13 ms·

Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

91 points by andygcook 8y ago

NietTim 8y ago
Bullcrap, we have a "paternity leave gap" in the Netherlands AND a wage gap
pmiller2 8y ago
http://archive.is/g3gbd http://archive.is/g3gbd
treyfitty 8y ago
I've discussed this in the past. My company started offering 5 month paternity leave at the end of 2016. For a credit card company, this was huge. There had to have been a catch. I took the chance anyway, and got laid off. This isn't uncommon at the company either. I've heard of 3 females so far who also shared the same fate. All of thought it was illegal, but our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it." I think it wasn't worth it because of an arbitration clause or whatever, but I wasn't going to risk my time, money, and energy required when I just had a baby.
- adammunich 8y ago
  Calling out the company by name is the first step to effecting change. Nothing scares a brand like bad PR.
  - treyfitty 8y ago
    And nothing scares me more than them sending their goons (lawyers). I'm still looking for a job 8 months later, so I don't want to deal with that.
    - magnetic 8y ago
      What's your skill set?
      - treyfitty 8y ago
        Analytics + Data Science.
- mc32 8y ago
  That's awful. Why bother with a program if it's only there as a trap? Ok, so a few people take it in good faith; then the company lays those people off so as teach others not to take the leave... So they're back to square one where no one takes parental leave. It's not mandated (yet) by law, so why bother to set-up bad goodwill? Just to bait people into joining? It seems a very poisonous scheme with little benefit for anyone.
  - chillydawg 8y ago
    It's left hand not talking to the right. The HR people put the system in place as a way of promoting equality, hiring more easily and generally doing a decent thing. Individual managers of teams, with fixed budgets, high workloads and bonus targets around completing those workloads are probably not internally compensated for the cost of HR's policy, thus they look for ways to get rid of such people.
- klipt 8y ago
  > our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it." Sounds like you need a group lawsuit. Firing one person - could be coincidence. Firing three? Starting to look like a pattern of punishment. The more people you can get on the lawsuit, the stronger your case.
  - LorenPechtel 8y ago
    Arbitration agreements normally preclude class action lawsuits.
- nugget 8y ago
  A wrongful termination lawsuit in a case like this should cost no money (contingency) and take very little time and energy, if you have the right lawyers. Arbitration would be even less commitment, with potentially less upside.
vsviridov 8y ago
Nothing like a little enforcement for the public good /s
- contravariant 8y ago
  Eh, sometimes you need a little enforcement to escape the Nash equilibrium. Not sure this is the best example though.
  - 08-15 8y ago
    Just stop telling people that pure greed is the same thing as rationality. Never forget, Nash was crazy, and he did not get a Nobel Prize. Superrationality provides nicer solutions to classic problems like the Prisoners Dilemma, but superrationality "is not mainstream". (Economists don't get it.)
fjsolwmv 8y ago
Why do we want equality if it means pushing women away from the motherhood they choose?
- cimmanom 8y ago
  How would this push any woman away from the choice to be a mother? And why should someone who wants to be a mother and a careerist have to accept more career penalties than someone who wants to be a father and careerist? And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do? For the same reason that men do. After all, society as a whole has decided for some reason that children are a good thing, and that the cost of having them should be born by all, even those without.
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      > After all, society as a whole has decided [...] that the cost of having [children] should be born by all, even those without. Is this not a thread about how society has NOT yet decided such a thing?
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        In theory, yes, but in practice taxes tend to favor married couples and people with children. So even if in the theoretical case you are right practically speaking we all share the cost of having children.
        zimablue 8y ago
        Sorry to be that guy but you're making a clear logical fallacy. The argument is "should we subsidize children" and you're substituting "does society want to subsidize children" and then for THAT you're substituting "do we currently subsidize children". You can only go from 1 to 2 by assuming something like tyranny of the majority. You can only go from 2 to 3 by assuming that the current system is exactly what society would choose if they decided now. Which is obviously silly, given a blank slate drug laws, marriage laws and tax breaks would all be different for a few examples.
oconnore 8y ago
This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting. Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us. Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.
- patagonia 8y ago
  “What’s valuable for men...” It begins with “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap”. Not, what would be valuable for men. A woman who just gave birth just spent an increasingly personally costly, and completely requisite (so long as the pregnancy is wanted), nine months simply getting to the maternity leave portion of the process. I can’t immagi how a woman would perceive for men to gawk at it even being suggested they be forced to take maternity leave. If a man won’t take maternity leave the woman must and that is after the pregnancy they just sacrificed during. Given the SCOTUS hearing at the moment, for such a tone deaf comment to be on HN says all you need to know.
  - lainga 8y ago
    Shades of Bergeron.
  - dang 8y ago
    Could you please not up the ante like this on HN? This comment and the ones you added below take the thread into flamewar. Picking a gotcha phrase from what someone posted and giving them a smackdown leads straight to degraded discussion. Instead, please follow the site guidelines and (a) assume good faith, and (b) react to the most plausible interpretation of what someone said, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Both of those are necessary for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here. That still leaves plenty of room to disagree, and then your disagreement will be much higher-quality, be more likely to convince others, and much more likely to lead to interesting (a.k.a. unpredictable) responses. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
matz1 8y ago
Good, I guess as someone who have no plan to have kids, it makes me more attractive to employer since they don't have to wory of paying me leave.
- zimablue 8y ago
  Except that you have no way of proving that and it would be illegal for them to ask. What it actually does is leave you do the work/pay taxes for your colleagues reproduction holiday.
  - renjimen 8y ago
    "Reproduction holiday". I can only assume you have never spent time around babies and small children. Holiday usually is the last word that springs to mind.
    - lovich 8y ago
      The guy thinks the one month is a generous amount of time to give a woman to recover from childbirth while taking of a baby at the same time. He seems adamant that people only take time off to relax and there's zero benefit to the child to having parents around. The arguments hes posting might hold more sway if he based them on the reality of having a child at all
      - renjimen 8y ago
        Sounds like he just wants people to stop having kids at all. Like our society wouldn't collapse within a generation if we didn't. Somehow it's an individual's responsibility to maintain the future workforce and the rest of society in no way benefits.
facistsSuck 8y ago
How about people are allowed to choose what works best for them and their families?
alkonaut 8y ago
