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Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

• rednerrus 8y ago
  One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave. If I gave you the choice of two employees, one of whom would take 12 weeks of paid leave and one who would take 2 weeks of paid leave, which would you choose? If you offered both sexes 12 weeks of paid leave, you wouldn't have to make this decision.
  • ChuckMcM 8y ago
    I agree completely. I think this effect of paternity leave is under appreciated by men and greatly feared by employers. I can understand how an employer gets concerned about an employee being gone for 3 or 4 months and whether or not they admit it selecting/biasing against that possibility in hiring rather than just figuring out how to deal with it.
  • andrewclunn 8y ago
    Wouldn't be enough. So many women choose not to come back to work full-time. It's a huge waste to train them, and very dangerous to move them up the corporate ladder.
  • zucked 8y ago
    I believe this is the path forward, as well. Using your example above in a gender-blind scenario, I can't imagine a scenario where a hiring manager would't choose the potential employee who would only take 2 weeks leave.
  • lovich 8y ago
    You'd have to make it mandatory leave. The social pressure is still tilted towards women as care givers and men as providers so more men will end up not using the leave. If it becomes mandatory then it's just a baked in rising to every employee, _and_ will probably do better for society to have both parents get time with their children. I believe some European states solve this by having the state cover ~60% of your wage while on leave so that it's not a giant burden for companies
    • Geeek 8y ago
      The social and bioligical pressure*. I think we should strive to have equal maternity/paternity leave, but let’s not deny the origins of the current reality.
      • untog 8y ago
        Why would fathers have biological pressure to spend less time with their children? I'd take five years paternity leave if I could get it.
        • Geeek 8y ago
          Fathers can’t breastfeed.
          • rosser 8y ago
            How is that "biological pressure to spend less time with their children"?
          • untog 8y ago
            You are giving a reason not to deny a mother time with a child, not a reason for a father to spend less. There is no "biological pressure" that forces fathers to go back to work. (as it happens, fathers can breastfeed, albeit not literally. Mothers can pump breastmilk for fathers to feed to the child, or they can use formula. It's a perfectly viable way to raise a child, and people do)
            • Geeek 8y ago
              Sociatel pressure usually comes after (and very much influenced) biological manifestations.
              • untog 8y ago
                I ask again: what biological pressures would lead to a father spending less time with his children?
  • progers7 8y ago
    I don't think this is practical because many men do not take their full paternity leave. For biological reasons alone, the woman needs to take more.
    • partiallypro 8y ago
      You could simply make it mandatory time off. But either way, he has a point. A company doesn't want to risk hiring someone that might miss a huge swath of time, for any reason. Not in every job but in many jobs, an employee isn't just an employee, they are an investment. If it was mandatory for both sexes though, it would level the playing field.
      • to_bpr 8y ago
        >You could simply make it mandatory time off. Then I won't notify the company when I've had a child. Simple as. Don't consider going down the road of "you must declare what is happening in your private life to your private employer" as someone else did either, without at least considering what an absolute breach of privacy that would involve.
        • partiallypro 8y ago
          It wouldn't matter, because in the end the company would hire you or promote you with the same expectation as women. It would start to make less and less sense to not take the paternity leave because the opportunity cost would diminish. If you didn't take off, it would be your loss. The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would -help-
        • lovich 8y ago
          We've already decided as a society, in the US at least, that your right to privacy from your company concerning the existence of your children does not exist. The government is willing and able to inform your employer to garnish your wages when it comes to child support payments. They also know if you take dependents on your tax forms. There are arguments to be made that this right _should_ exist, but since it doesn't currently its not a reason to stop mandatory leave
  • NuSkooler 8y ago
    Not to mention the whole idea that a child only needs to see their mother and not their father is flawed.
  • ukj 8y ago
    I guess I'll be making damn sure to negotiate a pay raise based on the fact I've chosen not to have children! Where do I sign to veto my paternity leave?
    • coldtea 8y ago
      Or, you know, businesses and societies could leave that as a courtesy to just those that did chose to have children -- a group of people that every society that cares about sustaining itself forward should encourage and respect.
      • ukj 8y ago
        Sure. Everybody likes grand gestures. Nobody likes paying for them. As a social responsibility it's not on private businesses to cover the cost. Pay for it through taxation. Until then - my choice is a competitive advantage.
        • seanmcdirmid 8y ago
          Many countries have maternity leave as a payroll tax (for both genders). Even China has this.
        • krschultz 8y ago
          I'm going to guess you will get more growth in your career by learning how to be empathetic than negotiating with such an asinine argument.
