9 ms·

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

• 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?
      • MattLaroche 8y ago
        What do you mean by "extra" on "extra CA PFL"? Companies I am familiar with continue vesting through the full length of their paid parental leave.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• hectormalot 8y ago
  Thought experiment: would it still be a (meaningful) difference if the father would get the same leave as the mother?
  • ISL 8y ago
    It would hinder the employment for anyone, regardless of gender, who expects to have children.
    • pimmen 8y ago
      I don't think so, in Scandinavia we have a very low unemployment rate and Stockholm is one of the most vibrant tech hubs of Europe. We offer every employee some of the most generous paternal and maternal leaves in the world. You can take time off for your children even when they're 11 years old if you save up some days (you get months off that you can take whenever you like). We also have some of the most generous laws for taking care of your sick child. If you fire an employee because they're taking care of a sick child all the time, boy is your business in for a world of hurt. The unemployment rate is lowest for people in their 30s, which is the time in life when it's likely people will either be getting a child or they already have a child at home that needs to be looked after. It might have something to do with our government subsidised daycare though.
      • username90 8y ago
        Employees always pays for it one way or another, high skill salaries are very low in Sweden and I'd guess that this is a big reason.
        • pimmen 8y ago
          We don't pay for health care or higher education and we have good pension plans that are government subsidized, though. We pay a lot but get a lot.
          • hectormalot 8y ago
• s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "So while I'd like to force the startup to make the decision without considering this factor, is that always reasonable?" I believe it is. As a society, we've decided that being able to continue the population is more important than the fortunes of any particular startup.
  • saagarjha 8y ago
    > As a society, we've decided that being able to continue the population is more important than the fortunes of any particular startup. Maybe we could take this out of the hands of the startup and have society subsidize it?
    • emptybits 8y ago
      Some societies do. I'm writing from Canada. Mother and/or father can share up to 35 weeks of paid leave under the national insurance program. This maxes out at, I think, approx $500 per week. It's not a lot. But it helps. Regarding societal values, this the same program that would normally pay you temporarily if you were laid off (not by choice). Normally you wouldn't be eligible to collect benefits if you willingly left a job. Pregnancy is generally considered to be a choice, so I think making these benefits available to parents shows society does value the choice to parent and will subsidize it. Parents who adopt a child receive significant additional benefits on top of the standard allowance. Recently there have been changes to the program to improve benefits for self-employed. As we on HN know ... sometimes a startup founder isn't "employed" or receiving salary in the usual sense and historically it was difficult for such professionals to receive employment insurance benefits but it's changing. Anyways, progress? :-)
      • ldp01 8y ago
        > I'm writing from Canada. Mother and/or father can share up to 35 weeks of paid leave under the national insurance program. This maxes out at, I think, approx $500 per week. It's not a lot. But it helps. This. I'm writing from Australia- it looks like we only get $622.10 for 18 weeks, but it seems like a nice middle ground to support new parents. At that low price I would probably agree that 35 weeks is reasonable. I get confused when people argue strongly against the middle ground position. I don't even want to have kids but I don't begrudge the use of public money in this way- it's a direct investment in the future of society which shields both parents and businesses from undue financial stress without being profligate or forcing too much ideology on the rest of us.
• jschwartzi 8y ago
  It actually isn't a biological reality that the woman is away from work for longer. What's actually happening is that the man isn't expected to be away as long as the woman, so he doesn't take as much leave. It's a form of discrimination to make it the woman's problem because she's the one laid up in the hospital. Just because women are bearing the physical burden of the pregnancy, it doesn't mean it's solely their burden. We're making the choice that it should be their burden. We could just as easily provide subsidies and insurance to companies to cover family leave. If we value childbirth as a society, then we should put our money where our mouth is and actually pay for it somehow.
  • tomp 8y ago
    How can you say this with a straight face?! It's a fact that (some) women need to stay off work (bed-ridden before birth, in hospital after birth). It's also a fact that men don't need to. Obviously, men don't need to work and women don't need to take care of the kids (above and beyond what's biologically required of them), but (1) on average, outcomes will be influenced by underlying biological reality, and (2) it's a fantasy thinking that people can take time off work - e.g. a poor family with a newborn, you really think that any parent will take off more time than they absolutely need to, biologically? Finally (3) yeah there are possible social levers we can use to counter this biological reality and enforce equality of outcomes, but ultimately, we need to decide what we want - why is women working more better than women spending more time with the children? Personally, I look up to Netherlands, one of the happiest countries on Earth, where many women work just part-time.