Don’t enforce it. Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. Next make part of the parental leave shared between parents be allocated to the father. Now if they don’t use it they will lose a benefit they already paid taxes for. The last and most important step is to keep this system in place for a generation or more, after which any parent not doing a fair chunk of the parental leave will be considered a bad parent by their peers.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. I guess it'd be good for small businesses, but I'm not sure how I'd feel about paying $40,000,000 a year to Larry Ellison while he was on parental leave.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    Just cap it, if you make more than 100k you don't really need it anyway.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      Yes. Cap for where I am (Sweden) is around the pay of a teacher, and the pay during the leave is 80% of that. This means I as a software dev is paid around 50% of my salary during the leave. Some employers fill this in up to e.g 80 or 90% as a benefit.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    On our side of the pond you only get paid the corresponding of your full salary based on what you discount for social security. In your example, if he's getting 40m a year, then he's also paying the corresponding social security for a 40m/y income.
barrkel 8y ago
We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate, or live under fascist governments, or worse. Much of the gains of two-income parents goes into house prices to be closer to good schools - i.e. zero sum competition, while company incentives are to encourage people not to have children, or defer children until too late to maintain population, and essentially stopping the next generation of employees from being born. And then you mix migration driven by climate change into the mix, and it's very easy for populist politicians to whip up narratives of being overrun, not least because on a historical scale it's true (and of course it's always been true, everywhere has always been in the state of being overrun, with ebbs and flows). The dynamics here aren't good and it's hard to see how they're going to change any time soon, short of a crisis.
- mc32 8y ago
  >We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate Except for Japan (probably China when it comes to it), most will import labor. Globalization (in terms of corporations) isn't just about taking jobs overseas it's also about brining people from overseas in (in the US H1Bs for professionals, for example).
- john_moscow 8y ago
  >And then you mix migration driven by climate change Do you seriously believe the migration is driven by climate change, not by the difference in life quality driven by political/cultural differences?
  - zimablue 8y ago
    Water crisis contributes to Syria/ISIS contributes to migration is one where I think the cause-effect is quite clear, I could be wrong.
  - lukeschlather 8y ago
    Do you seriously believe that climate change isn't a factor? One need look no further than the Maldives for an extreme example, but there are little examples all over. Obviously people migrate for lots of different reasons, but climate change is becoming a serious one for a lot of people.
pmiller2 8y ago
I don’t think this is legal. Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, so, if women are not also forced to take such leave, how can men be?
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  Ok. So make sure women are forced to take some time off as well.
brighteyes 8y ago
It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach. One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies. Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children. Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.
- was_boring 8y ago
  Arguably, decreasing human kind's birthrate is a net positive. Even in the absence of that, being a dad, and knowing many dads, we've already made the choice to "disadvantage" ourselves -- and wish we could do it more. What stops us is the fact that we would lose our jobs which disadvantages our kids. So I say bring on mandatory leave! The vast majority will be much happier.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    One important tangent. There's a very significant nuance to birthrates you're not considering when it comes to reducing birthrates. Most of everybody knows birth rates in the developed world are decreasing, compared to the developing world. But what many do not know is that this sort of pattern holds true even within developed nations themselves. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year have 50% more children than those who earn $200k per year. [1] The slope of the inverse relationship between income and fertility is surprisingly and disconcertingly smooth. Think about what this means. The things that correlate strongly with fertility are: low income, low education, high religiosity. If you look at the pool of all children being born they're going to end up ever more disproportionately in low income, low education, highly religious households over higher income secular households in developed nations. I used to feel similarly to you, but in considering this the very people 'responsibly' choosing not to have children are the exact people that should be reproducing to no end if we want a better tomorrow for everybody. And this is without even considering genetic factors. Responsible fertility is, paradoxically, anything but responsible for those who would have the wherewithal to consider such things in the first place. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
JackC 8y ago
I took 12 weeks of paternity leave after my wife went back to work, and definitely recommend it if you can swing it. Partly just that spending time with a kid small enough to nap inside your hoodie is worth doing -- but honestly I'm not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent and that's not why I'm a fan of paternity leave. More that it helped so much with setting us up for parenting together. One reason is that it's hard to understand just how much work it is if you haven't done it on your own for long stretches, and it helps for both partners to know that both partners know how hard it is and have taken a turn at it. Another is the self-reinforcing competence thing -- if one partner always packs for going out, say, then the other partner is likely to take longer and do a worse job when they try packing, so it's easier for everyone if they don't, and you end up thinking only one person is good at parenting. To some extent it's fine to specialize, but having to do everything during the day on my own for a few months made it really clear that both of us can be good at any given thing if need be. One thing I was surprised by (but shouldn't have been) is just how much wealth you're showing off by taking paternity leave. Telling people you're taking 12 weeks of paternity leave in America is basically telling them you have plenty of money and a job you can afford to walk away from, which pretty much crosses the line into boasting about things you shouldn't boast about. I ended up playing it down more than I expected, which kind of sucks, since it's an awesome thing that more folks should be able to do.
damagednoob 8y ago
I'm in favour of a set amount of parental leave that can be shared between spouses in whatever ratio they choose. I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing. Example: You and your husband would like to breastfeed your baby for the first 6 months but you are unable to express? Too bad, your husband has to take paternity leave and you will have to go back to work. From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth that is nurtured and strengthened through breastfeeding. I would vehemently oppose the state enforcing any interruption in my child's wellbeing as we see fit as parents.
- matt4077 8y ago
  > From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth That's not "experience", it's just the 1950's dogma on the role of men and women dressed up in think-of-the-children. And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence, or men could choose a period after weaning for their leave.
  - damagednoob 8y ago
    I'm not thinking-of-the-children, I'm thinking-of-my-children. I don't care how other parents choose to allocate their parental leave. If they want it to be more equitable, then more power to them. And it's not dogma it's just a biological fact that men can't breastfeed and thus women spend more time with the child. There is a snowball effect to this that makes the connection stronger which seems to be pretty self-evident. > And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence Did you understand the point about not being able to express? If the mother can't express (which many find too painful or just can't) how are the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding supposed to be delivered to the child?
