don't have more than a few kids.
It's not only that maternity leave policies in the US suck in the majority of companies, it's that fact that quality child care is so expensive, that many mothers find it cheaper to stay at home or work part-time, especially those with more than one small child.
Add in the fact that many companies are understaffed to cut expenses, that there can be resentment from coworkers when a mother goes maternity leave. You might get some blowback from the non-parents and singles in the office when you expect them to cover for you with no incentives, not even a thank you. Try working in a office with deadlines and critical projects when 40% of staff are expecting...
Well, in countries with larger maternity (and other) leaves and functioning overtime legislation, it's obvious even to dumb,lazy and miserly managers that (a) you need to plan for workers becoming unavailable, and (b) you need to hire extra staff for absences, as it's cheaper than paying lots of overtime. Only in USA they can get by without caring about this.
Handling long absences is an everyday task just if you handle vacations properly - a month paid vacation means that of an unit of 12 employees at any time at least one is off, so every company has worked out how to handle replacements and task switching properly (i.e., delegate tasks to someone who has time) - and if you handle a month off, then you can handle 6 or 12 months off.
Every civilized country has it better than USA in this regard. Every. single. one.
In many of them, the minimum mandatory maternity/paternity support that every sweatshop must (and does) provide is better than what google is offering now.
50 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadAnd this isn't anything employers do; this is a governmental program. However, the first 6 months of leave are paid 70% regular salary, the rest is at 50%.
I think it's a great program, and I don't know that a lot of women have any issues returning to work after that time.
Considering the many massive deficiencies in Quebec, this is one of the brighter spots.
"Many massive deficiencies" is overly dramatic.
No, no it's not. Not in the slightest. I meant exactly that. If anything, it's less antagonistic then I how I usually describe Quebec, it's government and laws, and it's medical community. I usually associate them with child-abusers, and feel justified in doing so. Nor do I feel it's overly dramatic.
Simply put, if I knew years ago what I knew now, I would have left Quebec before having children.
(I'm a Canuck living abroad.)
How about meaningful work, not being evil, and being respected?
(And also, is there a possibility that reported reasons are not actual reasons?)
"We're having to worry about money. We never had to do that before." (Router wrangler, left in 2008. One of the earlier casualties of the great shrinking.)
The whole China thing. (The office there, not the Christmas/Aurora attacks.)
The real names thing. (G+)
Hostile environment / "My boss was a dick" (This one was in a news story linked from HN not too long ago... and happens to have been said by one of my friends).
Bozos, bozos, everywhere. Plus, the new focus on the relentless pursuit of evil, and more. (Me, covered in my writing: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ )
Tired of being stuck as a go-nowhere sysadmin job with no hope of upward mobility. (Bailed out to go back to school to learn web stuff.)
Acqi-non-hired. (They bought a company and then put one of their dev relations people in a one-year fixed term because they didn't like her approach to tech.)
Really bad manager. Incompetent, unable to have a meaningful conversation, goes in circles. (Wound up being PIPped. Probably would have quit anyway.)
Sorry, I can't come up with any more right now. But that should be a start.
Do women leave Google in disproportionately higher numbers?
This means I can't really answer your question about proportions with hard data. I can tell you that the ratio in engineering, and particularly in the kernel team / cluster management area (where I was at the end) was seriously lopsided just by looking at things. This meant when a woman did leave, it was pretty obvious.
I know this isn't much to go on, so I started digging around. Lucky for you, I found a short video I shot when there was some kind of release celebration in September 2009. I counted 25 people in my shot (so I'm not including myself), all standing around in front of what used to be my office. Of those 25 people, there was one woman. So, add me behind the camera, and that's 8%.
That's the best I can do for now. Hope that helps.
Men and women, not all that different.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/21/empires/
That talks about Collabra eating Netscape from within by destroying its culture. You might argue that Doubleclick has been steadily doing that to Google.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/20/screw/
There's the whole antitrust lawsuit about no-poach agreements among valley companies.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/19/leave/
There's the five year leave program evaporating.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/17/badging/
If your company starts doing this, worry.
Reports on wages and working conditions are fair game.
Plug: my 2011 posts are organized in meaningful categories in my book (link in profile). You might give it a shot if you prefer that arrangement.
