17 ms·

Women who are halfway into their careers in tech are leaving at a rate of 56%, which is more than double the quit rate of men. One reason for the high quit rate

by larrik 10y ago

Women who are halfway into their careers in tech are leaving at a rate of 56%, which is more than double the quit rate of men. One reason for the high quit rate may be that women have a much lower chance of being promoted, even when they have the same amount of experience and tenure as their male peers, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. So around the time a lot of people have kids? They probably discover that you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare per kid, and at 2+ you might as well just stay home. I'm going to go out and a limb here and say that solid support for working moms would be one of the more effective strategies for long-term careers for women. I also can't imagine that it's that easy getting back into a tech career after 8 years of being a state-at-home mom (which is about 2-3 kids, with the youngest finally in kindergarten), looking for to work for a specific 6 hours per day on school days. Maybe SF is different, though. I'm not there.

droope 10y ago
It is undeniable that women in technology face greater challenges than men and it becomes hard for them go get through certain hoops that men get through effortlessly. Congrats YC! This seems like a good move.
- tsmffh 10y ago
  Undeniable without hard evidence?
dudifordMann 10y ago
I am not sure if that is the right mind set: "So around the time a lot of people have kids? ...you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare ... you might as well just stay home." The "you" can be the other partner. Ensuring fair pay and opportunities for all qualified workers would encourage only a brief departure from a woman's career for maternity leave, allowing either partner to be the home support (as needed), instead of making the choice based on poor future earning opportunities vs their male peers.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Do we know that that's the reason that more women are deciding to stay home? This looks like a big conclusion to draw when the data only _may_ correlate. Where's the survey of double-income family moms working in tech where they specified the reason why they chose to stay at home? There are a lot of reports coming out that look at numbers and say what may be the reason, but I've yet to see anyone go ask women the reasons why they left jobs in tech.
  - nostrebored 10y ago
    Oh, I've done this, let me tell you why: 1) People in tech are assholes to women. I don't think most of them realize they're doing it. Sending images of swimsuit models over slack or otherwise sexualizing your work environment is an awful idea, and you shouldn't do it even if you don't have women on your team. My partner gets asked out by coworkers regularly, even while pregnant. 2) No really, people in tech are assholes to women. I've heard women give presentations where people talk over them the whole time, and then critique them for not being prepared afterwords. Nah pal, you literally stopped her from presenting information. People do not take suggestions of women as seriously wrt technical problems. 3) Kids. State of paternity leave in the U.S... 4) Being pushed into management. Women are pushed into management at a disproportional rate -- while some see this as a success metric, it can also be seen as an extension of point 2. 5) HR problems. Using HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team. Having someone else call HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team because everyone assumes it was you. 6) Culture, combination of all of the above, lack of a critical mass of women to make actual change, etc.
    - busterarm 10y ago
      I'm not at all saying that I don't believe you, but we're at the point where we need to leave anecdotes out of this and start gathering good data. As much as I've seen your examples, I've also seen all of the counter examples (except to point 3 because that's just how it is in the States). I spent the first few years of my working-life in female-dominated industries/workplaces and almost the entirety of my tech career in female-dominated or equal workplaces. I've yet to work somewhere without pay-parity (actually the hedge fund I worked for paid women more). From my anecdotal perspective, the world out there is wonderful. But I know that's not true. I have a strong filter against toxic work environments - I simply would never end up at a company like that. I'm just asking for good data that can speak for itself. This is what our industry does. Aside: frequent surveys/studies show that more than 50% of participants have engaged in an office romance, equally across genders. I've never done this, but it's a big stretch to say that asking out a coworker is asshole behavior at this point. It's much more about the how.
throwaway293810 10y ago
> you might as well just stay home But why does it have to be the woman who stays home? Why is this just the tacit assumption? I'd love to see not just solid support for moms at work, but solid support / encouragement for dads at home: paternity leave up-to-par with maternity leave, a normalization and acceptance of stay-at-home dads where desired, etc. It's kind of amazing how prevalent the assumption is that children are mom's problem. As a guy I care about this not just from a supporting-women perspective but from a when-I-have-kids-I'll-want-to-spend-time-with-them-too perspective. This should be one of the easiest ways for men to be sold on feminism. Somehow though, paternity leave is a second class citizen and people who talk about advancement of women mostly just talk about maternity leave benefits. Let me help! I'm happy to take care of kids while you build your career!
- xenihn 10y ago
  >But why does it have to be the woman who stays home? Why is this just the tacit assumption? Maybe you should be asking the mothers.
  - throwaway293810 10y ago