          • ukj 8y ago
            And I am going to guess that knowing when to be strategically empathetic in a negotiation is going to get me even further.
            • chii 8y ago
              > strategically empathetic aka, the sociopathic mentality.
  • Alex3917 8y ago
    > One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave. A better solution would just unpaid parental leave for both sexes, with a stipend paid for by the government. The idea of paying people some percentage of their salary while on parental leave is an incredibly regressive policy and should be banned.
    • growlist 8y ago
      A better solution would be that we don't make work the be all and end all of our short lives.
    • rocqua 8y ago
      How is it regressive that compensation during parental leave depends on salary? Without that, women higher in the career ladder are disincentivized from taking maternity leave. Moreover, you might even get women who earn more on leave than during the job, which is simply weird.
      • deleted 8y ago
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      • Alex3917 8y ago
        > How is it regressive that compensation during parental leave depends on salary? People who make more money for working make more money for not working. That's literally the definition of regressive. To quote Wikipedia: "In terms of individual income and wealth, a regressive tax imposes a greater burden (relative to resources) on the poor than on the rich: there is an inverse relationship between the tax rate and the taxpayer's ability to pay, as measured by assets, consumption, or income."
        • Buge 8y ago
          If it's a fixed based on your salary, it would be neither regressive, nor progressive. It would be flat. And that's assuming the government takes the money from thin air. If the government gets the money via a progressive tax, then distributes it in a flat manner, it's overall a progressive tax.
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave. One of the solutions to this is litigation, like in other countries, and burying any company that does it to the ground (including with consumer backslash and media shaming). "Matching paternity leave" doesn't solve the problem for single mothers -- and it just provides a broader target to discriminate against.
    • hexane360 8y ago
      Symmetric leave would help solve the problem for single mothers. The strategy doesn't rely on both parents getting leave, it relies on everyone at the company getting leave. The flaw with this strategy is it still allows discrimination against men and women who are likely to have babies, even though it discourages discrimination for men against women.
    • narag 8y ago
      Old curse: I wish you sue and win.
      • coldtea 8y ago
        That might be true for personal affairs (e.g. suing an ex etc) and the mess than entails, but no for suing some business entity that screwed you over.
    • Buge 8y ago
      >it just provides a broader target to discriminate against. Isn't that an improvement? If we could broaden it entirely such that everyone falls under the net of "potentially long leave taking" then effectively there would be no discrimination.
  • deleted 8y ago
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  • wincy 8y ago
    My wife thinks this is a terrible idea, why should she suffer through my depressed wages to pay for two income families to be subsidized to having dual leave for children? This leave doesn’t come for free. Why should she pay for that when she chooses not to work?
    • jonathankoren 8y ago
      What? It’s paid leave. You get your whole salary, but you don’t come to work.
      • sokoloff 8y ago
        Yes, and where do you imagine the money comes from?
        • jschwartzi 8y ago
          From all of us single people who are likely never going to have children. I'm fine with that. Hell, you can take it out of the mortgage interest deduction that I will never get.
          • deleted 8y ago
            [deleted]
        • krschultz 8y ago
          If you're going to make a financial argument (as opposed to the moral one), you should take a look at how we fund entitlements in this country. You want population growth. The financial disincentive for having kids is a real problem.
          • vkou 8y ago
            If you want to make an economic argument, we don't want exponential population growth, unless you are looking forward to an unmitigated ecological disaster. You want a steady population level, whether via births, or immigration, or both.
  • deleted 8y ago
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• tinbad 8y ago
  Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take severance and leave. We had twins so she wasn't going back to work anyway but the fact that they tried left us with a bad taste. EDIT: Let's call the company by name indeed.
  • InclinedPlane 8y ago
    What's funny about big corporations is they will always always always ask employees to pitch in, help out, make sacrifices, etc. for the betterment of the corporation: to get work done, to survive lean times, etc. And yet when the shoe is on the other foot they are always the most incredibly reluctant to make any sacrifice, even small ones, to help their employees. And this isn't just a matter of finances, financially it makes sense to retain good employees at almost any cost, because it costs a ton of money to hire and train new employees (sometimes upwards of a year's worth of salary for the position in equivalent costs), and that's aside from the ancillary benefits of retaining employees longer (better work environment, higher skill level workers, more able to reliably execute on challenging projects, etc.) So much of it just comes down to power dynamics.
    • Cofike 8y ago
      You see this at small companies and start ups as well. I've seen it first hand myself.
  • sp527 8y ago
    You should name the company, assuming there are no legal barriers to doing so. How can we possibly fight back against abuse if we default to anonymizing the perpetrators out of fear?
