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Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so tha
Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization), or you hire a temporary employee explicitly on a 1 year "parental leave" contract.
The labour market is quite good, and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all positions (CFO, specialists included). Often, a good temp ends up getting another position at the same company after doing the 1-year contract. There is also a small cottage industry of successful individuals who basically take such jobs.
Maybe hard to accept for some, but the world doesn't end when people go on leave to have kids.
It also turns out that most people (that I know) are quite happy to buy into this particular social contract. There is a tacit understanding that you might have to pick up the slack a bit for someone else, but one day you might need the same in return - borrowing against the future is another way to think about it.
Source: Canadian, have worked in organizations and involved in hiring policies where this is successful.
It's surely doable in big organizations but small businesses it's an overwhelming cost even if the government pays the salary of the worker on a leave (the only way it can really work).
Maybe the answer to that problem is that really important employees who make a lot of money shouldn't be hired as normal workers but as contractors. Something like: if you get 3x more average salary then you are important but you only get paid if you work and standard protections don't apply. If you get a normal salary standard protections apply but then we will hopefully be able to find replacement for you at reasonable cost.
It would be nice if I at least don't nee to re-hire you after covering big costs of getting your replacement up to speed.
If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost. If I am hiring a cleaning lady or social media specialist then I won't have problems because I will easily find the replacement on the market and they can be productive from day one.
If you think it's immoral, think again. I have responsibilities towards my family to provide for them. I won't take risk which can ruin my source of income for the sake of someone's children. What is immoral is forcing employers to cover that risk.
"The labour market is quite good," [for employers, terrible for employees] "and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all positions (CFO, specialists included)."
I guess...
This is how it's done w/o having the company in shambles after 2 employees take their parental leave.
Plan in advance, rely on a steady flow of workforce willing to work only for a year.
I can't see any other options a healthy child-mother relation could develop than this.
Of course, todays corporate design needs to be overhauled structurally for this to work, but we have to decide which benefits more for our society.
> Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization), or you hire a temporary employee explicitly on a 1 year "parental leave" contract.
Obviously. But doing this imposes costs on the organization. Those costs scale (possibly non-linearly) with length of leave. The question we have to ask is, what is the amount of time off that balances the interests of the company, the economy, and the parents optimally? The Gates foundation is saying 1 year does not strike a good balance for them, because the organizational costs are simply too high. That's what being said here.
Experience tells me this is also a really good way to test how essential your essential employees really are. If you're fundamentally redundant or your job can be replaced by a 1-year temp people will take note.
>The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization)
Sure, but once one person takes parental leave you're back to being fragile on this one aspect.
>The labour market is quite good, and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all positions (CFO, specialists included).
I heavily disagree here. There are plenty of jobs that basically work because of the unique set of skills that a person brings to the table. It might be possible to manage with other people filling in, but it's often not the same.
>There is a tacit understanding that you might have to pick up the slack a bit for someone else, but one day you might need the same in return - borrowing against the future is another way to think about it.
Except for the people that won't get this benefit, because they won't or can't have kids.
> Sure, but once one person takes parental leave you're back to being fragile on this one aspect.
That's the point! I'm not sure if you're arguing for not taking any action against fragility (since it's going to happen) or arguing for infinite redundancy - there's plenty of room between those 2 extremes. Your argument sounds a lot like "Sure, but once you lose a disk in your array / a node in your HA cluster, you're back to being fragile"
Another consequence that I observed in Canada is that employers have shifted a bit from full-time employees to perpetually renewing contracts. So exactly like that example you gave, the good temp finds another “position” which happens to be a one year contract at the same firm (not necessarily filling in for a leave). This contract gets renewed each year, and the company is not on the hook to “keep the spot open” for a year when the employee has a child. They just don’t renew the contract and hire another contractor. I knew several people in this position. (I believe one actually worked for the federal government, ironically.)
IMO this unintended consequence isn’t often discussed. IIRC it’s also an issue in France, where because it’s nearly impossible to fire someone, you’ll basically never hire full time employees if you can avoid it, especially if they’re young and unproven.
It provides opportunties for others to grow as well. Getting a temp role as cfo can open doors.
> I will either need to hire a temp which is more difficult than to hire for full time position
We're still talking about programmers, right? Because it is way easier to hire a part-time contract programmer, than it is to hire a full-time programmer. If anything, the best devs are often already freelancing/consulting anyway, and would prefer you hire them this way.
> If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost.
So, OTOH, is a sex discrimination lawsuit, especially when you are blatantly guilty.
Also, most Western jurisdictions with paid or even unpaid but job-protected parental leave policies apply them without limitation by gender.
And these days, youth is not essentially to being a parent (even a natural parent, but parental leave policies usually apply to adoptive parents as well.)