    Well, it's cultural, undoubtedly. Many couples just do it that way because that's "how it's done" without really thinking about it. But as far as I've seen/heard there is also significant social cost to stay-at-home dads. They're alternately demonized, ignored, assumed incompetent, assumed less worthy for not financially supporting the family, or just not accommodated in a thousand other ways. That's what we (society) should challenge and change, IMHO. It would be a huge win for women and for men alike.
    - grahamburger 10y ago
      > Many couples just do it that way because that's "how it's done" without really thinking about it. Are you sure about that? Have you asked them? No one that I know makes these decisions just because that's "how it's done," although I can imagine that might be how it looks from the outside.
    - 10y ago
nzoschke 10y ago
I think/hope that remote friendly engineering companies will help with this. I'm working at a fully-distributed startup, and while it's all male currently, 50% of the team are dads with young kids and don't have to make the tradeoff of never seeing their kids to advance their career.
belorn 10y ago
I find it quite interesting that a similar number of 50% of men who enter the teacher profession also leaves while the number for women is about half. In stark contrast however, the quote text, the theory on why men drops out of female dominated professions share nothing in common with the theories on why women leave male dominated. In a 2009 report by the Swedish national agency, they argue that the reason why people drop out at a higher rate compared to the dominating gender is that the work culture integrate gender identity when there is unequal gender ratios, and the more a individual work and study, the more are they forced to either assimilate into that culture or quit. Compared to the argument about "lower chance of being promoted", a hostile culture seems much more likely as a root cause to high drop rate, and I would be surprised if culture crashes had no correlation with promotion rates.
- busterarm 10y ago
  Anecdotal, but my cousin was a primary school teacher and faced an incredible amount of hostility because of his gender from parents and colleagues and left for construction after 2 years.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Westerners seem to have a serious distrust in men when it comes to young children. A woman talking to kids in a park is most obviously a mom. A man talking to kids in a park is most obviously a paedophile.
    - andrepd 10y ago
      At least where I come from I do not feel that in the slightest.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I envy you. I feel weird when dealing with children for exactly that reason.
ksenzee 10y ago
> you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare per kid That's true. But as it happens, engineers do make a lot of money. Many of us even make enough to support one-income families. You can't just assume senior engineers leave tech because of childcare costs, when most of us make well over the amount where you "might as well just stay home."
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  We do, but we also get pushed to move to places where making a six-figure salary in USD still means you need to have a roommate. Where I am (Dallas) that isn't true. Not coincidentally, the gender ratios in this industry are much better here than they are in the Valley.
- gshulegaard 10y ago
  I don't think that the parent comment is assuming one way or another, just offering a plausible explanation given the very limited perspective of the metrics being quoted. For example, how does this compare to other trends for female jobs in other sectors? How do the figures compare when you separate the population between those with children and those without? When someone wants to make a claim like: "These numbers reflect two problems: 1) the percentage of women who work in tech is low, and 2) women are leaving tech jobs in droves." I would expect more analysis than simply: "In 2014, 26% of computing jobs were held by women – and that’s down from 36% in 1991" I think there are a lot of bogus statistics/conclusions being drawn when it comes to many social issues, female equality being one of them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc). I am a libertarian so ultimately I believe that everyone should be free to make their own decisions even if there are gender preferences at play. Not saying there aren't issues, but simply saying, "X is anti-women, because only Y% are female," is academically dishonest.
  - nostrebored 10y ago
    And to say that people are making their decisions in a vacuum is intellectually dishonest. Unless of course you just assume that women have different brains, that make them too intellectually feeble to have interests in computing, engineering, machinery.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
yummyfajitas 10y ago
There are a variety of studies suggesting that "solid support for working moms" - in the form of paid leave, subsidized day care and the general Nordic experience - do not actually help much. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the-nordic-gender-equality-paradox.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the... http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... In fact, paid leave encourages women to be less attached to the workforce - as paid leave goes up, women leave the workforce for more time. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2348505 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2348505 the country in the OECD which is most successful at getting women into tech is Saudi Arabia. (Next up are Ireland and Mexico.) Are they known for solid support for working moms? They do a lot better than countries you'd expect to support working moms, like Sweden and Finland. https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/percentageoftertiaryqualificationsawardedtowomenbyfieldofeducation.htm https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/percentageoftertiaryqualifi... (Outside the OECD Iran does quite well also, as does India.)
