> In general, in countries with good parental leave policies, it is forbidden to discriminate against parents for taking them. The returning worker is entitled by law to return at the place he/she would have been assuming he/she had worked continuously.
This assumes that the only form of discrimination happening is delaying raises and promotions during maternity leave. The articles linked aren't addressing that; they're about whether the expectation that women may take long paid leave encourages people to preferentially hire and promote men, who won't (be able to) take similar leave. This isn't explicit, actionable discrimination against returning mothers, it's a hard-to-prove worsening of the glass ceiling to save money on leave.
And no, that problem doesn't make maternity leave a bad thing, it means that we should craft policies carefully to avoid worsening discrimination. But I think it's reasonable to say that a policy isn't obviously desirable if common and well-regarded versions of it may worsen gender inequality.
At the very least, it's worth asking whether there are improvements which could be made to avoid that problem while getting comparable benefits, and in this case there probably are.
> Then the only way to reconcile it is to have the government pay.
My point was that this only goes part of the way: even if the leave is publicly funded it can be very expensive for the employer when a parent leaves. Just because you don’t pay salary while the parent is away, doesn’t mean it’s free for the employer.
To mitigate that causing discrimination you’d need to go further. One example is a system that also compensated the employer (pays for the inconvenience and extra cost of finding a temp etc).
Another way that you mentioned is ensuring that men and women take equal amounts of leave, and that is happening in some places. Me and my wife got 400+ paid days to share but part of it is reserved for each parent and can’t be transferred. Currently that’s 60 of the days, but there have been voices calling for making the program individual, ie having ~200 non-transferable days for each parent. This is a tradeoff between families’ right to choose and gender equality, and so far the former has outweighed the latter, so it has not been split.
> equal male leave wouldn't solve the problem because they don't take it
That’s a chicken and egg problem. Once there is a large generous system in place, norms change.
The most common case here is that the mother is home 8-12 months and the father then the following 4-6 months (because obviously breastfeeding is pretty convenient to do without bottling for the first months etc. so it’s nearly invariably the mother who goes first). If the program was individual/split I’m 100% sure that the leaves would also be very close to equal per parent. Both parents do take long leaves, as it’s not quite socially acceptable not to, and it’s accepted by employers (often encouraged) to do so, for both men and women. This is of course an effect of having the generous leave. If you can get paid leave, and your employer supports you leaving (or worst case at least can’t stop you) - then aren’t you a bad parent for choosing not to take the leave? That’s the status of it, more or less.
> In the long run, it's very important to switch away from a system of maternity leave to equal parental leave. Women of child-bearing age are routinely discriminated against because companies know that they might quit/focus on the children/work less hours/have long maternal leave etc. By having equal paternal leave, and making sure that men take as much as women, this discrimination will disappear.
You aren't going to be able to force a father to take time off, just because you think he should. Even if he takes a week or two, the vast majority of them will go back to work in short order.
I would argue it is pretty much impossible to get men to take as much leave as women. The baby is literally attached the the portion of mothers who breast feed. It is stereotypical, but in my experience true, that mothers are more in tune with their infant and end up taking a lot more of the burden than the father. Ignoring that, single mothers are going to need time off, the father isn't even in the picture; and that is going to skew things as well.
> I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time.
That's why many European countries are progressing towards giving fathers the same leave as mothers, and making it mandatory for both (e.g. in Spain mothers used to have much more leave than fathers, but they progressively increased the leave for fathers while also making things more inflexible - fathers used to be able to "give" their days to mothers, but that no longer works, and both must take at least six weeks mandatorily).
I don't think there is a clear-cut optimal solution for the problem and every solution has pros and cons. For example, mandatory equal leave for both means losing flexibility (and there are biological arguments that mothers need more leave). But I think it's a reasonable compromise to mitigate discrimination and bias.
> My understanding is that this idea would imply paid mandatory leave. It would be bad for the individuals if it was mandatory unpaid leave.
That was understood in my post. Long periods of paid leave inhibits earnings growth and leaves you vulnerable to replacement regardless of gender.
This is what was meant by "Fixing the pay gap between never-married women and mothers will solve the gender pay gap as a corollary."