  • oblong 8y ago
    > let her have her paid 12 month leave 12 months of free money from the company I am screwing over, what a deal!
• lsd5you 8y ago
  Is this really surprising? We cannot have meritocracy and a system where some people will go missing for a year at a time (and perhaps come back with completely different motivations). There is a fundamental mismatch, and as much as some people want to frame careers as lifestyle and entitlement, the primary purpose is to get things done and produce value. The situation is even more stark for smaller companies, many of which would be bankrupt if they lose one employee for a year. The unintended and inevitable consequence of trying to legislate something as massive as this away is it promotes what I call wankerism. Where by the more law abiding individuals are put at a further disadvantage as they try to follow onerous laws, whilst the people who are happy to skirt and bend them will do so and get ahead. After all there is almost never going to be a smoking gun and to the extent than you can tighten the rules against laying off pregnant women, then it moves on to hiring discrimination against women of a certain age range and effecting even more people, where its practically impossible to prove discrimination. Maybe the government and increased maternity pay is part of the solution, but no formula is going to capture the career costs and simultaneously be fair to the lower paid. Maybe it is the responsibility of the parents to make it right between them, in as much as that is practical and in as much as they believe in operating like that.
  • lsd5you 8y ago
    Rather than merely downvoting perhaps people can actually try to argue the point and answer the difficult questions. What are the unintended consequences of this kind of legislation? Should the domain of women just be in big companies and government? What is the relative cost of losing jobs due to pregnancy (with some compensation from the government) vs not being hired for certain jobs in the first place. Do we end up favoring the less law abiding managers with more legislation? I believe so and indeed for this kind of morally dubious individual it makes sense to promote these kind of unenforceable laws.
    • JungleGymSam 8y ago
      It all boils down to "I'm above your argument but I can't defend myself, and I'm anonymous, so I'll let you know I think you're wrong with a single click".
• CryoLogic 8y ago
  Pregnant employees are undoubtably less of an investment for the company when you consider paid leave. In fact the company might actually lose money on you. This is a lot different than racial, sex, or age discrimination as a result of social bias or stereotypes. So it makes sense there is discrimination from companies and managers - especially competitive companies where the managers are paid based on their team performance. In a truly capitalist market you would rarely hire someone at risk of becoming pregnant. That leaves me to believe the only good solution is some type of mandatory leave for both men and women. Rather than trying to avoid the discrimination (via penalties, laws, etc.), force an equal leave rights for men and women so the companies no longer have to consider a particular gender over the other.
  • lsd5you 8y ago
    Then you'd just be discriminating against the youngish, the married and a bunch of other factors. I just think these kind of answers are the first logical steps in trying to address the problem. With more thought and experience people will arrive at the realisation that there may actually not be a good mechanism to socially engineer the desired outcome. Devolving decision making to the business owners and managers, and to individual workers is what allows the system to work. Attempts to override and legislate decisions will fail with unintended consequences and ultimately make things worse in other ways. A complete solution would require totalitarian control, at which point you may as well just have central planning.
    • newfoundglory 8y ago
      People already discriminate against young women based just on the risk they could get pregnant, doesn't seem like it'd be that bad to spread it across to young men as well.
    • deleted 8y ago
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    • deleted 8y ago
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• habosa 8y ago
  This area is really tough. I feel terrible for women who experience this bias, but the solution is not nearly as obvious as with race/gender/age/religious/etc discrimination. In those cases the answer is: stop being biased. Let's say you're a small company and you can really only afford to have <10 people on your payroll. Let's say you're considering two candidates of exactly equal skills and age: a 28yo man and a 28yo woman. Even if they both plan to have 2 kids in the next 4 years, it's a biological reality that it will take the woman away from work for longer. She has the 9 months of pregnancy where she may be tired or uncomfortable, then the actual delivery, then recovery, and then often a period of breast feeding. The man could be father of the century but there are certain burdens that fall on women because of their sex. So while I'd like to force the startup to make the decision without considering this factor, is that always reasonable? And before the downvotes come: I am really on the side of pregnant women here. I want them to get generous leave without any effect on their careers. But I am questioning if that is always possible.