- nostrebored 10y ago
  [0] "One reason for the poor Nordic performance at higher corporate levels is high taxes, which limits the amount of household services supplied through markets. If it is harder to hire someone to do the chores, that makes it harder for women to invest the time to climb the career ladder." This is just so goddamn laughable. Again we come back to the implication that women are the de-facto owners of housework. [1] just shows that in countries where people tell children the meaningless platitude of "girls aren't any different than boys" without treating girls and boys differently there's no change. An increase in anxiety there makes perfect sense -- at least if I'm told I'm bad at something I don't have to stress out about why I'm inferior. [2] Just like everyone reasonable has been saying for decades, paid leave for women isn't the only metric you should be looking at. Creating a disparity in paid leave for women and men again creates a default assumption of women as caregivers. It also determines workplace reentry. In this sense, rather than pushing for extended maternal leave in the U.S., we should be pushing for equal paternity leave. [3] This is not a measure of getting women into computing, it's a proxy. Having been to the middle east I can tell you that college graduation rates are not a good metric to determine how many women are in the workforce. I'd say nearly half of the women (middle - upper middle class) had engineering degrees. Just about none of them had jobs, especially in rural areas. It's a piece of paper that increases your eligibility for marriage -- "look my wife has a CS degree, she's very smart, but she doesn't have to work".
pkaye 10y ago
Can they compare it to rates for countries which are more supportive of mothers (paid maternity/paternity leave, pay for daycare, etc.) Apparently US is the only country which doesn't have this should the data should easy to obtain.
zurn 10y ago
Very US-centric view. In many places daycare is heavily subsidized and it makes financial sense to stay at work with 2-3 kids.
mikekchar 10y ago
To my knowledge none of these groups who champion women in IT seem to talk about maternity leave. It mystifies me to be honest. The situation with maternal leave is very problematic because it is available to women only in most countries. Women get about 10 years into their career and decide to have families. In high tech, my experience has been that maternity leave benefits are common. So women often take up to a year away from work. This puts them at a serious disadvantage. Even if their job waits for them, in the high tech industry, everybody moves on (not sure what the average attrition rate is, but I remember at one point people would change jobs every 2-3 years). So you get back to your job and everything is different. Essentially you are a new hire and you have to work your way back into the political spectrum. Then imagine that you have a spouse who works in the IT industry. Not only did they not take the year off, but they are plugged into everything thing that's happened and have made relationships with all the new people who have shown up in the last year. It is just natural that those people will be better placed for promotion. Also I have yet to meet a woman, after spending a year away from work to look after their new born child, who thinks, "I'm so happy to be able to hand my child over to childcare while I'm at work." Naturally you worry -- especially for your first child. Naturally you feel guilty. Naturally you don't want to give up what you have (looking after your child is an awesome job!). If you happen to have enough income coming in because your spouse works, is there really a serious argument for going back to work? This is fixable. 6 months maternity leave followed by 6 moths paternity leave. Make it a law that spouses have the right to that 6 months. Limit the amount of maternity leave so as not to punish women in the work place. This allows the family to hand over the child to the non-childbearing spouse for 6 months so as to ease the transition of the mother. Then after those 6 months the mother has been back at work and it is the other spouse (very probably male) who has to make the hard decision of whether or not to go back to work. Also, each spouse has taken 6 months off from work and each suffers on the work side equally. Not to mention that it really sucks that men in our society rarely get the opportunity to interact with their young children simply because they don't have the hardware to gestate a baby. 2 birds, one stone and all that. P.S. I struggled to write in a way that would include all family styles, but if I unintentionally missed one that you care about, please accept my apologies and consider the idea anyway.
- maerF0x0 10y ago
jacobr 10y ago
I considered moving from Sweden to England for a job a while back. If we did so, the cost for day care and school would be significantly more than my wife's potential salary, so she would probably have stayed at home. That would have been completely absurd living in Sweden, I don't know any stay at home moms, barely even in my parent's generation. Of course culture, role models, mentors, etc are very important to some, but economic factors establish the baseline for what is actually reasonable and possible for most. As an example, to diversify the police force in Sweden, one method was to have more opportunity for remote studies at the police academy. It turns out women (for various reasons) have a harder time getting away from their families frequently, so when they could have remote classes that helped.
MollyR 10y ago
I've never been pregnant myself (yet). But I have friends who are new mothers, who say they can't imagine leaving their newborn child, who they carried for nine months. It's a special bond, and most of them wanted to be stay at home moms after. Only a few went back to work because they had financial issues due to costs from delivery complications.