- michaelt 8y ago
  I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing. There are loads of situations where being deprived of choices is a good thing. Consider the prisoners' dilemma [1], where the global optimum is for neither side to defect, but the Nash equilibrium is for both sides to defect. If both sides could be deprived of the choice to defect, both would enjoy a better outcome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
p2t2p 8y ago
I like how left response is forcing people at the point of a gun when people’s behaviour doesn’t fit into the ideology. If only I’ve seen it somewhere... ah, in the country I was born - Soviet Union.
aghaghagh 8y ago
“And the trees were all kept equal.. by hatchet, axe, and saw.”
stcredzero 8y ago
Make men stay at home for paternity leave? I have a coworker fighting for the ability to stay at home for parental leave.
- gumby 8y ago
  If you read the article you see why: men who take it are liable to face consequences ("what, you are so unimportant that the company can do with out you?") that clearly also affect women. The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.
  - orangecat 8y ago
    The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing. It will never not affect your career. Even if you work for a wonderfully enlightened company that is happy to have you take six months off at full pay, the people who are continuing to work in that time are going to be gaining experience and increasing their skills, and will have a better shot at raises and promotions.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Or you end up with companies that discriminate against parents of either sex. Then birth rates plummet even more and companies of the future struggle to find skilled workers.
gaius 8y ago
There should be a system that every n years you get a 6-month paid sabbatical that can be used for any purpose - studying, traveling, having a kid, anything. Because consider two women, one who wants kids and one who doesn’t. Why should woman 2 be disadvantaged? Isn’t that the exact opposite of equality?
- gumby 8y ago
  The point is that none should be disadvantaged.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Exactly. So decouple the time off from the reproduction.
    - gumby 8y ago
      Except that the amount for this special case far outweighs the amount typical for PTO.
      - gaius 8y ago
        I’m proposing to up the PTO for any person for any purpose to match. Then everything is equal regardless of reproductive choices.
- zimablue 8y ago
  That's actually a pretty clever idea, nice.
- paulryanrogers 8y ago
  Doesn't this encourage terminating employees before that N year, unless they are absolutely essential?
  - gaius 8y ago
    Well it’s already illegal to sack a woman immediately that she announces she’s pregnant, so I guess this would come under the same thing. For both men and women obv.
itry2develop 8y ago
These days when someone says, " Let's force someone to...", its usually a stupid idea.
zimablue 8y ago
Can we stop linking and upvoting these article on HN, I've seen several in the last few months. I don't see a clear link to hacker culture, if anything it's less relevant to developers as we often have some form of flexible working already. The link I can see is that it's part of the gender culture war that has somehow become focussed on SV.
- gumby 8y ago
  > I don't see a clear link to hacker culture It's good advice for how to run my company.
  - zimablue 8y ago
    But it's not about that, it's about a proposed law. Anything to do with how to run companies isn't hacker culture, we don't spam posts about the best offshore tax arrangements and the advantages of different board structures. Company stuff is mostly to do with startups and this practise is both less relevant to and less favoured by startups.
    - lovich 8y ago
      It's a proposed change to how to run a company, it's not someone's rant about how someone didn't call them xer and how that person is a Nazi. Your opposition to even seeing this post because it includes gender seems like more of a culture war artifact than the post itself
      - zimablue 8y ago
        As I said, we generally don't post company minutae unless there's a link to tech or startups. It's not opposition to seeing the post, it's opposition to the general trend of putting gender culture war articles otherwise disconnected to hacker news on the forum because gender activists chose to make SV a battleground. It's not culture war to be bored of the culture war.
        8y ago
colllectorof 8y ago
>What’s needed now is action. Why not start with mandatory paternity leave? This is called politician's syllogism. 1. We must do something 2. This is something 3. Therefore, we must do this. It's a logical fallacy.
chriskanan 8y ago
In academia, some studies have shown than mandatory paternity leave may not close gaps in productivity: The authors compared promotion rates before and after these gender-neutral parental policies were adopted, relative to trends in comparable institutions that did not alter their policies, while also accounting for an array of influences, like where each economist was trained. They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists. From: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension-policies-that-put-women-at-a-disadvantage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension...
erokar 8y ago
In Norway mother and father each have 15 weeks paid leave from work after childbirth, e.i. 30 weeks total. If the father chooses not not use his paid leave it cannot normally be transferred to the mother.
rukittenme 8y ago
I'm surprised this has had such a good reception. Hobbling men in the name of equality is just bizarre. It's mixture of "Hansel and Gretel" and "Harrison Bergeron". Instead of weights just fatten them up with sweets. I didn't push a human being out from between my legs. Because of that I'm capable of working. I would like to be useful to my family. Working is one way I can do that. If I work while my wife is on leave and the gender pay gap is worsened. I don't care. If my wife stays home to recover from her ordeal and the gender wage gap is worsened. She doesn't care. The gender wage gap is so abstract and cynical at this point. It is beyond meaning. People aren't allow to live their lives the way they see fit because of some stupid number. Shocking I know but there is no such thing as the "average woman". If her wage is different from the "average man" it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits. But who cares about individual women and what they want? We want the top level statistics to be equal! /s
- lovich 8y ago
  It's not leave to just fuck off and do nothing. Taking care of a baby is an incredibly demanding task which is why most human societies we're built around having multiple generations of family, or other members of your tribe, helping with childcare. Foisting all of that onto a mother without any assistance is a relatively new thing in human history. If you took parental leave, most people would expect to be an actual parent to the child. Beyond all of that, this change isn't about what the right level of child care is. It's about the fact that managers and companies discount women workers of child bearing age to a degree that they do not for men, because if a couple is having a child the woman is going to have to take some amount of time off. The suggestion from this article would be like adding an interface of IParent over the male and female classes, and having the employers make hiring/firing/promotion decisions based off of the interface rather than the concrete class. If you don't do this the two groups of people, men and women, will be treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth. As a culture we've made a value judgement that this sort of discrimination is a bad thing, so why would we not mitigate it?
paulus_magnus2 8y ago
Let's stop discriminating against people who have a family or other things to do except work. Start by enforcing 40 hour work week and make overtime paid 150%. Employers prefer frugal workaholics with no obligations but these individuals impose externality on "normal people". We're rich enough, no need working above 8h/day. I'd go all the way and make it illegal to provide work without compensation (internships, 80h work weeks etc). And I'd to try limit oversupply of labour by further limiting standard workweek below 40h.
- pimmen 8y ago
  Those benefits have been in Sweden for decades.
andrewclunn 8y ago