  • tinbad 8y ago
    It wouldn't be much of a problem if there are better government organized programs in place. In fact, California's paid parental leave is funded by employees and is a relatively small tax of 0.9% (over the first $110k of wages only)[1] that includes other disability pay. [1] http://www.edd.ca.gov/Payroll_Taxes/Rates_-_Historical.htm http://www.edd.ca.gov/Payroll_Taxes/Rates_-_Historical.htm
    • MattLaroche 8y ago
      I'm glad CA's PFL program exists, and by American standards, it's very good. But it only pays 60% of income, for 6 weeks, and up to a level under the salary of most in product-engineering-design in tech. Most tech companies true up salary above the PFL levels for those 6 weeks (and potentially pay 100% for more weeks), and in SF, truing up to 100% for those 6 weeks is required for companies above a certain size.
      • kooshball 8y ago
        How does vesting usually work if you take the extra CA PFL?
• rocqua 8y ago
  Isn't the case of physical labor justified? Here I refer to where the article states that pregnant women doing physical labor often face discrimination upon asking not to lift too much weight. This is an example where pregnancy directly makes someone less able to do their job. That seems like a valid reason to want to pay them less, or to no longer hire them. Unlike the more general call of equal pay for equal work (regarding the wage gap) here the demand is essentially equal pay for worse work. I assume the argument is that affirmative action is needed to get more women at the top. However, not taking affirmative action is rather different from active discrimination. I'd like to qualify that I tend to support affirmative action, but I do not think that forced affirmative action works. If we force companies into such action by law, they have every reason to follow the letter to the least amount possible, and totally ignore the spirit of the law.
• imh 8y ago
  I wonder if this discrimination is exacerbated in silicon valley where job tenures are so short and perks are so good. If on average, you keep employees for two years and offer 6-12 month parental leave, then an employee who uses it gets paid for two years while actively working for 12-18 months. That's 30-100% higher cost to you the employer per month of active output from the employee. The shorter the tenures and the longer the leave, the higher this extra cost. As a society, it seems like a no brainer to want to allow new parents to spend lots of time with their kids, but it does incur a way higher cost to the employer, many of whom can't afford to pay employees 30-100% more. The most immediate answer seems to be to make society pay and not the employer. Something like a government funded regional cost-of-living adjusted stipend, or a capped wage matching?
  • MattLaroche 8y ago
    I just switched jobs in San Francisco, and part of my search was parental leave. I did not see any companies in the 6-12 month paid parental leave range. 6-20 weeks is the range I saw. Twitter at 20, Square (and I think Facebook) at 16, Google at 12, and most at 6. I'm totally onboard with it being government funded instead of employer funded. I think tying it to salary (and what people pay in) makes sense, as many people are less likely to take it if it's significantly under their normal income.
    • paxys 8y ago
      Netflix gives 12 months for maternity/paternity.
      • MattLaroche 8y ago
        Thanks! I didn't check them out because I wasn't interested in leaving the city (and only included FB because I'd heard theirs was good).
• Micrococonut 8y ago
  "Wahh why can't I disappear from a company for a year to pursue my personal life goals without any consequences"
  • sctb 8y ago
    We ban accounts that post like this, so please read the guidelines and comment civilly and substantively instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• desireco42 8y ago
  Pregnancy, having kids, both for dads and moms, having a life, being older, experienced, all things that will count against you. Starting your business sometimes seems like the only way to get things right for you.
  • notadoc 8y ago
    > Pregnancy, having kids, both for dads and moms, having a life, being older, experienced, all things that will count against you. This is so true, at least in the tech industry and startup world. The bottom line is that if you're a parent, parent-to-be, or older, the apparent assumption is that you have a life outside of work, and thus you will likely not make work your life, so you will be working less than a childless early 20-something, and you'll probably actually use the health insurance, take vacation time, and maybe work reasonable hours. This, I suspect, is a big component of age discrimination as well.
• pertymcpert 8y ago
  I'm really surprised by the number of comments here that support this kind of discrimination. I thought we were better than this.
  • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    I'm not. Mention women and work/tech and you'll always see the dark side of HN.
  • stevenwoo 8y ago
    It should be expected - the high number of comments that regularly showed up in support of Damore's scientific (in the sense of being in the ballpark and selectively referencing some social science work) arguments in his internal post that got him fired when that was a hot topic was pretty disappointing.
    • ryanobjc 8y ago
      "scientific" might be a better way. I am continually disappointed at people who use the summary of a scientific article to prop up their justification, along with what I call "the world is a binary logic puzzle" fallacy. For example, a lot of arguments positioned nature vs nurture. It's not a simplistic blend of this or that, or even as simple as "trait X is DNA and trait Y is societal" -- if you learned anything about biology the sheer adaptability of the human body should be it. Don't forget that every single study hypothesizes a model, then attempts to build evidence in support of it. All models are wrong, some are occasionally useful. I've been extremely disappointed in the 'bay area rationalist' community with their response to that memo. It's really given me an eye opening view on the limitations of so-called "rationality" as they practiced it.