by larrik 10y ago

droope 10y ago

It is undeniable that women in technology face greater challenges than men and it becomes hard for them go get through certain hoops that men get through effortlessly. Congrats YC! This seems like a good move.

tsmffh 10y ago
Undeniable without hard evidence?

dudifordMann 10y ago

I am not sure if that is the right mind set: "So around the time a lot of people have kids? ...you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare ... you might as well just stay home." The "you" can be the other partner. Ensuring fair pay and opportunities for all qualified workers would encourage only a brief departure from a woman's career for maternity leave, allowing either partner to be the home support (as needed), instead of making the choice based on poor future earning opportunities vs their male peers.

busterarm 10y ago
Do we know that that's the reason that more women are deciding to stay home? This looks like a big conclusion to draw when the data only _may_ correlate. Where's the survey of double-income family moms working in tech where they specified the reason why they chose to stay at home? There are a lot of reports coming out that look at numbers and say what may be the reason, but I've yet to see anyone go ask women the reasons why they left jobs in tech.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  Oh, I've done this, let me tell you why: 1) People in tech are assholes to women. I don't think most of them realize they're doing it. Sending images of swimsuit models over slack or otherwise sexualizing your work environment is an awful idea, and you shouldn't do it even if you don't have women on your team. My partner gets asked out by coworkers regularly, even while pregnant. 2) No really, people in tech are assholes to women. I've heard women give presentations where people talk over them the whole time, and then critique them for not being prepared afterwords. Nah pal, you literally stopped her from presenting information. People do not take suggestions of women as seriously wrt technical problems. 3) Kids. State of paternity leave in the U.S... 4) Being pushed into management. Women are pushed into management at a disproportional rate -- while some see this as a success metric, it can also be seen as an extension of point 2. 5) HR problems. Using HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team. Having someone else call HR sucks when you're the only woman on the team because everyone assumes it was you. 6) Culture, combination of all of the above, lack of a critical mass of women to make actual change, etc.
  - busterarm 10y ago
    I'm not at all saying that I don't believe you, but we're at the point where we need to leave anecdotes out of this and start gathering good data. As much as I've seen your examples, I've also seen all of the counter examples (except to point 3 because that's just how it is in the States). I spent the first few years of my working-life in female-dominated industries/workplaces and almost the entirety of my tech career in female-dominated or equal workplaces. I've yet to work somewhere without pay-parity (actually the hedge fund I worked for paid women more). From my anecdotal perspective, the world out there is wonderful. But I know that's not true. I have a strong filter against toxic work environments - I simply would never end up at a company like that. I'm just asking for good data that can speak for itself. This is what our industry does. Aside: frequent surveys/studies show that more than 50% of participants have engaged in an office romance, equally across genders. I've never done this, but it's a big stretch to say that asking out a coworker is asshole behavior at this point. It's much more about the how.

throwaway293810 10y ago

> you might as well just stay home But why does it have to be the woman who stays home? Why is this just the tacit assumption? I'd love to see not just solid support for moms at work, but solid support / encouragement for dads at home: paternity leave up-to-par with maternity leave, a normalization and acceptance of stay-at-home dads where desired, etc. It's kind of amazing how prevalent the assumption is that children are mom's problem. As a guy I care about this not just from a supporting-women perspective but from a when-I-have-kids-I'll-want-to-spend-time-with-them-too perspective. This should be one of the easiest ways for men to be sold on feminism. Somehow though, paternity leave is a second class citizen and people who talk about advancement of women mostly just talk about maternity leave benefits. Let me help! I'm happy to take care of kids while you build your career!