>>So, OTOH, is a sex discrimination lawsuit, especially when you are blatantly guilty.
Yeah, lawsuit or my children not being able to afford college. Oh the choices... I think I am taking the lawsuit, especially that it will be very hard to prove anything with just one employee.
>>Also, most Western jurisdictions with paid or even unpaid but job-protected parental leave policies apply them without limitation by gender.
Maybe in theory, if you looks at statistics of what actually happens in most European countries you will see that women take much longer leaves and often several months medicals during pregnancy as well. I mean I live in one and my male friends usually take at most several days while women usually take close to a year if you count medical leave during pregnancy. I know exactly one couple who split the leave equally. It worked for them but it's definitely not usually happens.
> Yeah, lawsuit or my children not being able to afford college.
I don't think you've researched the costs of the kind of lawsuit at issue for your business if you think that it's less than you'd lose by having the employee in the position take a year off on job-protected leave.
Risk = Probability * Consequence
I don't think he (or she!) is saying that the consequence is low, just that the risk of suffering that consequence is low enough to outweigh it.
I'd posit that making public blanket statements about being willing to break the law increases both probability and consequence, and thus expected value.
Which means I don't have high confidence in the risk assessment in the first place, but thankfully it's not my business :)
I am not in US, in my country lawyers don't carry a big stick. In US on the other hand I wouldn't need to be sexist as I don't have to promise parental leaves so that would make things easier. Small businesses don't have to offer that till they are big enough so it makes sense for them.
> In US on the other hand I wouldn't need to be sexist as I don't have to promise parental leaves
The US does, indeed, have mandatory job-protected parental leave. It's much shorter (even in the more generous states) than many European countries and in many cases (i.e., federally, though some states differ) unpaid-only, but it's still a thing.
You are just bullshitting. By your accounting, if your employee quits, or falls ill for a month or two, which would have the same impact as the training period for the maternal leave replacement, your kids would not be able to afford college [1]?
Does your employee Ski? Because ACL tears are damn common, and medical leave for an ACL tear is up to 3 months.
[1] (which if you're really not in the US should be free anyway)
> especially that it will be very hard to prove anything with just one employee.
As long as your real life identity isn't linkable to this comment, that is.
Yeah, lawsuit or my children not being able to afford college
Run your business better. If an employee leaving—something that can already happen at any time due to causes outwith your control—means your children can’t go to college, then your chances of failure are already sky high.
What other laws are you willing to break in order to run your company? Are you fine with tax fraud?
If you're looking for a 3rd programmer, you're looking for somebody who can commit to the short term future of the company with - if you're wise - an explicit guarantee of long term rewards.
Excluding half the population from that search will absolutely ensure that you don't get unlucky hiring a man who, develop schizophrenia (symptoms occur typically in younger males), runs off with your IP, decides he doesn't want to stick the long hours, his wife/girlfriend has a child and he wants a more stable position, can't stand your attitude, or all the other reasons that make people, male and female leave small companies run by people who make bad decisions. In the grand scheme of things that can go horribly wrong for startup companies, female pregnancy is actually the least of your worries.
I have a small business (15) and a lot of my employees are young women in Germany, so I think I understand the situation from different perspectives (young father). You just try to work with it, of course the situation for me would be easier in the US, but since all my competitors have the same problem and my customers have the same problem it is not a competitive problem. It is actually a problem for a company in a certain size, so you try to stay out of this size or grow out of it pretty fast.
But st the end, it’s a value discussion, my business partner took parental and I’m fine with that , it doesn’t make it easier but it’s definitely better for the kids and I don’t value my personal financial success higher than the chances for these kids.
> If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman
Ignoring the fact that this kind of discrimination is flat out illegal, you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent.
Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost". I could get interns to be productive in a day or two. In many fields of work, such as early education, there are standardized accreditations so an employer can basically just pick and choose from a pool of qualified individuals who will be ready-to-work on day 1.
As the other poster said, standard fare in parental leaves is to hire a contractor for a 1 year contract. By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual. A more realistic scenario is your business grew by some amount that now allows you to hire the temp person full time.
>you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent.
But they are much less likely to take this parental leave.
>Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost".
Well, everyone else doesn't get to always run wildly successful small businesses. Most small businesses fail. I imagine that if you yank out a significant portion of their workforce that they'll be even more likely to fail.
>By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual.
Aka your small business shuts its doors, because the market has moved on and you couldn't keep up. Half the businesses fail within the first 5 years. Only a third of businesses survive 10 years.
