You are, obviously, completely correct on the point that you raise. However, I am sold on those sort of laws on the basis that employers are discriminating on irrelevant dimensions, like race and gender.
An employee expecting, or indeed planning, to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US handles leave.
An employee literally cannot be a high quality, productive worker if they are not working. Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring. That isn't fair on them.
But it isn't "discriminating based on parental leave". It's "discriminating" based on experience. The reason why someone takes a year (or whatever) off isn't the issue.
Does this feel unfair in some sense? Yeah. But would it be less unfair to artificially punish the person who didn't take time off? Questionable...
Nah, the idea is not that it's the leave that sets any single woman's career back, it's that the expectation of the leave being taken by women causes them to not be hired/promoted/... before having children that the OP is concerned with if I understood them correctly. If suddenly all parents were to take leave, regardless of gender, then discriminating young people by gender would no longer make economical sense.
There should definitely also be mandated minimum vacation days in my opinion (where I live, four weeks of paid leave per year are the legal minimum for full-time jobs), but that's quite unrelated to the issue at hand.
If parental leave is equal between genders, this argument may stand.
But beware any unequal treatment of men and women with generous leave. It creates big incentives not to hire women of a certain age and family status. It's a lot harder to oppose discrimination when the discrimination is obviously rational and arguably not even wrong.
I think we agree that companies shouldn't be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, reproductive status, or family plans. However, I would contend that a simple blanket rule doesn't address the incentives to discriminate.
I would also argue that burden to compensate companies for employees taking time off for personal or family matters (regardless of sex, reproductive plan or status) should be shouldered at the state or national level, and not at local level where there may be higher disparity in both burden and capacity. If both men and women are allotted mandated time to attend to family, and both men and women warrant access to funding for their employers, then companies would lose incentives to discriminate because presumably everyone would want their time off.
If the federal government compensated businesses, then startups and small businesses wouldn't be exempt from protection, nor unequally stressed relative to bigger businesses. As another commentator pointed out, the UK has a similar model.
> 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.
I would argue that it's not the law that's preventing discrimination, it's the fact that nearly 50% of the workforce is made up of women, thereby excluding a huge category is detrimental to your business. You wouldn't be a very good manager if you decided not to hire women because one day they might take a year off. Additionally, many managers are probably also parents themselves and understand the importance of maternity leave and understand it's part of having a workforce. Plus, in my department, we actually see the benefit of maternity leaves. We get to hire a new person for a year that can bring new insight and experience into the role. If they are good, we try to find a place for them, if they are bad, the year expires and they go off without any fanfare.
I am not allowed to ask though. That's the whole point: extended maternal leaves cause discrimination when hiring women. I would love to be able to hire on merits alone but if I am facing much higher risk of not being able to put my children in a good school when hiring a women then I won't do that. No amount of moral outrage is going to put someone's children above my own. If you want me to not discriminate then please make laws which remove incentives to do so.
>I'm just saying from the perspective of an employer evaluating two candidates, if all other things are equal, and one took a year off and one didn't, and the employer chooses the candidate who was at work continuously, they weren't specifically discriminating against "parental leave".
Gender aside, this is still discrimination based on a persons “experience”, as you call it, or very simply: their employment status.
This is against the law. Plain and simple. Look at some of the laws enacted over the years, starting in 2011 [1].
It is reasonable, but reasonable employers for the most part don't exist. That's why we have laws establishing a minimum wage, nondiscrimination, paying out PTO in California, and the FMLA act which gives us parental leave in the first place.
> 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.
If only women have legally mandated paid time off for new kids it'll provide even more reproduction-related disincentive to hire women, which is reason enough for it to be relevant, I'd say.
Do people really come back from a 6 month paid parental leave and expect to get promoted? No shit the coworker who busted their ass the entire time will get picked over you. That isn't discrimination, just reality.
A company with good family leave policies shouldn't care, or even notice if you are male or female. Part of reducing discrimination should be taking away the idea that women are the only ones who can take care of a kid!
federal law gives 12 weeks unpaid leave. Companies may give paid leave, and usually make it uneven and pat themselves on the back by how pro-women they are, when they are effectively screwing them over long term for a short term benefit by promoting this inequality.
I don't even mind that they do it, so much as they really think they're OMG super pro diversity and pro women by doing so, when in a way they're hurting them.
Right. I had specifically insurance based parental leave in mind, which is the right way to implement it "by law". I might have posted that in the wrong part of the subthread. I agree with you regarding an employer pays model, which has obvious drawbacks.
Why can't someone taking parental leave be the best candidate? THis statement doesn't seem to be true at all and seems like somewhat good proof that we need such laws.
Which is why the person you replied to would most likely advocate for eliminating parental leave entirely, and I agree.
No matter how you slice it, government mandated leave that doesn't apply to every single person equally will lead to discrimination. If you mandate maternity leave then companies will prefer young men to young women, and if you mandate paternity leave then companies will prefer the old to the young.
Parental leave is detrimental for every person that has it, but doesn't want it. If you're of child bearing age you're a huge risk to your employer if your resume doesn't come with a sterility test stapled to it.
Thanks for chiming in, as is my way after diving into a "touchy" subject I'm honestly half regretting this thread given the negative reception, and from your greying I see you received the same; but what is HN for if we don't discuss important things. :) It's ironic since your situation is _exactly_ what I worry about, both my wife and I have some phenomenal stories of the side-channels that can be used to ensure "lack of performance" during or prior to a maternity leave.
Hell, it even bridges genders, I've seen male friends on extended sick leave got the shaft via PiPs, where the time-correlation was uncanny to say the least, and the cost to pursue it seemed disadvantageous to them at the time.
My suspicion is that there's a perception that because we don't back the "Laws Laws Laws" aspect of it 100%, some people read us as "opposed", when in reality I'm arguing that _laws are not sufficient_ to achieve positive outcomes. Unfortunately, many people are... very opposed to engaging in this discussion, so the best I can do is guess.
EDIT: (And, lest I spam the thread more, thanks@meti for mentioning EEOC, I honestly didn't know that existed prior, and I'll be sending it to one friend right now)
Considering that US federal law seems to be gender agnostic, from skimming Wikipedia, I'm not so sure about this criticism. At least there seems to be a ground work for caring for parents and not only mothers.
While I agree with your sentiment (as a father with ~18 month parental leave behind me) It would be nice to know if there are common policies that are problematic in your view.
An employee expecting, or indeed planning, to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US handles leave.
An employee literally cannot be a high quality, productive worker if they are not working. Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring. That isn't fair on them.
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