    • ldp01 8y ago
      > How can you say this with a straight face?! It's a fact that (some) women need to stay off work (bed-ridden before birth, in hospital after birth). It's also a fact that men don't need to. You're referring to a timescale of days which a woman will likely need to spend in hospital. I believe jschwartzi is referring to the weeks/months of maternity/paternity leave following the initial birth. There isn't a hard biological reason not to evenly share the load after the immediate medical concerns are completed.
• lhorie 8y ago
  If you can only afford 10 people, you can usually also get by with 9. Even a healthy male full-time employee is a much bigger commitment financially to a company than just the salary number (i.e. you need to pay payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, equipment, recruiter fees, etc) If you're going to be stretched thin financially after hiring a single new person, you probably shouldn't be hiring.
  • Teever 8y ago
    > If you can only afford 10 people, you can usually also get by with 9. With that kind of logic why should the company even bother hiring a 10th person?
    • lhorie 8y ago
      Because it has money in the bank, and it wants to invest it into growth. Let's put it this way: if 9 people can only produce enough revenue to pay for themselves, it would be risky to take on a new large client if doing so required an upfront investment that completely depleted your cash reserves. If things went south and you couldn't capitalize on your investment, you'd have no way to fund a pivot or a recovery strategy. If taking a new client only required a 10th of your bank and things went bad, it would still hurt but you'd have some breathing room. A new hire poses a similar risk.
      • R_haterade 8y ago
        You obviously live in inflated-margin land. I'm going to guess NY, SF, CS, or greater Denver (maybe austin) or worse, Academia. Startups don't work this way in heavy industry, especially when jobs are on the line. I envy you, actually.
        • lhorie 8y ago
          This is finance management 101. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, don't bet money that you can't lose, etc. > Startups don't work this way Just because it's common nowadays to offload risks to early employees in startups doesn't make it less scummy. It's one thing to operate in guerrilla mode when it's two dudes in a garage struggling to get ramen profitable, but it's an entirely different ball game when one's hiding their inability to deliver with angel money and cruising on the back of a dozen employees. My wife was let go from a startup shortly after returning from mat leave. The company went belly up a while later. It was already clear to me from her descriptions they were toying w/ people's expectations given there was no path to profitability, and a completely illogical hiring spree. That's simply not how the vast majority of successful companies survive.
• saudioger 8y ago
  If you're a 10 person company and more than 7 people are day-to-day critical you're going to have a lot of issues. When we were 8 people we had 2 parents go on 4 months of leave (with 3 month overlap). We missed them and vacation time was a little limited, but everything was fine. Companies need to account for the fact that they're comprised of human beings that reproduce. In terms of humanity you can't get much more fundamental than reproduction.
  • cornholio 8y ago
    > Companies need to account for the fact that they're comprised of human beings that reproduce. If think that's the point, companies do account for that, by discriminating against women, onto which the bulk of the burden of reproduction falls. Correcting this incentive structure is a prime job for government, else literally nothing can exist in few generations.
    • saudioger 8y ago
      I meant that companies need to account for it as an inevitable expense, avoiding it is completely unethical and if someone's party to that decision making process they need to take a good look at themselves.
      • cornholio 8y ago
        By the same token, people fall ill, grow old, and eventually die. The ethical company that covers all those expense for an indefinite duration for it's employees will go bankrupt in the face of competitors that do not. If the government does not intervene to force all companies to shoulder the cost on behalf of the society and distribute the costs to everyone else through prices, then it's hard to say it's unethical for a company not to offer free health care, retirement, disability, life and funeral insurance to each and every current or former employee.
        • saudioger 8y ago
          Workers comp, retirement funds, health insurance, and life insurance. Our company contributes all of those in some way... to not cover birth seems a bit silly by comparison.
• eanzenberg 8y ago
  Excuse me for being flippant but, I don't care if you're a 10- or 10,000- person company, but I'm going to take >4 weeks of vacation per year and if you can't handle that then you don't deserve to exist in the market.
  • sieabahlpark 8y ago
    Whoosh, your 4 weeks isn't comparable to 2 months of degraded quality of life and recovery after pregnancy. Not to mention the children if the father is also working full time.
  • paxys 8y ago
    There is a huge difference between a few weeks of vacation a year (probably taken in 1-2 week chunks) and multiple continuous months of parental leave. The latter can absolutely kill a startup, especially when the person leaving is a subject matter expert in a critical area.
    • chii 8y ago
      > probably taken in 1-2 week chunks if that wasn't mentioned in the employment agreement, then you (the boss) just lied about the conditions of employment. I think a startup deserves the right to not hire somebody who plans to take multiple months off (without telling the boss), but a startup also needs to be upfront about it. I think a bit of transparency goes a long way towards making the market more efficient.
      • emilfihlman 8y ago
        Almost all contracts require you to agree on the vacation schedule beforehand with your boss. If your contract does't have that either the company is very, very lax or their lawyer is incompetent.
    • YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      Third time I post this: my partner's company is a small startup of ~12 people and 7 of their women employees became pregnant and had babies while working for them. One of them was a very important manager, who gave birth to twins and came back within a month. The company is doing just fine, thank you. If a startup dies because it's hiring human beings, it should maybe start to pivot into employing dogs? Or robots, of course.
• solatic 8y ago
  > is that always reasonable? This is why remote-only work culture is so important for social justice in tech. Flexible working hours from home gives women the freedom to work from their recovery beds, walk away from the computer to feed their newborns, be there to give their kids a snack and ask them how was school when they get home. One of the best hiring strategies is to focus on workers whom the market is undervaluing, for whatever prejudice. Remote-only allows you to take the real career-related risks that pregnancy and motherhood imposes and completely mitigate them.
  • mayniac 8y ago
    >This is why remote-only work culture is so important for social justice in tech. Flexible working hours from home gives women the freedom to work from their recovery beds, walk away from the computer to feed their newborns, be there to give their kids a snack and ask them how was school when they get home. Although I agree in principle, I can think of few things as horrifying as new mothers working from a hospital bed, it's practically dystopian. IMO the way of fixing the discrimination issue is equal maternity and paternity leave, along with increasing the amount of leave. If both parents are going to take the same time off then there's less of an issue.
    • pimmen 8y ago
      She doesn't have to work from the hospital bed if she has paid maternal leave. Even better if the father has paid paternal leave and can help when she's recovering. Being a Swede, it's just so unreal when I hear about how it is in the US.
  • adrianN 8y ago
    Good luck doing anything resembling work when you're having a newborn at home and haven't sleep properly in weeks.
• YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  Like I say in another comment, my partner works for a small startup of ~12 people, 7 of whom became pregnant and gave birth in the last five years or so, while working for the company. The company manages just fine. It's a small startup of a dozen people. Almost two thirds of their employees had babies and the company's productivity never suffered from it. Fact, one of the ladies had twins and came back after a month, to continue ruling over the lesser mortals with an iron hand. So I can say with convicton that there is no logic in claiming that a woman's productivity has to take a hit if she has babies. Much less any "biological reality" to any of what you have written. You just severely understimate pregnant women and mothers, is all.
  • colmvp 8y ago
    I know severely women in my family who had exceptional academic and early careers. Once they had their kids, their drive to work dropped dramatically. Even my female CEO has been a lot less consistent as a productive performer compared to what she used to be pre-kid. That's not to say that I think all mothers are like that or that it's a bad thing per se since I'm all about work-life balance, but I can see where companies are coming from when it comes to trying to find someone who they can maximize output.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • yanslookup 8y ago
    > Fact, one of the ladies had twins and came back after a month In most cases this isn't optimal for the baby, mother, father or society. Just because one family decides to do it that way doesn't mean we should support a system that punishes those that don't make the same decision.
• slipjack 8y ago
  One major issue in this scenario: you don’t know who wants/can/will have kids. Discriminating against women because they have a uterus and might get pregnant and might have a problematic pregnancy and might carry to term and might give birth and might take parental leave is incredibly short-sighted - even in your scenario you’ve just missed out on 4+ years of work because you’re worried about a few (potential) months. Beyond that, while (cis) women have the necessary equipment to have kids, we’re not the only ones with bodies that can get sick. Penalizing all women for one particular way of (potentially) disrupting work is incredibly unfair, and ignores that men also can need leaves of absence.
  • shados 8y ago
    The point is that unlike things like race discrimination, when all other things are equal, there IS a real difference, no matter how small, in term of risk (and in practice, it's really not that small). I worked at a large company where most employees were women in the 20-35 yo rangeny for a while on HR project and saw some of the data. It was not pretty. As a society though, we shouldn't let that be ground for discrimination. As you mentioned, not all women want or will have kids. Of those who do, many will have supportive significant others, and the difference in productivity will be negligible. Even if it wasn't, I don't want to live in a world where people have trouble getting a job because they might end up doing something a very significant portion of the population will do. But it's still a fact that, given 2 exactly equivalent candidate, both in their mid twenties, one is a guy, one's a woman, there is a well known, significant short to medium term risk in the later, if only looking at it from a local maximum perspective. We as a society need to find a way to artificially make up for it. My personal favorite solution is to give both men and women equal (mandatory?) parental leaves, and no difference if its an adoption, same sex partners, or anything like that. Yes, women have an actual medical need, yes it might not be quite representative of reality, but that equalizes the risk from an employer perspective. No difference between the man and the woman (bonus point, it will help even out parental contribution and responsabilities at home). That still leaves the age discrimination, but considering ageism is often against older people, that might really just even things out a little.
    • 8y ago