> Women are being treated differently here because when a man and woman decide to have a child, the woman is guaranteed to have to take leave.
Yes there is a guaranteed recovery period. And, yes, depending on how long you are absent this leave will effect earnings. But...
> men don't get the same treatment despite being fathers
Men who take long paternity leave suffer the same income stagnation as women.
"Still, most men can’t afford to take more than a few days off after the birth of a new child. Especially because parental leave can depress long-term earnings [...] regardless of gender."[1]
Compelling paternity leave does not increase the earnings of mothers. It decreases the earnings of fathers. Which may very well shrink the gender wage gap but it makes families poorer and less able to provide for themselves and their children.
To be trite, you're cutting off your nose to spite your face.
> I view this more as spreading the burden
This, I believe, is our fundamental disagreement. You think a burden is being spread more thinly whereas I think you've created additional burdens. In my opinion, and I believe the data backs me up, this strategy reduces fathers and does nothing to help mothers (economically).
> I think we all know that it will be used at a much lower rate
It's a circular argument, since the main reason men aren't taking time off work to devote to parenting is the absence of such a leave.
The reality is that if you provide the leave, everyone will use it. (I work for a company that provides one, though a rather short one).
Ideally, the law will be written such that it's not an either-or scenario, and both parents could take the leave consecutively should they choose to (e.g. eligibility for a 6-month leave starting within 6 months of becoming a new parent).
And this will make it much harder for companies to discriminate, as it spreads the risks out. Old men can (and do) father children too.
> long paid maternity leave harms women's wages and career progression
Of course it does. What it benefits is the actual human beings in question (child, mother, father). Most humans think that significantly increasing the well-being of your family, and in particular your infant, is a whole fucking lot more important than wages and career progression. Like all things in life it's a trade off, but an unobjectionally good one.
Analogy: if a woman (or man) spent 8 hours every day of every vacation secretly working, they would definitely get better wages and career progression. Would you recommend everyone starts doing that?
> Moreover, a women will also face more headwinds for doing less mothering in order to continue in her career.
I'm not sure how cutting parental leave eliminates pr reduced these headwinds. It seems to me that it's deliberately putting more financial pressure on women to tolerate those headwinds. Not eliminating those headwinds. Women's choice is strictly less with 6 months of paid leave as compared to 1 year. Women have the choice to take 6 months of leave instead of the full year (the article mentions that they use 77% on average).
It still seems like this is trying to justify limiting women's choices and benefits, because it makes more of them work.
> There is significant empirical evidence that shows that > policies such as long paid maternity leave harms women's wages and career progression.
Let's be clear here and not mis-assign causality. The workplace's reaction to paid maternity leave harms a woman's career and wages. Not maternity leave itself.
> offering parental leave is an excellent example of the kind of thing a union would negotiate, and is also pretty well related to how attractive a company is to women (who are more likely to have childcare responsibilities).
This is an excellent example of how women make different choices to men driven by the special rights that they are afforded. Giving a women more maternity leave sounds laudable but it creates a perverse incentive where they have to take on those childcare duties.
My wife and I are going through this at the moment and she will be entitled to 5 months of full-paid maternity leave. No employment contract I've ever signed has even come close to that for paternity leave. The only rational decision is for her to take care of the child.
I'm much more in favour of some sort of system where that leave is allocated to a family and how they choose to divide it is up to them.
>>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.
> But I also had one boss who did not want to hire one woman because " what happens when she gets pregnant"
This is perhaps an example where extending parental leave benefits to both parents solves both ends of the problem. Men also may leave if they choose to expand their family, and women aren't pressured into more child care than they prefer due to the men not having parental leave to help.
> They are in avg more social
Careful with these generalizations. Women get placed in impossible behavioral expectations. Told to be more assertive, but then perceived differently than men when they are.
> If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.
What exactly is the point of this? All this does is penalize poor families. No amount of monetary hand out is going to ever devalue the wealth creation ability of work. You cannot pay out the social benefits of working. Women undertake a vital task in giving birth, and they of course need time to recover. However, in that situation, the best thing for their family is not for neither spouse to be uninvolved in the workplace. Forcing men to stay home (rather than choose what is best for their family) simply limits the family's overall ability to create wealth for themselves.