Is there mandatory maternity leave? No. Women want their freebees. So now of course forcibly keeping men from working more MUST be done. Busy body nonsense.
oh_sigh 8y ago
How would you enforce men informing their company that they recently became a father?
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Do you really think that new fathers aren't going to enroll their child in health insurance, and take advantage of tax deductions?
  - chongli 8y ago
    That doesn't apply here in Canada. If I were a new father in the US, faced with taking a massive pay cut for forced paternity leave, I'd pick up the insurance for my child at retail. Heck, in high pressure firms where anyone taking parental leave is inviting career stagnation or termination (fully justified by having HR set up a paper trail of unsatisfactory performance evaluations), you'd be downright crazy to disclose the birth of your child.
    - jonathankoren 8y ago
      1) We're talking about paid leave. 2) Historically, no one bought insurance on the individual market. It's been absurdly expensive. That was why the individual mandate under Obamacare is/was important. It forced healthy people to buy insurance, and thus drive down the price. 3) It's illegal discriminate based on parental status.
defen 8y ago
How exactly would this be enforced? If a man doesn't disclose that his partner is pregnant, is he going to be fired? I don't see how it could be legal to do so. How is a partner's / spouse's medical condition any business of an employer?
- zimablue 8y ago
  It gets better, what if you're not with the mother. What if it was a one night stand, or you donated sperm to her as a single parent. What if you're not with her, she told you she was on the pill and it wasn't true. What if you're in a non binary relationship (2 fathers?). What if you adopt a young child.
  - Broken_Hippo 8y ago
    Anyone that would not have paternal rights when the child is born obviously wouldn't get paternal leave. That covers things like sperm donors, some one night stands, and so on. One night stand? This depends if she knows it was you. If she does, the responsible thing would be to notify you that she was pregnant as a result of that. It gives you time to prepare to help. If you aren't with the mother, it really would depend on the relationship. Can you not help the mother out by going to the store? Delay your paternity leave until she starts working and keep your child while the mother is at work? Take the child to the doctor and other such things? People deal with this sort of thing with divorce, so I fail to see how this is different. Again, if you wouldnt get parental rights, however, you'd not have paternity benefits. I suspect they'd handle non binary relationships as they are handled now. If the woman doesn't choose one as a father and the man steps forward and claims the child, they might request a dna test. They already handle such things in courts at the time. The other option is for neither man to be on the birth certificate, nulling their paternity rights... and thus their paternity leave. Most places have leave for adoption, even if it isn't a young child. I fail to see how this would change at all. It would simply make sure the leave would be for both parents.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    Just look across the pond, many countries solved that over here and we managed to survive.
greggeter 8y ago
How about stay out of my life, and I'll stay out of yours?
ueiemdjj74 8y ago
ITT, liberals and higher middle class people and socialists discussing why paternity leave should be mandatory. Guess what, I don't want to pay for your fuck trophy. Some cucks are discussing make it taxed. Why not manage existing money efficiently first? Typical liberals.
WorshipChildren 8y ago
Parental leave of any kind is discrimination against workers who can't have or don't want children. Know what isn't discrimination? A parent using PTO that everyone gets to care for their kids. Don't have enough? Can't do without parental leave? Why the heck are you having kids?!" Jesus. Christ. FORCING people to take parental leave is insanity.
curtis 8y ago
We're thinking about the problem all wrong. Clearly the way to close the wage gap is to get women to stop having kids. Of course I'm not serious, but then I personally don't care if there is a wage gap as long as it is not being caused by workplace discrimination against women. If instead it's the case that the wage gap is caused by women (disproportionately to men) making an informed choice to de-prioritize work in order to prioritize childcare, then I am totally alright with that. Maybe the impact of the wage gap is too big even if it's caused by women making informed choices. We could choose to offset it directly, for example by subsidizing children -- kind of like a basic income just for kids. By doing it that way we could make the system largely agnostic about whether it's a father or a mother deciding to prioritize childcare over work in any particular case.
- larrydag 8y ago
  While not huge the US tax system has a child tax credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/five-things-to-know-about-the-child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/five-things-to-know-about-the-c...
  - dgudkov 8y ago
    >We could choose to offset it directly, for example by subsidizing children -- kind of like a basic income just for kids. Unfortunately, too many people thinking "why should I pay for raising someone else's kids?".
    - GW150914 8y ago
      We already do pay to help raise other poeple’s kids through a variety of taxes, including public schools via property tax. This would be more of a subsidy for reproducing, rather than helping to raise them. I think it’s only rational for a community to invest in good outcomes for children, because the alternatives are not only undesireable and immoral, but more expensive. Actually subsidizing having children though, rather than investing in existing children isn’t something quite so simple. If you want to have children and are willing to make the associated sacrifices, good for you, it entire ask me to mitigate those sacrifices when I’ve chosen to not have children. I’m still happy to pay my taxes and invest thereby in their education and health, but propping up your career? No.
beaner 8y ago
If such discrimination exists (it probably does), this will just change the bias to be against anyone who is part of a young, potentially child-bearing couple. It also seems utterly against my rights as a human, and unconstitutional.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
I wrote this as a response to another comment, but I think it deserves a top level comment. > it's clear where the wage gap comes from: childcare, childcare, childcare. I've decided recently, just now actually: I don't buy this. Why would an employer discount a woman's value just because she may, at some point, take time off to care for a child? Men also leave jobs. Shouldn't employers discount men's value because they may, at some point, leave?
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  I’m answering your question, but not accepting the premise that childcare isn’t the major cause. Also, I’m coming at this from a Canadian perspective, where we have paid maternity/paternity via the Employment Insurance system. Despite it being available to both parents, anecdotally it is predominantly use by the mother, although fathers do sometimes use it (and it’s shared, so both can use it at the same time, eg when the child first come home). While the employer doesn’t pay for the employee while they are on leave, the employer is responsible for ensuring that their job is materially still there when they come back. Someone can’t go on mat/pat leave and come back to discover that they’re no longer a software manager but rather a janitor. In the meantime, you have to find someone to replace them. If you have two candidates, male and female, both are likely to have a number of risk factors: they’ll leave, they’ll seek raises, etc. But, to address your question, the woman also has some probability of having a child and taking mat leave. All other things equal (probability of other risks), the woman will likely have a higher overall risk, since she’s more likely to take mat leave. That all being said, you’re not “allowed” to discriminate based on that. And, as a man, I’ve never experienced sexual discrimination as far as salary goes. But there’s an answer to your question as to why childcare could be the primary factor.

