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...
>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.
The commenter clearly stated their point. Businesses don't care why you have a one year gap. They only care that you have a one year gap.
I am in no way saying that taking care of a baby is leisure time, or anything of the sort. 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".From that point of view, the reason doesn't actually matter at all, as they are just comparing two candidates.
Of course in reality human nature being what it is, some people probably do actually care. And rarely are "all other things exactly equal". I'd guess most employers would be more favorable towards someone who took a year off to raise a baby, as opposed to taking a year off just to lounge around.
> 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...
It's not even about punishment. Calling it discrimination is like saying that hiring based on years of experience discriminates against younger people. It's the wrong point at which to solve the problem.
We know that taking a year off impacts employment prospects. If we want to compensate for it, what should we do?
The implied solution is to force employers to hire less experienced workers. But that has all kinds of known problems. The quality of their work will be lower. It creates an incentive for businesses to cheat and benefits the ones that do. The cost is not uniformly distributed, which creates risk and surprise for smaller businesses that may not be able to absorb the sudden cost.
What problem are we trying to solve here? We want to encourage parenting and help parents, so do that. Have a social insurance program for parental leave equivalent to unemployment insurance. Have a generous tax deduction for dependent children that compensates for the resulting lower salary. Do things, in general, that spreads the risk across all taxpayers rather than creating asymmetric costs for the employers who happen to employ parents, so that we avoid giving employers a perverse incentive to find ways to offset the cost.
It's not a problem if you make $5000/year less in salary if you also pay $5000/year less in taxes. Or $10,000/year less in taxes.
Many people here have echoed the fears and complaints I've heard on this topic. Simply that somehow taking parental leave at all puts you at a disadvantage. Or puts you in a position where you have to explain yourself.
I feel like what is being done here is to [ironically] force an equality of outcome on every metric _except_ the one that swings the argument.
The very nature of equality of _opportunity_ means to me that it doesn't matter at all that I took time off. Am I qualified? Do I have demonstrable expertise? References? Education? A unique perspective?
You may be generally curious about my year off but the idea that it somehow invalidates _any_ of my other qualifications feels silly and limits my opportunity based on external factors which don't impact my ability to do the job. It's just that you don't seem to fit the world view of others so it's suspect.
_This_ is the complaint: that a talented professional coming back to the work force loses out not because of ability but because of violating social norms.
>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].
This idea that putting aside the amount of parental leave candidates took when evaluating them for promotion is somehow "punishing" people who didn't take leave seems like a real stretch to me.
I don't think it'd be difficult to let people enjoy the benefits the company has agreed to provide without punishing them, indeed, this strikes me as the only reasonable way for the company to behave. Ideally, as time goes on, all employees with avail themselves of the full suite of benefits making this discrimination againts those who use their benefits will become moot.
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.
> Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?
Many (questionable) reasons, but among other things, it's a convenient way to exclude women trying to return to the workforce after they took time off to have kids, without overtly appearing to discriminate.
I don’t think anyone is incentivized to have a kid because they get a few weeks or months off. The only incentive i see is the opposite; if there is no parental leave, they may decide not to have children they were otherwise considering.
And the few weeks/months after a child is born can be much harder work than your day job in many aspects. So it would be unfair to parents, especially mothers, who tend to spend more time on child care, to force them to use their sabbatical/vacation time as parental leave. You’d effectively be controlling people’s reproductive timelines with this sabbatical schedule.
In terms of women being disadvantaged, I agree. But I think the answer is to make sure it’s illegal to discriminate based on current or future parental obligations and enforce that strongly, and to strongly incentivize both mothers and fathers to take their full allocated leave, and make it the same length for both parents.
> 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.
It's not about whether taking a year off work hurts career progression, it's about whether offering paid maternity leave creates pressure not to hire and promote women, regardless of whether they have kids. If the result was strictly "taking a year off work delays your career", that would be a fairly obvious outcome. Instead, what we see is "knowing some job candidates can take a year off work with pay discourages hiring and promoting those candidates".
It is, among other things, an indirect argument for paternity leave - if leave is symmetric, you can't preferentially hire/promote the people without access to it.
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.
I don’t understand. Optional parental leave would allow both parents to take work off. We’re debating whether or not parents (specifically fathers) should be forced against their will to take time off in order to satisfy an arbitrary desire to unify the distributions of work experience between men and women. In this debate, there is no dichotomy between freedom and justice; taking away one’s individual rights in the basis of gender is injustice—it’s neither freedom nor justice.
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.
> 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.
No, because what the policy is essentially doing is saying "anyone with a new kid gets 8 weeks off. If you happened to have actually given birth to the kid, we'll give you an extra 8 weeks."
As others have stated, it would only be discriminatory if it was based on gender, but it's not - it's based on whether or not you had the physical toll of childbirth, as evident in the adoption v. birth difference for women.
It would be interesting to hear what the leave would be for a lesbian couple with one of the women giving birth. I would think 16/8 like a heterosexual couple, but that could get dicey depending on how the rule is worded.
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.
A man and a woman can decide that whats best for them is that he not take leave, but for the benefit other people he should take parental leave.
Even if he enjoys working, even if the mother has decided she wants to stay home, even if they need opportunity that work brings (such as the opportunity to get promotions). Even if there are a hundred reasons for a man to not want to take leave, even if taking leave is worse for him, his partner and child, he must take leave so that other people who he may never meet have an advantage.
Yes, encouraging a few weeks off work is good for the family, but forcing someone to take 7 months off of work is massively disruptive. Not even to speak of the disruption on small businesses, that may not be able to accommodate a person leaving for that period of time. If you run a business of 10 people, a single person is 10% of your workforce, and just due to the size you may not have staff to cover the missing expertise.
Forced long-term paternity leave is a system, that explicitly harms the outcomes of one group (working fathers) to provide benefits to others (working mothers, and non-working people in general).
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...
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