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>Redundancy is never free. This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties

>Redundancy is never free. This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period. That's the hidden cost.

CogitoCogito 5y ago
Seems like the correct fix is to make sure that men have the exact same rights to parental leave and all the same incentives to take them. If men and women are equally likely to disappear for similar amounts of time, then it becomes a wash. Of course it could then be difficult for men and women of a certain age range to find new employment, but I don't see how you can fix this aspect of things.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  This is a bit of a problem in Estonia. Estonia has conscription. An employer is not allowed to fire someone that's being conscripted or is doing training for the military after conscription. This means that any business that hires a man that has gone through conscription might have to be able to replace him at extremely short notice (a few days) for the duration of training. I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Equal paternity leave is a thing but it doesn't change the fact that women get pregnant and men don't which is why most employers still discriminate against hiring women and why the salary gap is still a thing. Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
  - CogitoCogito 5y ago
    Are men taking the time as much as women? So basically the difference is the 1-2 months (or whatever the average is) women take off before giving birth? Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave?
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave? That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?
      - CogitoCogito 5y ago
        The same people who pay for the current maternity/paternity leave?
        ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        If it was that simple, it would have been done already but just saying "everyone should have nice things" is easy until you get to implementing it and ask who's picking up the tab that is hard, as taxes are high already and budgets are tight in most of Europe. There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least. It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
        CogitoCogito 5y ago
        Your original post asked how to make it so that women's career doesn't take a hit. The answer is obvious: make it so that the likelihood of men and women going on parental leave is roughly the same. It's totally doable. It would require some changes, but it's totally doable. If your concern is cost specifically, we could always _remove_ parental leave from women and allocate it to men instead. So this could even be done on a financial cost-neutral basis. But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.
llampx 5y ago
Is this really true though? From my experience in the job market in Berlin on both the hiring side and on the other side, it doesn't seem that there's a dearth of women being hired into individual contributor and management positions. Late 20's are women's starting years if they did a Masters or PhD, so we'd see that in the labor force participation numbers if it was true. Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Don't know the Berlin job market but TBH Austria is way more conservative than hip and liberal Berlin as proven by having a conservative party at the helm and the lowest number of women in top management positions in Europe. The corporate world in Austria (excluding young start-ups) pretty much is the embodiment of the "old boys club" meme. Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.

CogitoCogito 5y ago

Seems like the correct fix is to make sure that men have the exact same rights to parental leave and all the same incentives to take them. If men and women are equally likely to disappear for similar amounts of time, then it becomes a wash. Of course it could then be difficult for men and women of a certain age range to find new employment, but I don't see how you can fix this aspect of things.

Aerroon 5y ago
This is a bit of a problem in Estonia. Estonia has conscription. An employer is not allowed to fire someone that's being conscripted or is doing training for the military after conscription. This means that any business that hires a man that has gone through conscription might have to be able to replace him at extremely short notice (a few days) for the duration of training. I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Equal paternity leave is a thing but it doesn't change the fact that women get pregnant and men don't which is why most employers still discriminate against hiring women and why the salary gap is still a thing. Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  Are men taking the time as much as women? So basically the difference is the 1-2 months (or whatever the average is) women take off before giving birth? Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave?
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Maybe the solution is to add that amount of time to male paternity leave? That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?
    - CogitoCogito 5y ago
      The same people who pay for the current maternity/paternity leave?
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        If it was that simple, it would have been done already but just saying "everyone should have nice things" is easy until you get to implementing it and ask who's picking up the tab that is hard, as taxes are high already and budgets are tight in most of Europe. There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least. It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
        CogitoCogito 5y ago
        Your original post asked how to make it so that women's career doesn't take a hit. The answer is obvious: make it so that the likelihood of men and women going on parental leave is roughly the same. It's totally doable. It would require some changes, but it's totally doable. If your concern is cost specifically, we could always _remove_ parental leave from women and allocate it to men instead. So this could even be done on a financial cost-neutral basis. But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.

llampx 5y ago

Is this really true though? From my experience in the job market in Berlin on both the hiring side and on the other side, it doesn't seem that there's a dearth of women being hired into individual contributor and management positions. Late 20's are women's starting years if they did a Masters or PhD, so we'd see that in the labor force participation numbers if it was true. Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Don't know the Berlin job market but TBH Austria is way more conservative than hip and liberal Berlin as proven by having a conservative party at the helm and the lowest number of women in top management positions in Europe. The corporate world in Austria (excluding young start-ups) pretty much is the embodiment of the "old boys club" meme. Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.