91 points by andygcook 8y ago

NietTim 8y ago

Bullcrap, we have a "paternity leave gap" in the Netherlands AND a wage gap

pmiller2 8y ago

http://archive.is/g3gbd http://archive.is/g3gbd

treyfitty 8y ago

I've discussed this in the past. My company started offering 5 month paternity leave at the end of 2016. For a credit card company, this was huge. There had to have been a catch. I took the chance anyway, and got laid off. This isn't uncommon at the company either. I've heard of 3 females so far who also shared the same fate. All of thought it was illegal, but our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it." I think it wasn't worth it because of an arbitration clause or whatever, but I wasn't going to risk my time, money, and energy required when I just had a baby.

adammunich 8y ago
Calling out the company by name is the first step to effecting change. Nothing scares a brand like bad PR.
- treyfitty 8y ago
  And nothing scares me more than them sending their goons (lawyers). I'm still looking for a job 8 months later, so I don't want to deal with that.
  - magnetic 8y ago
    What's your skill set?
    - treyfitty 8y ago
      Analytics + Data Science.
mc32 8y ago
That's awful. Why bother with a program if it's only there as a trap? Ok, so a few people take it in good faith; then the company lays those people off so as teach others not to take the leave... So they're back to square one where no one takes parental leave. It's not mandated (yet) by law, so why bother to set-up bad goodwill? Just to bait people into joining? It seems a very poisonous scheme with little benefit for anyone.
- chillydawg 8y ago
  It's left hand not talking to the right. The HR people put the system in place as a way of promoting equality, hiring more easily and generally doing a decent thing. Individual managers of teams, with fixed budgets, high workloads and bonus targets around completing those workloads are probably not internally compensated for the cost of HR's policy, thus they look for ways to get rid of such people.
klipt 8y ago
> our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it." Sounds like you need a group lawsuit. Firing one person - could be coincidence. Firing three? Starting to look like a pattern of punishment. The more people you can get on the lawsuit, the stronger your case.
- LorenPechtel 8y ago
  Arbitration agreements normally preclude class action lawsuits.
nugget 8y ago
A wrongful termination lawsuit in a case like this should cost no money (contingency) and take very little time and energy, if you have the right lawyers. Arbitration would be even less commitment, with potentially less upside.

vsviridov 8y ago

Nothing like a little enforcement for the public good /s

contravariant 8y ago
Eh, sometimes you need a little enforcement to escape the Nash equilibrium. Not sure this is the best example though.
- 08-15 8y ago
  Just stop telling people that pure greed is the same thing as rationality. Never forget, Nash was crazy, and he did not get a Nobel Prize. Superrationality provides nicer solutions to classic problems like the Prisoners Dilemma, but superrationality "is not mainstream". (Economists don't get it.)

fjsolwmv 8y ago

Why do we want equality if it means pushing women away from the motherhood they choose?

cimmanom 8y ago
How would this push any woman away from the choice to be a mother? And why should someone who wants to be a mother and a careerist have to accept more career penalties than someone who wants to be a father and careerist? And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do?
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > And why should a woman who doesn't want children have to pay a penalty for the choices of those who do? For the same reason that men do. After all, society as a whole has decided for some reason that children are a good thing, and that the cost of having them should be born by all, even those without.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    > After all, society as a whole has decided [...] that the cost of having [children] should be born by all, even those without. Is this not a thread about how society has NOT yet decided such a thing?
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      In theory, yes, but in practice taxes tend to favor married couples and people with children. So even if in the theoretical case you are right practically speaking we all share the cost of having children.
      - zimablue 8y ago
        Sorry to be that guy but you're making a clear logical fallacy. The argument is "should we subsidize children" and you're substituting "does society want to subsidize children" and then for THAT you're substituting "do we currently subsidize children". You can only go from 1 to 2 by assuming something like tyranny of the majority. You can only go from 2 to 3 by assuming that the current system is exactly what society would choose if they decided now. Which is obviously silly, given a blank slate drug laws, marriage laws and tax breaks would all be different for a few examples.

oconnore 8y ago

This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting. Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us. Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.

patagonia 8y ago
“What’s valuable for men...” It begins with “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap”. Not, what would be valuable for men. A woman who just gave birth just spent an increasingly personally costly, and completely requisite (so long as the pregnancy is wanted), nine months simply getting to the maternity leave portion of the process. I can’t immagi how a woman would perceive for men to gawk at it even being suggested they be forced to take maternity leave. If a man won’t take maternity leave the woman must and that is after the pregnancy they just sacrificed during. Given the SCOTUS hearing at the moment, for such a tone deaf comment to be on HN says all you need to know.
- lainga 8y ago
  Shades of Bergeron.
- dang 8y ago
  Could you please not up the ante like this on HN? This comment and the ones you added below take the thread into flamewar. Picking a gotcha phrase from what someone posted and giving them a smackdown leads straight to degraded discussion. Instead, please follow the site guidelines and (a) assume good faith, and (b) react to the most plausible interpretation of what someone said, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Both of those are necessary for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here. That still leaves plenty of room to disagree, and then your disagreement will be much higher-quality, be more likely to convince others, and much more likely to lead to interesting (a.k.a. unpredictable) responses. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

matz1 8y ago

Good, I guess as someone who have no plan to have kids, it makes me more attractive to employer since they don't have to wory of paying me leave.

zimablue 8y ago
Except that you have no way of proving that and it would be illegal for them to ask. What it actually does is leave you do the work/pay taxes for your colleagues reproduction holiday.
- renjimen 8y ago
  "Reproduction holiday". I can only assume you have never spent time around babies and small children. Holiday usually is the last word that springs to mind.
  - lovich 8y ago
    The guy thinks the one month is a generous amount of time to give a woman to recover from childbirth while taking of a baby at the same time. He seems adamant that people only take time off to relax and there's zero benefit to the child to having parents around. The arguments hes posting might hold more sway if he based them on the reality of having a child at all
    - renjimen 8y ago
      Sounds like he just wants people to stop having kids at all. Like our society wouldn't collapse within a generation if we didn't. Somehow it's an individual's responsibility to maintain the future workforce and the rest of society in no way benefits.

facistsSuck 8y ago

How about people are allowed to choose what works best for them and their families?

alkonaut 8y ago

Don’t enforce it. Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. Next make part of the parental leave shared between parents be allocated to the father. Now if they don’t use it they will lose a benefit they already paid taxes for. The last and most important step is to keep this system in place for a generation or more, after which any parent not doing a fair chunk of the parental leave will be considered a bad parent by their peers.