  • syrrim 8y ago
    Ah yes, because this problem is easy, and the only reason it hasn't been solved is because of neanderthals running businesses.
  • randyrand 8y ago
    It's not so clear cut. The arguments for this type of discrimination also make logical sense. Morality is pretty subjective, and peoples goals for society are very different.
• throwaway81818 8y ago
  It's not just women that experience discrimination. When my wife was pregnant and I let our CEO and co-founder know (small company, < 15 people) they began covertly looking for a replacement for me knowing I would take some time off work for her birth. Not long after letting them know about the pregnancy/birth, I found a suspicious/hidden hiring post from the CEO for a position that mirrored mine although we were "not hiring". Within the next month or two I had a few suspicious interactions with the cofounder over things he'd like to see "improved" within my work. Which was complete bullshit. The guy didn't believe in version control, managed tasks in a Google Doc and didn't like how I used branches for feature development (why don't you just commit to master?). Trust me when I say his list of issues were bullshit (not worth going into all of them, though they may be funny as hell to hear). His improvements/concerns carried no weight and were obviously a front for something else. The CEO became more and more aggressive with me over things that were outside of my job/position/role. He would go off the handle over them and eventually I called him out on it. He lost his shit and basically "fired" me. I won't go into details regarding what happened next, but lets just say I made out very well :) Moral of the story, it's not just women that get discriminated against. If you're a father to be, be careful who you let know and how you handle it. Keep a record of everything including the timeline of events, it can come in handy ;)
  • notadoc 8y ago
    > It's not just women that experience discrimination > Moral of the story, it's not just women that get discriminated against. If you're a father to be, be careful who you let know and how you handle it. I have heard so many stories along these same lines, I think it's just accepted as normal in the industry.
  • Cofike 8y ago
    Love hearing companies get their comeuppance. Happy to hear things worked out, hope thing are going well with your family.
  • ndesaulniers 8y ago
    > didn't like how I used branches for feature development (why don't you just commit to master?) Jesus I just threw up. s/commit/force push/
• randyrand 8y ago
  Being anti discrimination started with not discriminating people for things they can't control. Race, gender, etc. Now we're moving into territory of not discriminating against optional things people choose (having children). This is a very significant change, IMO. I wonder how far it can be taken. I think there's a fair argument that since pregnancy only affects women then it counts as gender discrimination. However, if that line of thinking was applied everywhere then nearly everything would be sexist because few things affect men and women exactly 50/50. So in and of itself, that reason cannot fully explain it.
  • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    This isn't new. Companies have been trying and succeeding at discriminating against pregnant women since women have been working.
    • randyrand 8y ago
      That's not the new part.
  • somecontext 8y ago
    The phenomenon you describe is not new. Discrimination law differs by jurisdiction, but there are various protected classes that may be seen as "optional things people choose". People will not agree on precisely which such classes truly reflect choice, but some examples may include religion, familial/marital status (and related), political activity/affiliation (and related), pregnancy (and related), military/veteran status, matriculation/student status, place of residence/business, whistleblowing ("anti-retaliation"), source of income, smoking, and participation in lawful activities during non-work hours. (Some people believe even more class membership reflects choice; indeed, this is often a factor in their reasoning about whether the classes should be protected.) Some of these classes are protected in the United States as of the Civil rights acts of 1964 and 1968, as well as other federal laws from 1974 and 1978. (The protection of different religions is, of course, a founding principle of the United States. However, many people do not believe religion is a choice.) The following webpage was helpful in assembling this list and includes a few amusing items such as membership in the Communist party (not protected in Nebraska) as well as having a degree in theology (protected in Oregon): http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimination-employment.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimina...
• skizm 8y ago
  Thought experiment: a scrappy startup is struggling to stay profitable, they literally (and not figuratively) can't afford their developers leaving for extended amounts of time and they are very upfront about this in interviews. Are they legally allowed to discriminate against candidates that are pregnant or expressed a desire to have children in the near future since it has the potential to kill their business if they hire them?
  • MattLaroche 8y ago
    What they should do is say "These are our parental leave policies" (which will be at least legal minimum) and go from there. (Ideally, these should be reasonable leave time government policies and paid by the government, but let's assume we're not going to fix that soon) It's then up to the candidate to accept it or not. It'd be entirely shitty of a company to say "here are our policies" and then reject a candidate who would exercise those policies.
  • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    Nope. Doesn't change a thing. Nor should it. That startup's CEO could be in the right place at the right time and convince a VC to fund them.
