4 ms·

The downside of long paid leave, apparently, is that women are more likely to become full-time parents rather than re-enter the workforce. Is it fair to say tha

The downside of long paid leave, apparently, is that women are more likely to become full-time parents rather than re-enter the workforce. Is it fair to say that this makes long paid leave a bad thing? It seems wrong for me to consider a woman's life choices bad one way or another (whether they choose to re-enter the workforce or not). An organization is cutting benefits to try socially engineer a certain demographic outcome. I'm not sure if that action is something to be commended.

partiallypro 8y ago
Yes, it is...because the company is subsidizing your child and gaining nothing from it at all. You could work somewhere for a year, take a year off, then quit. The company just lost tons of money and output. That's not sustainable for the company.
- izacus 8y ago
  How can a company subsidise a worker? That's just pay. (Also here in Europe it's standard that the pay for parental leave is covered from the social budget making financial strain on companies marginal.)
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    Subsidize is not a government only term. Paying someone for nothing is subsidizing them. If government picked up the tab, it would be different...but in the case of the Gates Foundation that is not happening.
    - mattkrause 8y ago
      You could think of this as deferred compensation, in that policies like this make the Gates Foundation a more attractive employer, at no additional present* cost to them. [*] Or possibly future, if the employee does not have any more children.
      - partiallypro 8y ago
        Maybe if you forced the employee to sign a contract where they had to work there for X amount of years, which is something the Armed Forces do. But then enforcing that, and hiring lawyers to claw back money through the courts would be extensive and just bad press.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Maybe we're not on the same page here. Definitely, the company cutting paid child leave from a year to 6 months is beneficial to the company. I disagree, though, that this is beneficial to the workers or society as a whole because this benefits cut results in more women working. Such a justification necessarily implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce, and I can't bring myself to agree with that premise.
  - kelnos 8y ago
    > implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce For an individual, that might be the case. A mother who feels incentivized to drop out of the workforce due to childcare might later in life regret not having a career. A better balance of incentives that keeps someone working while ensuring childcare costs are taken care of (or at least subsidized) might make for a better outcome. For society, well... who knows. You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty. Certainly some amount of full-time parenting is great (some would say essential) for a kid, and lack of it can cause early development issues, but if -- just making up numbers here -- after 9 months, having a full-time parent only makes things 10% better for a kid vs. having a part-time parent and part-time third-party childcare, maybe that's okay?
    - manfredo 8y ago
      > You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty I don't really believe either with any degree of certainty. What I do believe, though, is that parents should be empowered and equipped to make that choice for themselves. Which I why I don't see the positive impact in a company putting more financial pressure on couples to pick one of those choices is a good thing.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
  So is vacation or sick leave a subsidy as well?
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    In some cases, it is depending on the companies policy. If you get vacation accrued immediately instead of "earned hours" then yes. Subsidizing just means financially supporting. Companies subsidize a lot of things for workers, from college tuition, healthcare to special credit rates (at least at some insurance/financial firms that lend to their own workers.)
  - adventured 8y ago
    Of course, there are a vast array of subsidies across employment in most every system. The issue is duration and reasonability of a given approach, which is open to a fair debate. Workers that are frequently sick are likely to be subsidized by other workers that are rarely sick. I'm not referring to pay, rather, to output. That's a form of subsidy. Does that mean there should be no sick pay and workers should come in sick? Of course not. What is the alternative to vacation being a subsidy? A god given right? That's absurd. It's plainly a subsidy and one that is widely supported and liked. Universal healthcare is a subsidy as well. Overwhelmingly the healthy subsidize the sick. The poor are subsidized by everyone else. It's nearly universally accepted as an approach to healthcare and yet it's definitely a system of subsidy. Subsidy is not inherently evil. Civil society is filled with all sorts of contracts between peoples, including subsidies between classes and people in different situations.
  - x220 8y ago
    If the company is forced to provide it, it's a subsidy. If they provide it contractually, it's an employment benefit.
- paganel 8y ago
  > That's not sustainable for the company. It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation. But for a multinational corporation the aging of both their consumers and especially of their workers is on the other hand pretty unsustainable. Just look at where Japan was in the late 1980s and where it is now, with no redress in sight.
  - x220 8y ago
    >It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation So 95% of corporations?