michaelt 8y ago
Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. I guess it'd be good for small businesses, but I'm not sure how I'd feel about paying $40,000,000 a year to Larry Ellison while he was on parental leave.
- zimablue 8y ago
  Just cap it, if you make more than 100k you don't really need it anyway.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    Yes. Cap for where I am (Sweden) is around the pay of a teacher, and the pay during the leave is 80% of that. This means I as a software dev is paid around 50% of my salary during the leave. Some employers fill this in up to e.g 80 or 90% as a benefit.
- lagadu 8y ago
  On our side of the pond you only get paid the corresponding of your full salary based on what you discount for social security. In your example, if he's getting 40m a year, then he's also paying the corresponding social security for a 40m/y income.

barrkel 8y ago

We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate, or live under fascist governments, or worse. Much of the gains of two-income parents goes into house prices to be closer to good schools - i.e. zero sum competition, while company incentives are to encourage people not to have children, or defer children until too late to maintain population, and essentially stopping the next generation of employees from being born. And then you mix migration driven by climate change into the mix, and it's very easy for populist politicians to whip up narratives of being overrun, not least because on a historical scale it's true (and of course it's always been true, everywhere has always been in the state of being overrun, with ebbs and flows). The dynamics here aren't good and it's hard to see how they're going to change any time soon, short of a crisis.

mc32 8y ago
>We western economies have to figure this out or we'll gradually depopulate Except for Japan (probably China when it comes to it), most will import labor. Globalization (in terms of corporations) isn't just about taking jobs overseas it's also about brining people from overseas in (in the US H1Bs for professionals, for example).
john_moscow 8y ago
>And then you mix migration driven by climate change Do you seriously believe the migration is driven by climate change, not by the difference in life quality driven by political/cultural differences?
- zimablue 8y ago
  Water crisis contributes to Syria/ISIS contributes to migration is one where I think the cause-effect is quite clear, I could be wrong.
- lukeschlather 8y ago
  Do you seriously believe that climate change isn't a factor? One need look no further than the Maldives for an extreme example, but there are little examples all over. Obviously people migrate for lots of different reasons, but climate change is becoming a serious one for a lot of people.

pmiller2 8y ago

I don’t think this is legal. Title VII prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, so, if women are not also forced to take such leave, how can men be?

Broken_Hippo 8y ago
Ok. So make sure women are forced to take some time off as well.

brighteyes 8y ago

It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach. One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies. Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further disadvantaging couples from having children. Overall, it's an interesting idea, and definitely worth discussing.

was_boring 8y ago
Arguably, decreasing human kind's birthrate is a net positive. Even in the absence of that, being a dad, and knowing many dads, we've already made the choice to "disadvantage" ourselves -- and wish we could do it more. What stops us is the fact that we would lose our jobs which disadvantages our kids. So I say bring on mandatory leave! The vast majority will be much happier.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  One important tangent. There's a very significant nuance to birthrates you're not considering when it comes to reducing birthrates. Most of everybody knows birth rates in the developed world are decreasing, compared to the developing world. But what many do not know is that this sort of pattern holds true even within developed nations themselves. For instance in the US people who earn < $10,000 per year have 50% more children than those who earn $200k per year. [1] The slope of the inverse relationship between income and fertility is surprisingly and disconcertingly smooth. Think about what this means. The things that correlate strongly with fertility are: low income, low education, high religiosity. If you look at the pool of all children being born they're going to end up ever more disproportionately in low income, low education, highly religious households over higher income secular households in developed nations. I used to feel similarly to you, but in considering this the very people 'responsibly' choosing not to have children are the exact people that should be reproducing to no end if we want a better tomorrow for everybody. And this is without even considering genetic factors. Responsible fertility is, paradoxically, anything but responsible for those who would have the wherewithal to consider such things in the first place. [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

JackC 8y ago

I took 12 weeks of paternity leave after my wife went back to work, and definitely recommend it if you can swing it. Partly just that spending time with a kid small enough to nap inside your hoodie is worth doing -- but honestly I'm not cut out to be a stay-at-home parent and that's not why I'm a fan of paternity leave. More that it helped so much with setting us up for parenting together. One reason is that it's hard to understand just how much work it is if you haven't done it on your own for long stretches, and it helps for both partners to know that both partners know how hard it is and have taken a turn at it. Another is the self-reinforcing competence thing -- if one partner always packs for going out, say, then the other partner is likely to take longer and do a worse job when they try packing, so it's easier for everyone if they don't, and you end up thinking only one person is good at parenting. To some extent it's fine to specialize, but having to do everything during the day on my own for a few months made it really clear that both of us can be good at any given thing if need be. One thing I was surprised by (but shouldn't have been) is just how much wealth you're showing off by taking paternity leave. Telling people you're taking 12 weeks of paternity leave in America is basically telling them you have plenty of money and a job you can afford to walk away from, which pretty much crosses the line into boasting about things you shouldn't boast about. I ended up playing it down more than I expected, which kind of sucks, since it's an awesome thing that more folks should be able to do.

damagednoob 8y ago

I'm in favour of a set amount of parental leave that can be shared between spouses in whatever ratio they choose. I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing. Example: You and your husband would like to breastfeed your baby for the first 6 months but you are unable to express? Too bad, your husband has to take paternity leave and you will have to go back to work. From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth that is nurtured and strengthened through breastfeeding. I would vehemently oppose the state enforcing any interruption in my child's wellbeing as we see fit as parents.

matt4077 8y ago
> From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth That's not "experience", it's just the 1950's dogma on the role of men and women dressed up in think-of-the-children. And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence, or men could choose a period after weaning for their leave.
- damagednoob 8y ago
  I'm not thinking-of-the-children, I'm thinking-of-my-children. I don't care how other parents choose to allocate their parental leave. If they want it to be more equitable, then more power to them. And it's not dogma it's just a biological fact that men can't breastfeed and thus women spend more time with the child. There is a snowball effect to this that makes the connection stronger which seems to be pretty self-evident. > And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence Did you understand the point about not being able to express? If the mother can't express (which many find too painful or just can't) how are the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding supposed to be delivered to the child?
michaelt 8y ago
I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing. There are loads of situations where being deprived of choices is a good thing. Consider the prisoners' dilemma [1], where the global optimum is for neither side to defect, but the Nash equilibrium is for both sides to defect. If both sides could be deprived of the choice to defect, both would enjoy a better outcome. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

p2t2p 8y ago

I like how left response is forcing people at the point of a gun when people’s behaviour doesn’t fit into the ideology. If only I’ve seen it somewhere... ah, in the country I was born - Soviet Union.