Also, re acquired company "eating [acquirer] from within" and
"You might argue that Doubleclick has been steadily doing that to Google"
... that's pretty interesting. I remember thinking "weird cultural mismatch" when Google acquired Doubleclick. Could you expand on this?
As for Doubleclick, well, that one's harder to explain. It sure seems like the company ate something it couldn't handle. "Ugh, bad pie."
Fortunately I have good insurance but this seems incredibly bizarre to me. Nurse's are already overworked. Long story short, when I see a high profile company treating pregnant mothers better it only makes me happy.
As for my own mom, even though I live in a country where she could take a long maternity leave, she opted to go back to work after a very short time.
From a business perspective, six months paid leave is worth it if you can avoid hiring and training a new employee.
But you can also see the viewpoint of single / childless people who feel like they're being punished for being single / childless. Sorta like the way non-smokers sometimes feel like smokers get more "free breaks" by virtue of the fact that they smoke.
That said, once we get Fogbeam Labs to the point where we have paid employees and have to worry about issues like maternity/paternity leave, etc., I'd like to do the same thing Google is going (or better). The question I'm chewing on right now is, should we do something different for the childless people. Call it a "mental health break" or something.
Bear with me, I'm just thinking out loud here, but can we assume that childbirth is fairly infrequent, and that a given employee isn't likely to use maternity/paternity leave more than once every couple of years? If so, how about a policy for employees that you can take a "mental health break" (MHB) of n months, every y years, unless you've taken maternity/paternity leave in that time?
Of course, that opens the door to someone taking MHB and then show up pregnant a year and a half later, and wind up taking both...
Hmmm... like I said, just thinking out loud here. But it seems like there ought to be some way to construct a mechanism where the people without kids don't feel like "people who have kids get extra special treatment."
Those children you are paying other people to have and raise? Just think of them as the future tax base for the Social Security benefits you will be collecting one day.
Except that society as a whole DOES already pay for this indirectly. Not providing decent support for people having babies effectively forces people to either have the family they want or keep working. Given that women disproportionately are expected to be the primary caregiver for children, this is a big pressure to keep women out of the work force.
In terms of morality, it is really unethical to punish people for living their lives and exercising their basic biology.
By increasing from 3 months at 50% pay to 5 months, their attrition post-maternity leave dropped by 50%. That sounds like a low cost to reduce the amount of new hiring and training they need to do
My wife and I recently had our first child, who thankfully has no serious health issues and is a great sleeper. My wife's employer provides 3 months leave at half pay, but only after she uses her PTO accruals.
So that left us in a position where we would have to find quality, expensive infant care, while simultaneously dealing with taking FMLA time without pay for baby doctor's appointments or when daycare sends the child home due to illness or other issues. (My job unfortunately requires travel, so much of that burden falls on my wife.)
End result is that we ran the numbers and talked about what we really wanted, and it made sense for my wife to stop working.
Family Medical Leave Act
-- https://www.google.com/
My wife and I had to face similar decisions when our first son was born.
I really applaud Google for doing this. I certainly understand that employers walk a thin line on giving benefits without employees simply taking advantage of the company. But a good maternity/paternity leave program really helps build loyalty to a company.
PTO is your vacation/sick accruals. In most US companies, having a baby means that a mother will use all of her accrued sick and vacation time for maternity leave. The problem with that is that you come back to work with no time... But you need to take days or afternoons off to care for your infant. (pediatrician visits, kid is sick from daycare, etc)
FMLA is a federal law that requires most employers to allow you to take time off to deal with medical problems that you or your immediate family have. If you use all of the time, it is almost certainly unpaid.
Management in the company I work for (and I've heard anecdotes about others) even encourage their employees to have children.
Some people abuse it but for the most part it makes people happy and, like most advanced western cultures, most families don't have more than a few kids.
Add in the fact that many companies are understaffed to cut expenses, that there can be resentment from coworkers when a mother goes maternity leave. You might get some blowback from the non-parents and singles in the office when you expect them to cover for you with no incentives, not even a thank you. Try working in a office with deadlines and critical projects when 40% of staff are expecting...
Handling long absences is an everyday task just if you handle vacations properly - a month paid vacation means that of an unit of 12 employees at any time at least one is off, so every company has worked out how to handle replacements and task switching properly (i.e., delegate tasks to someone who has time) - and if you handle a month off, then you can handle 6 or 12 months off.