  • jacquesm 8y ago
    Not so scrappy by the rest of that description.
• cleanyourroom 8y ago
  "I am going to be absent for several months and then maybe quit."
  • sctb 8y ago
    Please start commenting civilly and substantively. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• ggg9990 8y ago
  Yes, when I’m looking to promote someone to manage a team, I look for the person who is going to be absent starting in six months and for an indeterminate amount of time, and needs their job preserved for them when they come back.
  • jacquesm 8y ago
    At a guess you're a male and one without children. One day you may look at this through different eyes. If you are scared of promoting women because they might get pregnant or will take their maternity leave then you probably shouldn't be a manager to begin with, and hopefully you are not and will never be an employer.
• fixermark 8y ago
  Because it's not legal to even ask about pregnancy or desire for children during an interview, there's an unfortunate side-effect the market has adapted to: under-the-hood discrimination against young woman candidates. All other factors being equal, an employer knows a young woman could get pregnant and will probably quit to take care of the kids (going by statistics alone). So since they can't explicitly ask those things, the market prices in the risk by devaluing woman candidates in every legal way possible. It's downright insidious.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Because it's not legal to even ask about pregnancy or desire for children during an interview It's not illegal to ask about these things, but it's illegal to make a hiring decision based on these factors and asking during an interview would be pretty strong evidence of using the information in hiring.
  • techntoke 8y ago
    Don't forget the FMLA requirements that also protect employers in these types of situations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...
• qop 8y ago
  Don't bite my head off, but is that really discrimination in the sense of what word actually means? If you're literally not PRESENT to do the work, is that really a case of the employer discriminating against you? It's a privilege, not a right, to be paid to be at home taking care of a child. I grew up in an area where a lot of discrimination occurred, but it was racially motivated. I've seen guys smarter than me literally chased out of stores, had fingers pointed at them while obscene slurs are shouted at them. I've seen brilliant minds that get trapped in the ""wrong"" bodies. They get caught in the wrong environment around the wrong people, and the stress and danger of it all breaks them down. I've seen racism obliterate men that could've been ANYTHING, rocket scientists or something, if they could've had the luck to have been born a different color or live in a different neighborhood. So, from that perspective it's a bit mind-boggling that women will choose to pursue children and for some reason expect their employer to just pay them to be at home, while they aren't completing any work. Of course it's important to be with your child early on. So do that. But is it really important that your employer pay for work you didn't do? That is something that I believe lies on the shoulders of government, not industry. (And personally, I don't think govts should provide funding for it either, but that's for each nation to determine, and also cultures can be very different. It might not work here, but it may work over there.) Nobody owes you anything because you went and got pregnant. Nobody should attack you for doing so, either. But to turn around and think that you are somehow ENTITLED to wages and compensation for that time is absolutely insane.
• cobbzilla 8y ago
  To reproduce this error: 1. Create a law that penalizes companies for activities against current employees with attribute X (or who might have attribute X in the future) 2. Watch as companies ride the grey-line getting away with as much as they can whilst (a) staying within the letter of the law and (b) creatively discriminating to avoid hiring anyone who has (or might in the future have) attribute X. I'm not making a moral judgement, but when you set the system up like this can you really be surprised by the results?
  • ryanobjc 8y ago
    I hate these kind of sophisticate-cynical arguments. Yes you are technically correct, and thus get to revel in Being Right. Drinking a celebratory champaign. Yet we are still having negative outcomes that are highly problematic. And you have contributed nothing except, what, smugness?
    • cobbzilla 8y ago
      Where you see smugness, I ask you to see reality. If you want a system that works, design the incentives to align correctly. This is not happening here. If you leave a T-bone steak on your porch before you sleep, can you really be surprised in the morning to discover the raccoons have gotten it? Do you then blame the raccoons and call them evil? That might feel good but it's not going to solve anything.
• fixermark 8y ago
  Fundamentally, this is one of those places where if we want to change policy, the government needs to step in. If we want companies to honor paternity and maternity leave, then when a parent takes such leave, the government needs to soak the employee's salary and benefits. 100%, no questions asked, full stop. Any less is incentive for every company in the marketplace to find every excuse to cut parents out of the loop for costing more per-hour-unit-of-work than an equivalent employee with no children.
  • ryanobjc 8y ago
    So what do you do when you have high risk scenarios that are semi-rare but semi-predictable, combined with a high loss when they happen? It's called insurance. That's the private/"market" based solution to privatizing and sharing risk across a pool. Given it's kind of an impossible thing to fake, there isn't much risk of false claims.
