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One big part of this is that even if you have guaranteed maternity pay, it still hurts your career. In a highly competitive environment, I don't see how not wor
by phamilton 8y ago
One big part of this is that even if you have guaranteed maternity pay, it still hurts your career. In a highly competitive environment, I don't see how not working for X amount of time doesn't lead to being X amount of time behind in career growth.
The answer is to have less competitive environments. In Sweden, jantelagen (a cultural sentiment that discourages overt personal ambition) is a huge part of what enables generous leave policies.
- solatic 8y agoYou can't really tell American business culture to be less competitive. You might as well try to get Klingons to be less war-happy. If you're going to try to improve the situation for women, you have to work within the system as it exists. The best hope is improving remote work and improving transportation infrastructure. Women don't have to leave jobs that they can do from home, and client visits are less impactful when they take less time to visit the client and return. It's not a solution which fits nicely into a single bill of legislation to be passed, but it's the groundwork that the US needs to make it happen.
- blub 8y agoTaking care of a kid is a full time job during the first years. Many partly outsource it after year 1. :)
- skookumchuck 8y agoAs I recall, Sweden has had problems in the past where the ambitious people leave the country.
- toofy 8y agoAnd yet they’re not tumbling into nothingness, in fact, many reasonable people place Sweden as an amazing place in many metrics, stable in the top 10% for most lists I’ve seen—everything from happiness levels to GDP(PPP). Makes me question whether or not our (USians) shouldn’t push for a cultural change where we don’t worship so heavily at the alter of the hyperambitious.
- skookumchuck 8y agoAmbition is what makes things happen. Do you think Apple and the iPhone would have happened without the hyper-ambition of Jobs? It happened in the US, too, not in Sweden.
- TYPE_FASTER 8y agoSkype (Zennstrom) Kazaa Ericsson Minecraft
- skookumchuck 8y agoZennstrom lives in London. Kazaa is a dutch company. Ericsson was founded in 1876. Minecraft's creator Markus Persson lives in the US. I don't think these examples make your point.
- mch82 8y agoCareer trajectories aren’t linear, especially after the first 2-3 years. Lots of factors impact career growth & skills development.
- threatofrain 8y agoI would argue the answer is to offer both men and women the chance to have X time leave per child per Y time worked, that way there's no economic incentive to discriminate.
- phamilton 8y agoThat still incentivises having children later. Lost growth compounds over a career, so delaying it would still make sense. It would then hurt those who choose children earlier.
- threatofrain 8y agoThat's a problem that may require more policy nuance, but I thought both men and women face a similar modicum of risks for waiting too long for kids, so men cannot get an advantage on women over this.
- phamilton 8y ago> men and women face a similar modicum of risks for waiting too long for kids Sadly, biology disagrees. That aside, the original thread was that those who delay children have fewer children and the conclusion is this situation selects against the things that lead to delaying children. If career ambition is genetic, then each generation will have less of it. At least, that's the theory here.