aghaghagh 8y ago

“And the trees were all kept equal.. by hatchet, axe, and saw.”

stcredzero 8y ago

Make men stay at home for paternity leave? I have a coworker fighting for the ability to stay at home for parental leave.

gumby 8y ago
If you read the article you see why: men who take it are liable to face consequences ("what, you are so unimportant that the company can do with out you?") that clearly also affect women. The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing.
- orangecat 8y ago
  The article discusses that if you make it mandatory you get the company culture to adapt that parental leave should not be a career-affecting thing. It will never not affect your career. Even if you work for a wonderfully enlightened company that is happy to have you take six months off at full pay, the people who are continuing to work in that time are going to be gaining experience and increasing their skills, and will have a better shot at raises and promotions.
- chongli 8y ago
  Or you end up with companies that discriminate against parents of either sex. Then birth rates plummet even more and companies of the future struggle to find skilled workers.

gaius 8y ago

There should be a system that every n years you get a 6-month paid sabbatical that can be used for any purpose - studying, traveling, having a kid, anything. Because consider two women, one who wants kids and one who doesn’t. Why should woman 2 be disadvantaged? Isn’t that the exact opposite of equality?

gumby 8y ago
The point is that none should be disadvantaged.
- gaius 8y ago
  Exactly. So decouple the time off from the reproduction.
  - gumby 8y ago
    Except that the amount for this special case far outweighs the amount typical for PTO.
    - gaius 8y ago
      I’m proposing to up the PTO for any person for any purpose to match. Then everything is equal regardless of reproductive choices.
zimablue 8y ago
That's actually a pretty clever idea, nice.
paulryanrogers 8y ago
Doesn't this encourage terminating employees before that N year, unless they are absolutely essential?
- gaius 8y ago
  Well it’s already illegal to sack a woman immediately that she announces she’s pregnant, so I guess this would come under the same thing. For both men and women obv.

itry2develop 8y ago

These days when someone says, " Let's force someone to...", its usually a stupid idea.

zimablue 8y ago

Can we stop linking and upvoting these article on HN, I've seen several in the last few months. I don't see a clear link to hacker culture, if anything it's less relevant to developers as we often have some form of flexible working already. The link I can see is that it's part of the gender culture war that has somehow become focussed on SV.

gumby 8y ago
> I don't see a clear link to hacker culture It's good advice for how to run my company.
- zimablue 8y ago
  But it's not about that, it's about a proposed law. Anything to do with how to run companies isn't hacker culture, we don't spam posts about the best offshore tax arrangements and the advantages of different board structures. Company stuff is mostly to do with startups and this practise is both less relevant to and less favoured by startups.
  - lovich 8y ago
    It's a proposed change to how to run a company, it's not someone's rant about how someone didn't call them xer and how that person is a Nazi. Your opposition to even seeing this post because it includes gender seems like more of a culture war artifact than the post itself
    - zimablue 8y ago
      As I said, we generally don't post company minutae unless there's a link to tech or startups. It's not opposition to seeing the post, it's opposition to the general trend of putting gender culture war articles otherwise disconnected to hacker news on the forum because gender activists chose to make SV a battleground. It's not culture war to be bored of the culture war.
      - 8y ago

colllectorof 8y ago

>What’s needed now is action. Why not start with mandatory paternity leave? This is called politician's syllogism. 1. We must do something 2. This is something 3. Therefore, we must do this. It's a logical fallacy.

chriskanan 8y ago

In academia, some studies have shown than mandatory paternity leave may not close gaps in productivity: The authors compared promotion rates before and after these gender-neutral parental policies were adopted, relative to trends in comparable institutions that did not alter their policies, while also accounting for an array of influences, like where each economist was trained. They found that men who took parental leave used the extra year to publish their research, amassing impressive publication records. But there was no parallel rise in the output of female economists. From: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension-policies-that-put-women-at-a-disadvantage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/tenure-extension...

erokar 8y ago

In Norway mother and father each have 15 weeks paid leave from work after childbirth, e.i. 30 weeks total. If the father chooses not not use his paid leave it cannot normally be transferred to the mother.

rukittenme 8y ago

I'm surprised this has had such a good reception. Hobbling men in the name of equality is just bizarre. It's mixture of "Hansel and Gretel" and "Harrison Bergeron". Instead of weights just fatten them up with sweets. I didn't push a human being out from between my legs. Because of that I'm capable of working. I would like to be useful to my family. Working is one way I can do that. If I work while my wife is on leave and the gender pay gap is worsened. I don't care. If my wife stays home to recover from her ordeal and the gender wage gap is worsened. She doesn't care. The gender wage gap is so abstract and cynical at this point. It is beyond meaning. People aren't allow to live their lives the way they see fit because of some stupid number. Shocking I know but there is no such thing as the "average woman". If her wage is different from the "average man" it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits.

sheepmullet 8y ago
> it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits. But who cares about individual women and what they want? We want the top level statistics to be equal! /s
lovich 8y ago
It's not leave to just fuck off and do nothing. Taking care of a baby is an incredibly demanding task which is why most human societies we're built around having multiple generations of family, or other members of your tribe, helping with childcare. Foisting all of that onto a mother without any assistance is a relatively new thing in human history. If you took parental leave, most people would expect to be an actual parent to the child. Beyond all of that, this change isn't about what the right level of child care is. It's about the fact that managers and companies discount women workers of child bearing age to a degree that they do not for men, because if a couple is having a child the woman is going to have to take some amount of time off. The suggestion from this article would be like adding an interface of IParent over the male and female classes, and having the employers make hiring/firing/promotion decisions based off of the interface rather than the concrete class. If you don't do this the two groups of people, men and women, will be treated differently based on the circumstances of their birth. As a culture we've made a value judgement that this sort of discrimination is a bad thing, so why would we not mitigate it?

paulus_magnus2 8y ago

Let's stop discriminating against people who have a family or other things to do except work. Start by enforcing 40 hour work week and make overtime paid 150%. Employers prefer frugal workaholics with no obligations but these individuals impose externality on "normal people". We're rich enough, no need working above 8h/day. I'd go all the way and make it illegal to provide work without compensation (internships, 80h work weeks etc). And I'd to try limit oversupply of labour by further limiting standard workweek below 40h.

pimmen 8y ago
Those benefits have been in Sweden for decades.

andrewclunn 8y ago

Is there mandatory maternity leave? No. Women want their freebees. So now of course forcibly keeping men from working more MUST be done. Busy body nonsense.