    • chii 8y ago
      insurance doesn't work when the event is controllable (like pregnancy) and happens regularly to everyone. Imagine an insurance company offering to sell to a business a plan for each employee, which covers their salary while they take leave. The premium of this plan must be lower than their total cost in salary while they are on leave, since if it was higher, the business can just pay the salary! Therefore, the insurance company must cover the cost by taking on the risk that some employee don't take parental leave (and thus, profit off those premiums). But in aggregate, "everybody" reproduces. Therefore, there'd be nobody to "earn" the premium from. So the only remaining possibility to profit is from making interest from the premiums not yet paid out (which, while significant, can't really be as profitable as any existing insurance product).
      • ryanobjc 8y ago
        You’ve just also proven health insurance doesn’t work!
        • 8y ago
• porjo 8y ago
  To play devil's advocate - a personal anecdote: in a previous job, a newly hired manager announced she was pregnant and going on maternity leave in 6 months - threw our department into chaos. To me it seemed clear that in her mind, getting the job was a green light for getting pregnant - at the expense of the company! I can't blame companies for being nervous about these kinds of scenarios.
• p9j23flawkjf 8y ago
  I interviewed at Segment and had a recruiter ask me whether, "there was anyone in my life who I would have to take into consideration when deciding whether I would change work places?" I asked for clarification several times before he finally followed up with, "Are you married? Do you have any children?"
• amriksohata 8y ago
  On one side companies want to do more to get women into tech then on the other side they are not supporting them when they need to do what families want, have babies. This is upto the government to protect women against layoffs and redundancies after pregnancy. Especially if that woman has had a reasonable tenure leading upto the pregnancy.
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  My partner works at a small startup of ~12 people. They employ some 8 ladies all but one of whom became pregnant in recent years, while working at the company. The company kept going without any damage to its business. At some point, they had a bad turn and had to downsize so they fired most of the working mothers, who tended to hold the most expendable positions, I guess. Eventually, the company's fortunes turned again, at which point they re-hired all the people they had laid off (or offered to- some had moved on). They seem to be doing fine now, in any case they have plenty of business. I'm just saying: pregnancy does exactly zero harm to a company's bottom line or a woman's ability to hold down a job and perform at her role. And even if it did, we're talking about a tiny startup of a dozen people. If it can handle most of its staff being pregnant or with kids, then a big corp like Walmart or Merck has no excuse not to. No excuse at all.
• treyfitty 8y ago
  I’ve discussed how pregnancy discrimination impacted me (male) before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105745 Lawyered up, lawyer said “it’s not worth it to me, nor you.” This is the world we live in now, folks.
• throw2016 8y ago
  Decades of Neoliberal economics and systemic propaganda by self serving libertarians nostalgic for settler ideology and 'freedom' it seems has resulted in a corporate 'business only' society that is completely divorced from the practical realities of humanity. Many of the commentators seem to be arguing against their own existence like they are robots who just turned up, no one had to give birth to them or bring them up. And its not just their parents, there is a whole infrastructure around you that took hundreds of years to build that we call civilization and culture that allowed them and you to get you to where you are. I don't see how you can value or discuss culture or have any kind of shared existence and commonality with other human beings without acknowledging the entirety of the human condition.
• crimsonalucard 8y ago
  Is it unreasonable discrimination or is there a performance degradation correlated with pregnancy?
• iliasku 8y ago
  this would be unthinkable here in Iceland. we are looking for sw eng and sre here : https://jobs.netapp.com/job/Greenqloud%2C-Iceland-Office-%28RE-Site-Reliability-Engineer/440991800/ https://jobs.netapp.com/job/Greenqloud%2C-Iceland-Office-%28...
• overton 8y ago
  I'll fully get behind mat leave if it's taken as bonus paid vacation time that's available to everyone. Having a child is a choice, and a selfish one at that, the world being as overpopulated as it is. No problem with that. You want a kid, I want to take time off to make music and travel.