    - paganel 8y ago
      Google and Amazon are already more than 20-years old, Facebook is approaching 15, I guess, while Apple and MS are 40-ish. And these are technology corporations that are supposed to have a shorter shelf-life compared to big companies active in other areas of the economy. So corporations/big companies are here mostly to stay, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders that their consumer base doesn't physically disappear from under them in another 20 years.
      - x220 8y ago
        >Google and Amazon ..., Apple and Amazon Those are outliers and are not useful to talk about when discussing the economy as a whole.
        kelnos 8y ago
        It's a bit disingenuous to toss out a hand-wavy 95% statistic and then similarly hand-wave away rebuttals.
mikepurvis 8y ago
Offering cash in lieu seems like a pretty decent compromise. Like, if you're going to stay home for good at the end of it anyway, you can just quit (or go onto unpaid leave) at the six month mark and you benefit from having been paid up until that point. And if you want to go back, you have the extra assistance with infant childcare costs.
rayiner 8y ago
Paying parents to take leave is a form of social engineering to begin with. Once you're already engaged in social engineering, it's important to consider the impacts that alternative social engineering policies will have. "Life choices," moreover, don't happen in isolation. They happen within a broader social context. My wife and I basically have the same job--we're attorneys of similar seniority at corporate law firms. Over the years, she has faced so many more headwinds related to parenting than me. People stop my wife on the street to remark about how our 5 month old is dressed (warmly enough, etc.). I could stroll him down the street in nothing but a diaper in 40 degree weather and people would either offer to help or tell me how I'm such a good dad for not immediately ditching my family when he was born. (I'm joking but only a little bit.) (One of the neat things about "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is that it shows how it was socially acceptable for rich people in the 1950s-1960s to completely delegate parenting. In 1965, 70% of kids were not breastfed even in the hospital. It's much more socially acceptable for women to work these days, but in some respects the expectations for "mothering" are much higher. Decisions about whether to return to work are made in the context of these differential social expectations.)
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Speaking as a full-time father of a 2-year-old, don’t worry, people also feel free to question fathers’ parenting on a daily basis. (In particular, they are shocked that we often walk around town barefoot, but plenty of other random stuff draws busybody commentary.) I imagine it is worse for women in some places, but plenty of people on the street are eager to share their opinions with parents in general. Not to mention those who just stick to frowning and shaking their heads without saying anything. Back when he was a few months old, I was told on a regular basis by strangers that I was an ‘amazing’ father just for carrying him around, which is certainly something that mothers seldom encounter. > One of the neat things about "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is that it shows how it was socially acceptable for rich people in the 1950s-1960s to completely delegate parenting Judging from some of the raised-by-nannies-then-prep-school people I went to college with, this sometimes has mediocre results. YMMV.
  - rayiner 8y ago
CoolGuySteve 8y ago
I agree with you but to play devil's advocate, the women in the US who are most likely to get paid leave are in highly skilled salaried positions (which is also abhorrent in its own way). While it's definitely a good thing to have parents spend as much time as possible with their family, the economy would be better served by having these parents back in the workforce while a lower-skilled person takes care of the children during the day. I think the best way to have your cake and eat it too, in terms of overall economic productivity and parent-child bonding, is to subsidize childcare so that the economic incentive to stay home is removed. The choice to stay home would only be made with the consideration of the child in mind. Here in New York for example, we pay $25k on daycare per child. Depending on the parent's individual salaries, the gains in income vs childcare expenses becomes marginal after 2-4 children.
- kelnos 8y ago
  > the gains in income vs childcare expenses becomes marginal after 2-4 children That's also a good point to make in a parent's calculation as to whether or not going back to work makes sense. A member of my extended family decided she wouldn't go back to work for a while after giving birth (going on 3 years now), because a public school teacher's salary, minus childcare costs (while still a positive number), wasn't worth the extra hassle of dealing with work+childcare logistics. And that's just with one kid.
Thlom 8y ago
Seems unlikely. Europe have a higher labour force participation among women than the US, with paid parental leave (for both men and women).
e12e 8y ago
The hand-wavy allusion to "research" seems to be ending at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18702 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18702 Which shows at least for Norway and Sweden women participation was on the increase for the study. So maybe it's not the leave of 9+ months that's the problem, but that in combination with other factors? A blanket statement that one year is too long, sounds like bullshit - when the listener is in one of the Scandinavian countries, anyway.

