Even if not everybody takes advantages of those benefits, you can safely bet that a fairly large percentage of employees past a certain age are going to. If you

Even if not everybody takes advantages of those benefits, you can safely bet that a fairly large percentage of employees past a certain age are going to. If you want to hire senior people with solid experience, they're likely to be of an age where they're planning on having kids, and, given a company that offers no paternity/maternity benefits and one that does, they're pretty damn likely to choose the company that does offer such benefits -- both for the benefits themselves, and for the message that goes with them, that it is OK/expected that you'll have kids (and the less extravagant availability that goes with that).