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Completely anecdotal evidence, but every female coworker I've ever worked with has left work to raise their child after the first baby. Every single one of the

Completely anecdotal evidence, but every female coworker I've ever worked with has left work to raise their child after the first baby. Every single one of them said that they were definitely coming back before they went on maternity leave (and I believe that they believed it). The main issue in every case was that as the new mothers got to the end of their maternity leave, they started to think about day care. In the end, they felt that they could not trust the day care centres with their child. Similarly the mothers did not trust their own husbands to look after the child because the husband had not spent much time with the child at that point. Because all of the families I knew were relatively well off with dual incomes, they eventually decided that the woman would quit work to look after the child. In my anecdotal data, in no cases was there a salary gap between the man and the woman. Both were making roughly the same amount. Neither was it a case of not being able to afford child care -- although, once they crunched the numbers the cost of child care was a good percentage of one of the salaries, so it made it easier to take the financial hit to move to a single income. As far as I could tell, in all cases it just came down to trust. For this reason, I think there should be some sort of encouraged paternal leave. For example, the government/company in partnership could pay for 80% of the salary for 6 months for the father to look after the child. This would occur immediately after the mother's maternity leave. What this does is provide a financial incentive for the father to learn to look after the child. When the paternity leave is finished, then the choices look very different. I think it's still likely that one parent (in well to do dual family incomes) will choose to look after their child and quit their job (and I see nothing wrong with that). However, now the woman has spent the last 6 months working and it will be a harder decision to quit. The man now has had a chance to show that he can look after the child and the woman will be able to trust him with that responsibility. I honestly believe without that kind of system, there will always be a disparity between men and women when it comes to one parent choosing to quit their job and raise children. I should point out that, personally, I think raising children is a wonderful job, even if it doesn't pay so well ;-) Sometimes I think modern society looks down on that role and I think it's rather unfair. However, I do understand that we aren't quite modern enough to make that job reasonably risk free (you're dependent upon your spouse which is not always going to work out). We've got a long way to go...

zik 8y ago
By the time you have two children the cost of child care is often similar to or greater than after tax income. It's just not really financially viable to work at that point.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  People often make this argument, but it's an incautious one. It assumes the stay-at-home spouse's pay won't go up in the future, but this isn't the case. After four or five years, you won't need all-day childcare any more. However, the SAHP's earning potential will have gone down due to their time out of the workforce. This has compounding effects down the line. If you spreadsheet it out under reasonable assumptions, your after-tax income from the SAHP has to be substantially lower than the cost of childcare before it makes sense for them give up work over the long run. Obviously it depends on the family, but I think a lot of people take a fairly myopic view of this question and don't think about the long-term consequences.
noelsusman 8y ago
Iceland has a system similar to what you're describing. The mother gets three months, the father gets three months, and the couple gets another three months to share as they see fit. It's been a rousing success with 90% of fathers taking all three months. Compare that to Denmark where every couple gets ten(ish) months of leave that can be used by the mother or father as they see fit. Danish women take an average of 9 months off while Danish men take an average of 1 month off.
elliekelly 8y ago
Your point is actually very much backed up by science and Iris Bohnet devotes an entire chapter to it in her book "What Works." Arguably one of the easiest ways to reduce gender pay disparity is to give both women and men the _exact_ same amount of parental leave for the birth of a child. She actually argues we should go one step further and require new parents to take the leave because even men who are employed by companies with generous parental leave are under a tremendous amount of social pressure to return to work quickly and often do not use all of the time available to them even when they would have liked to stay home and spend more time with their family.

zik 8y ago

By the time you have two children the cost of child care is often similar to or greater than after tax income. It's just not really financially viable to work at that point.

asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
People often make this argument, but it's an incautious one. It assumes the stay-at-home spouse's pay won't go up in the future, but this isn't the case. After four or five years, you won't need all-day childcare any more. However, the SAHP's earning potential will have gone down due to their time out of the workforce. This has compounding effects down the line. If you spreadsheet it out under reasonable assumptions, your after-tax income from the SAHP has to be substantially lower than the cost of childcare before it makes sense for them give up work over the long run. Obviously it depends on the family, but I think a lot of people take a fairly myopic view of this question and don't think about the long-term consequences.

noelsusman 8y ago

Iceland has a system similar to what you're describing. The mother gets three months, the father gets three months, and the couple gets another three months to share as they see fit. It's been a rousing success with 90% of fathers taking all three months. Compare that to Denmark where every couple gets ten(ish) months of leave that can be used by the mother or father as they see fit. Danish women take an average of 9 months off while Danish men take an average of 1 month off.

elliekelly 8y ago

Your point is actually very much backed up by science and Iris Bohnet devotes an entire chapter to it in her book "What Works." Arguably one of the easiest ways to reduce gender pay disparity is to give both women and men the _exact_ same amount of parental leave for the birth of a child. She actually argues we should go one step further and require new parents to take the leave because even men who are employed by companies with generous parental leave are under a tremendous amount of social pressure to return to work quickly and often do not use all of the time available to them even when they would have liked to stay home and spend more time with their family.