partiallypro 8y ago

Yes, it is...because the company is subsidizing your child and gaining nothing from it at all. You could work somewhere for a year, take a year off, then quit. The company just lost tons of money and output. That's not sustainable for the company.

izacus 8y ago
How can a company subsidise a worker? That's just pay. (Also here in Europe it's standard that the pay for parental leave is covered from the social budget making financial strain on companies marginal.)
- partiallypro 8y ago
  Subsidize is not a government only term. Paying someone for nothing is subsidizing them. If government picked up the tab, it would be different...but in the case of the Gates Foundation that is not happening.
  - mattkrause 8y ago
    You could think of this as deferred compensation, in that policies like this make the Gates Foundation a more attractive employer, at no additional present* cost to them. [*] Or possibly future, if the employee does not have any more children.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      Maybe if you forced the employee to sign a contract where they had to work there for X amount of years, which is something the Armed Forces do. But then enforcing that, and hiring lawyers to claw back money through the courts would be extensive and just bad press.
manfredo 8y ago
Maybe we're not on the same page here. Definitely, the company cutting paid child leave from a year to 6 months is beneficial to the company. I disagree, though, that this is beneficial to the workers or society as a whole because this benefits cut results in more women working. Such a justification necessarily implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce, and I can't bring myself to agree with that premise.
- kelnos 8y ago
  > implies that it's worse for a woman to be a full time parent than to be part of the workforce For an individual, that might be the case. A mother who feels incentivized to drop out of the workforce due to childcare might later in life regret not having a career. A better balance of incentives that keeps someone working while ensuring childcare costs are taken care of (or at least subsidized) might make for a better outcome. For society, well... who knows. You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty. Certainly some amount of full-time parenting is great (some would say essential) for a kid, and lack of it can cause early development issues, but if -- just making up numbers here -- after 9 months, having a full-time parent only makes things 10% better for a kid vs. having a part-time parent and part-time third-party childcare, maybe that's okay?
  - manfredo 8y ago
    > You may believe that it's better for the kid to have a full-time parent in the home, but I don't think that's a settled argument with any degree of certainty I don't really believe either with any degree of certainty. What I do believe, though, is that parents should be empowered and equipped to make that choice for themselves. Which I why I don't see the positive impact in a company putting more financial pressure on couples to pick one of those choices is a good thing.
SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
So is vacation or sick leave a subsidy as well?
- partiallypro 8y ago
  In some cases, it is depending on the companies policy. If you get vacation accrued immediately instead of "earned hours" then yes. Subsidizing just means financially supporting. Companies subsidize a lot of things for workers, from college tuition, healthcare to special credit rates (at least at some insurance/financial firms that lend to their own workers.)
- adventured 8y ago
  Of course, there are a vast array of subsidies across employment in most every system. The issue is duration and reasonability of a given approach, which is open to a fair debate. Workers that are frequently sick are likely to be subsidized by other workers that are rarely sick. I'm not referring to pay, rather, to output. That's a form of subsidy. Does that mean there should be no sick pay and workers should come in sick? Of course not. What is the alternative to vacation being a subsidy? A god given right? That's absurd. It's plainly a subsidy and one that is widely supported and liked. Universal healthcare is a subsidy as well. Overwhelmingly the healthy subsidize the sick. The poor are subsidized by everyone else. It's nearly universally accepted as an approach to healthcare and yet it's definitely a system of subsidy. Subsidy is not inherently evil. Civil society is filled with all sorts of contracts between peoples, including subsidies between classes and people in different situations.
- x220 8y ago
  If the company is forced to provide it, it's a subsidy. If they provide it contractually, it's an employment benefit.
paganel 8y ago
> That's not sustainable for the company. It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation. But for a multinational corporation the aging of both their consumers and especially of their workers is on the other hand pretty unsustainable. Just look at where Japan was in the late 1980s and where it is now, with no redress in sight.
- x220 8y ago
  >It's not sustainable for a company that doesn't intend to stay in business for more than a generation So 95% of corporations?
  - paganel 8y ago
    Google and Amazon are already more than 20-years old, Facebook is approaching 15, I guess, while Apple and MS are 40-ish. And these are technology corporations that are supposed to have a shorter shelf-life compared to big companies active in other areas of the economy. So corporations/big companies are here mostly to stay, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders that their consumer base doesn't physically disappear from under them in another 20 years.
    - x220 8y ago
      >Google and Amazon ..., Apple and Amazon Those are outliers and are not useful to talk about when discussing the economy as a whole.
      - kelnos 8y ago
        It's a bit disingenuous to toss out a hand-wavy 95% statistic and then similarly hand-wave away rebuttals.