> But they are much less likely to take this parental leave
If you want to talk about likelihoods, consider that in most companies, the chance that an employee of any gender will leave for a random reason is much higher than someone of any gender taking parental leave. Trying to skirt the law to "optimize" for least parental leaves is kinda like sending a memo to your employees telling them to always run red lights and jaywalk to get to work faster. It's one of those "not even wrong" kinds of things.
> Most small businesses fail
This is a non sequitur. Businesses fail for all sorts of reasons. Your restaurant staff ghosting you, not enough clients, spending stupidly after raising money, etc. If your business fails due to a parental leave of all things, let me tell you, you were probably severely delusional about its viability to begin with.
> Aka your small business shuts its doors
I believe I mentioned a fitting example where this could not be farther from the truth (early education)
But none of the things you mentioned are different between men and women. Parental leave is simply a risk factor on top of what you mentioned.
>If your business fails due to a parental leave of all things, let me tell you, you were probably severely delusional about its viability to begin with.
Let's take an extreme case: a 1 person business. If I, the business owner, take parental leave then my business is pretty much guaranteed to fail. The rate gets lower the more employees and capital you have, because you can mitigate the risk, but many businesses are susceptible to this risk, because they simply don't have the resources to mitigate it. That doesn't really tell you much about the viability of the business. It says much more about the resources the business had available. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth.
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I actually have a friend who runs a restaurant with her husband. It's an _extremely low margins_ business with brutally long hours. She got pregnant and eventually took time off (she went back to China for a few months to get her parents to help with the baby). When she came back a few months later, surprise surprise, the business was still there. Did they have worries? Sure, stress from wait staff turnover, an air conditioner that was too expensive to fix, chairs. But leaving for an extended period of time to decompress from work stress was something her husband supported despite the temp long distance relationship and the extra burden on himself because he knew that would help them cope better in the long term.
Let's be honest, anyone can come up with ridiculous hypothetical situations where "obviously" parental leave is the only evil in the world and must be banished. But at the end of the day, they're just that: hypotheticals with no basis in reality. I've seen businesses succeed and fail and I've seen parental leaves in these businesses. Parental leaves are simply not as deciding of a factor as one might like to fantasize, and anyone who wants to argue against them might want to look at the silver spoons in their own mouths before casting stones at others.
Of course they are less likely to go on leave — they work for a guy who doesn’t hire women in non-disposable roles, because his family will starve if a female professional gets pregnant.
Presumably the female custodians and admins just get purged.
Small business doesn't have "custodians and admins". It has a few people every one of them absolutely crucial for survival.
Have you ever started a company without outside funding? Usually you have some savings, maybe for a few months and a lot of hope. Someone quitting in the middle of that to take care of the child means you won't make it.
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So will someone quitting to get a different job, being hit by a bus, etc.
I have. I put the company in the ground when we couldn’t resolve a dispute and left.
We had our first child at 32. (I took 5 months off as a director level manager when my wife went back to work.) When is a woman deemed safely in old maid status and ok to hire?
When I was in this position as a principal, our biggest threat was good junior tech staff being snatched up by big companies or being lured into a government gig with a great pension plan.
I get the risk/concern, but the Mad Men era attitude projects risk. As a guy, it would give me pause about working for the firm. On top of everything else, you’re missing out on fantastic talent.
This is an unrealistic description of reality.
Most small companies do not actually worry about growth, they worry about staying in business and small things matter.
I think the most blatant scenario involves a code-base where only one engineer knows where the skeletons are buried. Yes it's bad architecture, caused by sustained bad development choices, but it is RAMPANT in our industry. If said engineer gets hit by a bus, or goes on parental leave, the company is fucked. They deserve it, but they are still fucked and they are going to kick and scream whatever excuse they can think of to prevent these scenarios from being legislated into higher frequency.
Sure, and it's good for society for those companies to fail.
That's one thing that I think is missing in many argument about business policy. Many times someone says, with this policy passed, my business will be less productive and might even fail. And we're too scared to say out loud that that's a good thing.
Markets works best when there is accurate and open communication of information, and it's generally very difficult to know how a prospective employer really approaches technical debt (or the equivalent for other disciplines) and business risk. I want to work for the company that's willing to confront past mistakes and not drowning in them, and, if possible, the company that made fewer past mistakes in the first place. This company is also more likely to be successful at delivering the very benefits for which society recognizes companies at all (producing goods and services, creating reliable jobs, advancing the state of knowledge, etc.). So, all other things being equal, it's in society's interest for me to find this company accurately, and with a limited labor pool it is almost certainly in society's interest for there to just be one competent company tackling a problem than two companies, one of which is incompetent.
Businesses failing can hurt a lot of people. Thousands can be laid off, many of whom might not be in an industry where finding a replacement job is easy. Many organizations arguably exist solely to provide jobs regardless of their inefficiencies (in my view the TSA, and to some extent the US military).