xenihn 10y ago
>But why does it have to be the woman who stays home? Why is this just the tacit assumption? Maybe you should be asking the mothers.
- throwaway293810 10y ago
  Well, it's cultural, undoubtedly. Many couples just do it that way because that's "how it's done" without really thinking about it. But as far as I've seen/heard there is also significant social cost to stay-at-home dads. They're alternately demonized, ignored, assumed incompetent, assumed less worthy for not financially supporting the family, or just not accommodated in a thousand other ways. That's what we (society) should challenge and change, IMHO. It would be a huge win for women and for men alike.
  - grahamburger 10y ago
    > Many couples just do it that way because that's "how it's done" without really thinking about it. Are you sure about that? Have you asked them? No one that I know makes these decisions just because that's "how it's done," although I can imagine that might be how it looks from the outside.
  - 10y ago

nzoschke 10y ago

I think/hope that remote friendly engineering companies will help with this. I'm working at a fully-distributed startup, and while it's all male currently, 50% of the team are dads with young kids and don't have to make the tradeoff of never seeing their kids to advance their career.

belorn 10y ago

I find it quite interesting that a similar number of 50% of men who enter the teacher profession also leaves while the number for women is about half. In stark contrast however, the quote text, the theory on why men drops out of female dominated professions share nothing in common with the theories on why women leave male dominated. In a 2009 report by the Swedish national agency, they argue that the reason why people drop out at a higher rate compared to the dominating gender is that the work culture integrate gender identity when there is unequal gender ratios, and the more a individual work and study, the more are they forced to either assimilate into that culture or quit. Compared to the argument about "lower chance of being promoted", a hostile culture seems much more likely as a root cause to high drop rate, and I would be surprised if culture crashes had no correlation with promotion rates.

busterarm 10y ago
Anecdotal, but my cousin was a primary school teacher and faced an incredible amount of hostility because of his gender from parents and colleagues and left for construction after 2 years.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Westerners seem to have a serious distrust in men when it comes to young children. A woman talking to kids in a park is most obviously a mom. A man talking to kids in a park is most obviously a paedophile.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    At least where I come from I do not feel that in the slightest.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I envy you. I feel weird when dealing with children for exactly that reason.

ksenzee 10y ago

> you need to make a LOT of money to pay for daycare per kid That's true. But as it happens, engineers do make a lot of money. Many of us even make enough to support one-income families. You can't just assume senior engineers leave tech because of childcare costs, when most of us make well over the amount where you "might as well just stay home."

vonmoltke 10y ago
We do, but we also get pushed to move to places where making a six-figure salary in USD still means you need to have a roommate. Where I am (Dallas) that isn't true. Not coincidentally, the gender ratios in this industry are much better here than they are in the Valley.
gshulegaard 10y ago
I don't think that the parent comment is assuming one way or another, just offering a plausible explanation given the very limited perspective of the metrics being quoted. For example, how does this compare to other trends for female jobs in other sectors? How do the figures compare when you separate the population between those with children and those without? When someone wants to make a claim like: "These numbers reflect two problems: 1) the percentage of women who work in tech is low, and 2) women are leaving tech jobs in droves." I would expect more analysis than simply: "In 2014, 26% of computing jobs were held by women – and that’s down from 36% in 1991" I think there are a lot of bogus statistics/conclusions being drawn when it comes to many social issues, female equality being one of them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc). I am a libertarian so ultimately I believe that everyone should be free to make their own decisions even if there are gender preferences at play. Not saying there aren't issues, but simply saying, "X is anti-women, because only Y% are female," is academically dishonest.
- nostrebored 10y ago
  And to say that people are making their decisions in a vacuum is intellectually dishonest. Unless of course you just assume that women have different brains, that make them too intellectually feeble to have interests in computing, engineering, machinery.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

yummyfajitas 10y ago

There are a variety of studies suggesting that "solid support for working moms" - in the form of paid leave, subsidized day care and the general Nordic experience - do not actually help much. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the-nordic-gender-equality-paradox.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/the... http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0153857 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... In fact, paid leave encourages women to be less attached to the workforce - as paid leave goes up, women leave the workforce for more time. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2348505 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2348505 the country in the OECD which is most successful at getting women into tech is Saudi Arabia. (Next up are Ireland and Mexico.) Are they known for solid support for working moms? They do a lot better than countries you'd expect to support working moms, like Sweden and Finland. https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/percentageoftertiaryqualificationsawardedtowomenbyfieldofeducation.htm https://www.oecd.org/gender/data/percentageoftertiaryqualifi... (Outside the OECD Iran does quite well also, as does India.)