mikepurvis 8y ago

Offering cash in lieu seems like a pretty decent compromise. Like, if you're going to stay home for good at the end of it anyway, you can just quit (or go onto unpaid leave) at the six month mark and you benefit from having been paid up until that point. And if you want to go back, you have the extra assistance with infant childcare costs.

rayiner 8y ago

Paying parents to take leave is a form of social engineering to begin with. Once you're already engaged in social engineering, it's important to consider the impacts that alternative social engineering policies will have. "Life choices," moreover, don't happen in isolation. They happen within a broader social context. My wife and I basically have the same job--we're attorneys of similar seniority at corporate law firms. Over the years, she has faced so many more headwinds related to parenting than me. People stop my wife on the street to remark about how our 5 month old is dressed (warmly enough, etc.). I could stroll him down the street in nothing but a diaper in 40 degree weather and people would either offer to help or tell me how I'm such a good dad for not immediately ditching my family when he was born. (I'm joking but only a little bit.) (One of the neat things about "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is that it shows how it was socially acceptable for rich people in the 1950s-1960s to completely delegate parenting. In 1965, 70% of kids were not breastfed even in the hospital. It's much more socially acceptable for women to work these days, but in some respects the expectations for "mothering" are much higher. Decisions about whether to return to work are made in the context of these differential social expectations.)

jacobolus 8y ago
Speaking as a full-time father of a 2-year-old, don’t worry, people also feel free to question fathers’ parenting on a daily basis. (In particular, they are shocked that we often walk around town barefoot, but plenty of other random stuff draws busybody commentary.) I imagine it is worse for women in some places, but plenty of people on the street are eager to share their opinions with parents in general. Not to mention those who just stick to frowning and shaking their heads without saying anything. Back when he was a few months old, I was told on a regular basis by strangers that I was an ‘amazing’ father just for carrying him around, which is certainly something that mothers seldom encounter. > One of the neat things about "Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" is that it shows how it was socially acceptable for rich people in the 1950s-1960s to completely delegate parenting Judging from some of the raised-by-nannies-then-prep-school people I went to college with, this sometimes has mediocre results. YMMV.
- rayiner 8y ago

CoolGuySteve 8y ago

I agree with you but to play devil's advocate, the women in the US who are most likely to get paid leave are in highly skilled salaried positions (which is also abhorrent in its own way). While it's definitely a good thing to have parents spend as much time as possible with their family, the economy would be better served by having these parents back in the workforce while a lower-skilled person takes care of the children during the day. I think the best way to have your cake and eat it too, in terms of overall economic productivity and parent-child bonding, is to subsidize childcare so that the economic incentive to stay home is removed. The choice to stay home would only be made with the consideration of the child in mind. Here in New York for example, we pay $25k on daycare per child. Depending on the parent's individual salaries, the gains in income vs childcare expenses becomes marginal after 2-4 children.

kelnos 8y ago
> the gains in income vs childcare expenses becomes marginal after 2-4 children That's also a good point to make in a parent's calculation as to whether or not going back to work makes sense. A member of my extended family decided she wouldn't go back to work for a while after giving birth (going on 3 years now), because a public school teacher's salary, minus childcare costs (while still a positive number), wasn't worth the extra hassle of dealing with work+childcare logistics. And that's just with one kid.

Thlom 8y ago

Seems unlikely. Europe have a higher labour force participation among women than the US, with paid parental leave (for both men and women).

e12e 8y ago

The hand-wavy allusion to "research" seems to be ending at: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18702 https://www.nber.org/papers/w18702 Which shows at least for Norway and Sweden women participation was on the increase for the study. So maybe it's not the leave of 9+ months that's the problem, but that in combination with other factors? A blanket statement that one year is too long, sounds like bullshit - when the listener is in one of the Scandinavian countries, anyway.