7 ms·

> Its just not beneficial for anyone. I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point. "Forcing women" back into work after pregn

by mbesto 5y ago

> Its just not beneficial for anyone. I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point. "Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood-and-the-gender-productivity-gap/ https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...

danShumway 5y ago
I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing. And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing. Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners. ---- [0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.) Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins. Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
  - belorn 5y ago
    We can follow the tactic used in other gender equality initiatives and creates targeted incentives to raise participation levels. As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows. I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work. Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement. There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect. > Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement. The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
- DavidVoid 5y ago
  Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree. Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).
  - jseban 5y ago
    Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people at all.
    - themaninthedark 5y ago
      Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children. In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      All social programs will be abused at the tail. That is not a reason to avoid those social programs.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      > It's a privilege not available to single people at all. And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents. I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported. I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through. There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.
- mambru 5y ago
  That's the case in Spain since 2021. Both parents get 19 weeks paid leave.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  My employer privately gave me tons of paid parental leave. I took a portion of it at the beginning and ended up using the rest of it to work every other day for the remaining year - and my partner used the chance to work on her stuff. It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution. I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance. She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.
angelzen 5y ago
Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?
  - angelzen 5y ago
    This is an orthogonal point. I don't see any provision mandating wages or promotions for periods when people are on leave, abled or disabled. The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers. BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-individual-disability https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...
- TuringTest 5y ago
  > Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering? * (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).
jensensbutton 5y ago
> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  To whatever extent time out of the workforce is a driver of future wage discrepancy, it seems like at least some women would make an entirely economically rational choice to minimize that time out of the workforce. (I’m not claiming it’s a good or bad thing, just that there exists a strong force that would motivate people in this direction.)
- mbesto 5y ago
  I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases. The cultural components manifest themselves different ways: As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months? As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    Ah makes sense. > The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases. Strongly agree with the above.
deanCommie 5y ago
> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)
- mbesto 5y ago
  https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-gender-pay-gap-researchers-say-19269185 https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-... https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-is-the-wage-penalty-for-mothers https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-... https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/working-paper-series/07-19-Berkay-Ozcan-and-Allison-Dunatchik.pdf https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/wor...
- petsormeat 5y ago
  I'm not a parent, yet have never made even 90% of what my male peers were paid.

by mbesto 5y ago

danShumway 5y ago

I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing. And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing. Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners. ---- [0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.

Ericson2314 5y ago
Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.) Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins. Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
- belorn 5y ago
  We can follow the tactic used in other gender equality initiatives and creates targeted incentives to raise participation levels. As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows. I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work. Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement. There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect. > Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement. The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
DavidVoid 5y ago
Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree. Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).
- jseban 5y ago
  Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people at all.
  - themaninthedark 5y ago
    Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children. In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    All social programs will be abused at the tail. That is not a reason to avoid those social programs.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > It's a privilege not available to single people at all. And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents. I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported. I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through. There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.
mambru 5y ago
That's the case in Spain since 2021. Both parents get 19 weeks paid leave.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
My employer privately gave me tons of paid parental leave. I took a portion of it at the beginning and ended up using the rest of it to work every other day for the remaining year - and my partner used the chance to work on her stuff. It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution. I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance. She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.

angelzen 5y ago

Perhaps this is a case of metrics getting ahead of reality. Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. Perhaps there are some reasons for that, for example the tradeoff between forcing mothers back into the workforce vs. giving them ample time (order of 12 months) to recover and take care of the new born. For the not parents out there, a new born requires feeding every 2-3 hours. Expecting a mother to feed on that schedule and perform as an employee is inhuman.

emodendroket 5y ago
I think it is instructive to compare this case to disability. There are perfectly rational reasons, from a cold economic perspective, that an employer would not want to hire any disabled employees, or that a business would not want to build amenities to accommodate them as customers. But we've decided that it is not to society's benefit to have a system wherein the disabled are routinely discriminated against, so we don't allow you to do those things. Why is this case different?
- angelzen 5y ago
  This is an orthogonal point. I don't see any provision mandating wages or promotions for periods when people are on leave, abled or disabled. The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers. BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-individual-disability https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...
TuringTest 5y ago
> Some circles have taken as an axiomatic truth that any disparity in wages between males and females is an intrinsic scandal. All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering? * (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).

jensensbutton 5y ago

> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.

sokoloff 5y ago
To whatever extent time out of the workforce is a driver of future wage discrepancy, it seems like at least some women would make an entirely economically rational choice to minimize that time out of the workforce. (I’m not claiming it’s a good or bad thing, just that there exists a strong force that would motivate people in this direction.)
mbesto 5y ago
I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases. The cultural components manifest themselves different ways: As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months? As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  Ah makes sense. > The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases. Strongly agree with the above.

deanCommie 5y ago

> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)

mbesto 5y ago
https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-gender-pay-gap-researchers-say-19269185 https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-... https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-is-the-wage-penalty-for-mothers https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-... https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/working-paper-series/07-19-Berkay-Ozcan-and-Allison-Dunatchik.pdf https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/wor...
petsormeat 5y ago
I'm not a parent, yet have never made even 90% of what my male peers were paid.