nostrebored 10y ago
[0] "One reason for the poor Nordic performance at higher corporate levels is high taxes, which limits the amount of household services supplied through markets. If it is harder to hire someone to do the chores, that makes it harder for women to invest the time to climb the career ladder." This is just so goddamn laughable. Again we come back to the implication that women are the de-facto owners of housework. [1] just shows that in countries where people tell children the meaningless platitude of "girls aren't any different than boys" without treating girls and boys differently there's no change. An increase in anxiety there makes perfect sense -- at least if I'm told I'm bad at something I don't have to stress out about why I'm inferior. [2] Just like everyone reasonable has been saying for decades, paid leave for women isn't the only metric you should be looking at. Creating a disparity in paid leave for women and men again creates a default assumption of women as caregivers. It also determines workplace reentry. In this sense, rather than pushing for extended maternal leave in the U.S., we should be pushing for equal paternity leave. [3] This is not a measure of getting women into computing, it's a proxy. Having been to the middle east I can tell you that college graduation rates are not a good metric to determine how many women are in the workforce. I'd say nearly half of the women (middle - upper middle class) had engineering degrees. Just about none of them had jobs, especially in rural areas. It's a piece of paper that increases your eligibility for marriage -- "look my wife has a CS degree, she's very smart, but she doesn't have to work".

pkaye 10y ago

Can they compare it to rates for countries which are more supportive of mothers (paid maternity/paternity leave, pay for daycare, etc.) Apparently US is the only country which doesn't have this should the data should easy to obtain.

zurn 10y ago

Very US-centric view. In many places daycare is heavily subsidized and it makes financial sense to stay at work with 2-3 kids.

mikekchar 10y ago

To my knowledge none of these groups who champion women in IT seem to talk about maternity leave. It mystifies me to be honest. The situation with maternal leave is very problematic because it is available to women only in most countries. Women get about 10 years into their career and decide to have families. In high tech, my experience has been that maternity leave benefits are common. So women often take up to a year away from work. This puts them at a serious disadvantage. Even if their job waits for them, in the high tech industry, everybody moves on (not sure what the average attrition rate is, but I remember at one point people would change jobs every 2-3 years). So you get back to your job and everything is different. Essentially you are a new hire and you have to work your way back into the political spectrum. Then imagine that you have a spouse who works in the IT industry. Not only did they not take the year off, but they are plugged into everything thing that's happened and have made relationships with all the new people who have shown up in the last year. It is just natural that those people will be better placed for promotion. Also I have yet to meet a woman, after spending a year away from work to look after their new born child, who thinks, "I'm so happy to be able to hand my child over to childcare while I'm at work." Naturally you worry -- especially for your first child. Naturally you feel guilty. Naturally you don't want to give up what you have (looking after your child is an awesome job!). If you happen to have enough income coming in because your spouse works, is there really a serious argument for going back to work? This is fixable. 6 months maternity leave followed by 6 moths paternity leave. Make it a law that spouses have the right to that 6 months. Limit the amount of maternity leave so as not to punish women in the work place. This allows the family to hand over the child to the non-childbearing spouse for 6 months so as to ease the transition of the mother. Then after those 6 months the mother has been back at work and it is the other spouse (very probably male) who has to make the hard decision of whether or not to go back to work. Also, each spouse has taken 6 months off from work and each suffers on the work side equally. Not to mention that it really sucks that men in our society rarely get the opportunity to interact with their young children simply because they don't have the hardware to gestate a baby. 2 birds, one stone and all that. P.S. I struggled to write in a way that would include all family styles, but if I unintentionally missed one that you care about, please accept my apologies and consider the idea anyway.

maerF0x0 10y ago

jacobr 10y ago

I considered moving from Sweden to England for a job a while back. If we did so, the cost for day care and school would be significantly more than my wife's potential salary, so she would probably have stayed at home. That would have been completely absurd living in Sweden, I don't know any stay at home moms, barely even in my parent's generation. Of course culture, role models, mentors, etc are very important to some, but economic factors establish the baseline for what is actually reasonable and possible for most. As an example, to diversify the police force in Sweden, one method was to have more opportunity for remote studies at the police academy. It turns out women (for various reasons) have a harder time getting away from their families frequently, so when they could have remote classes that helped.

MollyR 10y ago

I've never been pregnant myself (yet). But I have friends who are new mothers, who say they can't imagine leaving their newborn child, who they carried for nine months. It's a special bond, and most of them wanted to be stay at home moms after. Only a few went back to work because they had financial issues due to costs from delivery complications.