• jonathanoliver 8y ago
  I have a few honest and open questions as a US-based small business with a handful of women who have recently had children or who are pregnant. Do you guys have any advice for how to balance the impact to the results that we receive from those having children prior to vs after pregnancy and/or having children? Example: One individual is a phenomenal front-end website engineer. Her input has been critical in helping us solve a lot of engineering challenges and more forward in significant ways. When she became pregnant she had debilitating morning sickness so much so she could hardly function on a personal level. This morning sickness persisted for the last 5 months through the present day to the point where she's only be able to come to work (or even work from home/remotely) for perhaps 15 days sprinkled throughout the 5 months. We all value her opinion and expertise highly. We try to schedule meetings around when she might available (to the point of even having spontaneous "she's available" meetings) but even she doesn't know when she'll be able to work or operate productively. Further, her ability to code/design/be productive has plummeted to perhaps 5% of her original capacity. Do you guys have any tips on how to handle this situation? We thought about starting her maternity leave early (during pregnancy), but she'll definitely need that leave AFTER she has the baby. Perhaps we start the paid maternity leave during her pregnancy and then a leave-of-absence (unpaid) after the child is born? Is that fair to her? Is that fair to us? In many regards, we have a paid member of the team but without any of the capacity. Another example: We have another woman who is very detail-oriented. For years, her projects always came out flawlessly. She has an amazing talent to see all the different ways a project could go wrong and then she would plan accordingly to keep things on track. However, since her first child was born move than a year ago, she's been a completely different person. Her child still isn't sleeping through the night. She's sleep deprived in a big way. On many days, she's almost a zombie. Previously she was punctual, reliable, and focused. We're not sure what to do. We have offered to pay for sleep training for her baby which she has refused (and that's her right as a mother of her child), but we would like to have some form of productivity capacity from her. We don't want to let her go because we know what she is capable of. For the last 18 months, we've been struggling to balance what we can reasonably expect from her vs the demands/results that her role requires. Letting her go sounds like horrible, insensitive, and possibly illegal. Is reducing her compensation a fair trade? Ultimately, we're paying value to be delivered and that has been slashed to a fraction of her previous state. Are there any tips, tricks, ideas, or ways of thinking that can help us be fair and equitable with these individuals in their unique circumstances while at the same time allowing ourselves to expect a reasonable amount of value from them in exchange for the compensation they receive? A few other notes: 1. We offer 4+ months of paid maternity leave for having/adopting children. 2. We also offer paid paternity leave for male employees for having/adopting children.
• vfc1 8y ago
  The obvious solution that brings many other benefits is to allow people to work from home. By simply removing the long commute the problem is already nearly solved, as all of a sudden people have two extra hours of productive work in many cases. If a kid wakes you up at 3 AM, it helps to only have to wake up at 8AM instead of 6AM. Also, the levels of stress while working from home make for much more productive workers. There are many other benefits, but making it easier to reconcile parenting with a full time job is one of the biggest.
• matz1 8y ago
  I guess this is good for me, I don't have plan to have kids. This can potentially give me slight competitive advantage since the employer doesn't have to worry about me taking long paid time off.
• bitcoinisqueen 8y ago
  I know many cases where small employers were left paying 100k's after taking on a woman for a position, and just a few months later 'she got pregnant'. - employer had to fork over 12 months of pay - employer had to disrupt their business and hire another person The employer struggled to eek out their own profit to feed their own family and meet their obligations. This is a common scam that some women will get a job, with the intention of juicing the parental leave AND then we they are supposed to return to work.... they instead quit. This scam has cost my friends a lot of money and suffering because these women are predators and care not of others, but getting something for themselves. And they scream "mah discrimination".
  • techntoke 8y ago
    Do you have the employers names and any documents or court records to show that this is what was uncovered? Why were your friends not able to determine the quality of employees during the interview and on-boarding process? Have you actually read the FMLA? They would have had to work their for quite a bit of time before requesting leave, and even then there are additional requirements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_of_1993 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o... I was denied FMLA when I got full-time custody of my kids. Not saying that you are, but you come across as a biased person trying to stereotype and generalize women. FMLA does not only apply to women either.
    • bitcoinisqueen 8y ago
      The world does not revolve around US law. Where I live, you just have to surpass your probationary period to qualify. My apologies for being biased by sharing a story of how my friends lost 100k's, next time I guess I should bring documentation and court cases before daring to tell you about something that happened. /s And why the heck would I tell you the name of my friends business to effectively give you my identity? The scam I outlined is common enough and you will hear it happen if you ask. A variation is that women will take their 12 months pay from a business, and then a certain percentage decide they do not want to work and then do not go back to their jobs. Whether it applies to men or women both under FMLA law has no bearing on the morality of executing this scam. I'm not sure why you even pointed it out and what you're trying to say with that information.
• acd 8y ago
  In the age of companies wanting to expand on an exponential pace and globalization. I get the feeling that there is no longer any compassion for things that are normal. It is normal for women to have children and have parental leave. It is good for a countries GDP that women have equal opportunity to take part of the work force. If women would not participate working the economy GDP of the country would be half of what it could be. Is is also good for dads to take equal long parental leave as women. Thus it is short sighted by companies and the economy as general only to see the very short term.