Why would you avoid hiring her? It takes 9 months to deliver the baby, plenty of notice to find a replacement. If she just quit you have two weeks notice to find someone. In many ways someone going through that situation is most likely to return and stay long term adding additional value.
Wow. Just wow.
So, in many European countries, fathers and mothers have a right to substantial amounts of parental leave. Like a year or more. In all of these places small businesses exist. In Sweden, with very extensive parental leave [1], there is a large number of start ups. So obviously, empirically, you must be missing something.
Generally speaking, if your employees care about your business (and getting their job back after the leave) they will not take decisions that destroy this business. Some laws will also vary depending on company size, though parental leave is just such an obvious fundamental need and right that I am not aware of a country where it does.
You might not think of yourself as immoral, but your post is definitely sexist, and I find the viewpoint you take towards your potential employers deeply unethical. Because people like you sometimes end up with power we need democratic states to fight back and keep a sense of perspective.
[1] "New parents in Sweden are entitled to 480 days of leave at 80% of their normal pay. That’s on top of the 18 weeks reserved just for mothers, after which the parents can split up the time however they choose. Swedish dads also get 90 paid paternity days reserved just for them. Out of these 480 days, 60 must be taken by the father or else all are lost. This leave can be taken by the month, week, day or even by the hour."
So fathers are forced to take more paternal leave in Sweden than mothers get in the US.
https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/parental-leave-working-scandinavia/ https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/parental-leave-working-sca...
I want to support women having babies. I just think current regulations put too much burden on the employers especially small ones. I also think it's unfair that a women who decided to have kids just after college doesn't get any (or way less) help that a women who found a job and get pregnant right after. A system set that way encourages women to have children later in life because they will get more benefits then. I think it's backwards and we are all paying the price already.
I just want incentives to be aligned in a way that it doesn't make sense to make sexist decisions when hiring and it doesn't encourage women to postpone motherhood because of how benefits are set.
According to the 2018 SBA fact sheet about Sweden by the EU commission [1] Sweden does employ fewer people in small and micro businesses than are employed on average in the entirety of the EU. Small and micro businesses in Sweden employ 46.6% of the workforce, while in EU-28 the percentage is 49.4%. If you add medium businesses to it you get 65.5% for Sweden and 66.4% for EU-28. You can also find some interesting measurements about entrepreneurship in Sweden compared to the EU average int he report.
I'm not saying this specific thing is the reason why Sweden's small businesses employ fewer people, but you can't just ignore this either.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/32581/attachments/28/translations/en/renditions/native https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/32581/attachments/28... (PDF)
Those numbers seem close enough that it's hard to conclude that there's a significant effect (especially given that there are many more variables at play here than just parental leave).
Wow, those percentages are really close. From your opening sentence it seemed like you were going to say something like 60% and 20%. Seems there's no point at all :)
Dailyscandinavian seems to have mixed up the numbers a bit.
In Sweden parents get 480 in total together, of which 390 are at 80% (capped at 989 SEK = 138 USD / day), and 90 days are at a minimum level (180 SEK = 25 USD). Out of the 480 days, 90 are reserved to each parent (used to be 60 before 2016) and the non-pregnant parent (usually a father) gets extra 10 days at the birth.
Propping up a bad business that would otherwise fail has two harmful effects:
1. The failure is greater and more impactful if it can't be held off forever. It's a lot better for society for fifty people to be laid off than a thousand. (It's probably better for those fifty people, too: their friends are less likely to be laid off and can provide immediate support, there are probably more open jobs, there's only fifty people competing for them and not a thousand, there's less loss of confidence in the industry, etc.) So failing fast is important. Ideally, you'd fail fast enough that the incompetent founding team loses their jobs and nobody else does.
2. There's usually a limited market / mind share for businesses, and it is hard for new businesses to get traction. The demand for, say, fast food within a given town is fairly fixed - advertising can make more or fewer people interested in it, but certainly there won't ever be more demand than three meals per day per person, and probably it will never get even close to that. So there's a limited labor market for fast food makers in that town. If there's an incompetent company employing a hundred people, and we prop up those jobs, we're likely preventing a more competent company from starting which could hire those same people and provide them with stabler and possibly higher-paying jobs. Worse, if the incompetent company is insolvent because they made bad pricing decisions, that company is probably out-competing other companies with more stable financial situations and preventing them from gaining traction.
So, if you don't want thousands of people to be laid off, it's good for incompetent businesses to fail as quickly as possible.
(The TSA and the military are government organizations, not companies, so the analysis is pretty different. Providing jobs to people for the sake of providing jobs is not a bad thing for government to do; providing that money without making them work is an even better thing for government to do.)