oh_sigh 8y ago

How would you enforce men informing their company that they recently became a father?

jonathankoren 8y ago
Do you really think that new fathers aren't going to enroll their child in health insurance, and take advantage of tax deductions?
- chongli 8y ago
  That doesn't apply here in Canada. If I were a new father in the US, faced with taking a massive pay cut for forced paternity leave, I'd pick up the insurance for my child at retail. Heck, in high pressure firms where anyone taking parental leave is inviting career stagnation or termination (fully justified by having HR set up a paper trail of unsatisfactory performance evaluations), you'd be downright crazy to disclose the birth of your child.
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    1) We're talking about paid leave. 2) Historically, no one bought insurance on the individual market. It's been absurdly expensive. That was why the individual mandate under Obamacare is/was important. It forced healthy people to buy insurance, and thus drive down the price. 3) It's illegal discriminate based on parental status.

defen 8y ago

How exactly would this be enforced? If a man doesn't disclose that his partner is pregnant, is he going to be fired? I don't see how it could be legal to do so. How is a partner's / spouse's medical condition any business of an employer?

zimablue 8y ago
It gets better, what if you're not with the mother. What if it was a one night stand, or you donated sperm to her as a single parent. What if you're not with her, she told you she was on the pill and it wasn't true. What if you're in a non binary relationship (2 fathers?). What if you adopt a young child.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  Anyone that would not have paternal rights when the child is born obviously wouldn't get paternal leave. That covers things like sperm donors, some one night stands, and so on. One night stand? This depends if she knows it was you. If she does, the responsible thing would be to notify you that she was pregnant as a result of that. It gives you time to prepare to help. If you aren't with the mother, it really would depend on the relationship. Can you not help the mother out by going to the store? Delay your paternity leave until she starts working and keep your child while the mother is at work? Take the child to the doctor and other such things? People deal with this sort of thing with divorce, so I fail to see how this is different. Again, if you wouldnt get parental rights, however, you'd not have paternity benefits. I suspect they'd handle non binary relationships as they are handled now. If the woman doesn't choose one as a father and the man steps forward and claims the child, they might request a dna test. They already handle such things in courts at the time. The other option is for neither man to be on the birth certificate, nulling their paternity rights... and thus their paternity leave. Most places have leave for adoption, even if it isn't a young child. I fail to see how this would change at all. It would simply make sure the leave would be for both parents.
- lagadu 8y ago
  Just look across the pond, many countries solved that over here and we managed to survive.

greggeter 8y ago

How about stay out of my life, and I'll stay out of yours?

ueiemdjj74 8y ago

ITT, liberals and higher middle class people and socialists discussing why paternity leave should be mandatory. Guess what, I don't want to pay for your fuck trophy. Some cucks are discussing make it taxed. Why not manage existing money efficiently first? Typical liberals.

WorshipChildren 8y ago

Parental leave of any kind is discrimination against workers who can't have or don't want children. Know what isn't discrimination? A parent using PTO that everyone gets to care for their kids. Don't have enough? Can't do without parental leave? Why the heck are you having kids?!" Jesus. Christ. FORCING people to take parental leave is insanity.

curtis 8y ago

We're thinking about the problem all wrong. Clearly the way to close the wage gap is to get women to stop having kids. Of course I'm not serious, but then I personally don't care if there is a wage gap as long as it is not being caused by workplace discrimination against women. If instead it's the case that the wage gap is caused by women (disproportionately to men) making an informed choice to de-prioritize work in order to prioritize childcare, then I am totally alright with that. Maybe the impact of the wage gap is too big even if it's caused by women making informed choices. We could choose to offset it directly, for example by subsidizing children -- kind of like a basic income just for kids. By doing it that way we could make the system largely agnostic about whether it's a father or a mother deciding to prioritize childcare over work in any particular case.

larrydag 8y ago
While not huge the US tax system has a child tax credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/five-things-to-know-about-the-child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/five-things-to-know-about-the-c...
- dgudkov 8y ago
  >We could choose to offset it directly, for example by subsidizing children -- kind of like a basic income just for kids. Unfortunately, too many people thinking "why should I pay for raising someone else's kids?".
  - GW150914 8y ago
    We already do pay to help raise other poeple’s kids through a variety of taxes, including public schools via property tax. This would be more of a subsidy for reproducing, rather than helping to raise them. I think it’s only rational for a community to invest in good outcomes for children, because the alternatives are not only undesireable and immoral, but more expensive. Actually subsidizing having children though, rather than investing in existing children isn’t something quite so simple. If you want to have children and are willing to make the associated sacrifices, good for you, it entire ask me to mitigate those sacrifices when I’ve chosen to not have children. I’m still happy to pay my taxes and invest thereby in their education and health, but propping up your career? No.

beaner 8y ago

If such discrimination exists (it probably does), this will just change the bias to be against anyone who is part of a young, potentially child-bearing couple. It also seems utterly against my rights as a human, and unconstitutional.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago

I wrote this as a response to another comment, but I think it deserves a top level comment. > it's clear where the wage gap comes from: childcare, childcare, childcare. I've decided recently, just now actually: I don't buy this. Why would an employer discount a woman's value just because she may, at some point, take time off to care for a child? Men also leave jobs. Shouldn't employers discount men's value because they may, at some point, leave?

tonyarkles 8y ago
I’m answering your question, but not accepting the premise that childcare isn’t the major cause. Also, I’m coming at this from a Canadian perspective, where we have paid maternity/paternity via the Employment Insurance system. Despite it being available to both parents, anecdotally it is predominantly use by the mother, although fathers do sometimes use it (and it’s shared, so both can use it at the same time, eg when the child first come home). While the employer doesn’t pay for the employee while they are on leave, the employer is responsible for ensuring that their job is materially still there when they come back. Someone can’t go on mat/pat leave and come back to discover that they’re no longer a software manager but rather a janitor. In the meantime, you have to find someone to replace them. If you have two candidates, male and female, both are likely to have a number of risk factors: they’ll leave, they’ll seek raises, etc. But, to address your question, the woman also has some probability of having a child and taking mat leave. All other things equal (probability of other risks), the woman will likely have a higher overall risk, since she’s more likely to take mat leave. That all being said, you’re not “allowed” to discriminate based on that. And, as a man, I’ve never experienced sexual discrimination as far as salary goes. But there’s an answer to your question as to why childcare could be the primary factor.