Yes, paternity leave is important and nice, but the truth of the matter is that some women are going to need many months to recover from birth, and men simply do not. Why disadvantage entire families in the name of 'equality'. There is no equality to be had. The woman's body suffered through birth, and the man's didn't. The baby needs the mother nearby to feed it, not the father. What's the big deal then if the man goes back to work earlier?
Can anyone articular why it is better (for families) for men to not return to work when they feel ready, which is almost invariably going to be sooner than their wives? This seems to me a good thing that ensures children have their financial well being looked after.
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.
>and downplays the impact of obvious and unobjectionable steps like [..] "give expectant mothers maternity leave"
This is a bit off-topic, but maternity leave is neither obvious nor unobjectionable. There is significant empirical evidence that shows that policies such as long paid maternity leave harms women's wages and career progression.
> It should be a law because left to their own devices companies will otherwise simply evade the problem and hire guys instead of equally qualified women.
Sometimes these laws actually discourage hiring women. For example, you say:
> companies only have the requirement to re-instate the person that took leave after they return
This is a great example of why these laws are more complex than they appear. For example, in that case I'll need to hire somebody to fill in for the person on leave while they're away. So I'm paying for that training, paperwork, etc for the new person. Then when the first person comes back from maternity leave, I've got two people for one job. Either I have the unpleasant business of firing somebody who hasn't done anything wrong (and may actually be the better employee!) or depending on how the laws are written I may be forced to continue to employ both, despite a lack of need. What if I've downsized or pivoted, and no longer need to original person? Do they accumulate benefits and paid vacation while they're gone? All this can be an employer's nightmare.
A post by a Hungarian entrepreneur partially on this topic went viral last year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that maternity leave is a bad thing, I just feel that paining it as a simple issue is unproductive.
> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time?
I think all the other answers to this have been arguing either yes/no, but it's really the wrong question.
If you have 2 candidates, you should take into account their experience, but you shouldn't otherwise penalize the parental leave taker. So by taking parental year you put yourself one year back in the experience cohort.
There is nothing discriminatory or gender specific about this. If it turns out that women take more parental years than men, we return to your question of incentives and equality of outcomes, to be decided separately.
> They invent the delusion that gender and age disqualifies you for a job (girls will just get pregnant and leave!
This is not a delusion, and it's a thing commonly talked about in my country (Poland). It's not just about that girls will get pregnant and leave - it'll be that girls will get pregnant and out of the sudden[0] go on paid maternity leave, which they can extend to a year, during which you have to keep their position open, after which you can't legally fire them even if you've already found a replacement, and there are many women[1] who plan another pregnancy just after the leave period ends, in order to extend their employment period by another two years. The incentive here is that health leave and maternity leave both count as employment, so they don't have a break in years of employment on their CV (and both are paid, too).
Overall effect of our legal landscape makes companies prefer men over women, and/or prefer employment contracts that don't offer these legal guarantees, and there's always noise being made whenever our government (which is currently pro-family) starts talking about adjustments that would extend some protections to those other work contract types.
(Now I'm not saying this to justify the bias in general, but just to point out that there are real economic pressures in play that do get considered by the employers.)
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[0] - You don't have a "notice period" on maternity live; if a doctor decides there are concerns about the health of a mother or a child, your employee can just give you the doctor's note and stop coming to work.
[1] - And I've personally heard parents encouraging their daughters to do that. It seems to be a common theme, at least among the less well-off parts of our population. The boss-employee relationship is pretty antagonistic.
This assumes that the only form of discrimination happening is delaying raises and promotions during maternity leave. The articles linked aren't addressing that; they're about whether the expectation that women may take long paid leave encourages people to preferentially hire and promote men, who won't (be able to) take similar leave. This isn't explicit, actionable discrimination against returning mothers, it's a hard-to-prove worsening of the glass ceiling to save money on leave.
And no, that problem doesn't make maternity leave a bad thing, it means that we should craft policies carefully to avoid worsening discrimination. But I think it's reasonable to say that a policy isn't obviously desirable if common and well-regarded versions of it may worsen gender inequality.
At the very least, it's worth asking whether there are improvements which could be made to avoid that problem while getting comparable benefits, and in this case there probably are.
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