One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave.
If I gave you the choice of two employees, one of whom would take 12 weeks of paid leave and one who would take 2 weeks of paid leave, which would you choose?
If you offered both sexes 12 weeks of paid leave, you wouldn't have to make this decision.
You'd have to make it mandatory leave. The social pressure is still tilted towards women as care givers and men as providers so more men will end up not using the leave. If it becomes mandatory then it's just a baked in rising to every employee, _and_ will probably do better for society to have both parents get time with their children.
I believe some European states solve this by having the state cover ~60% of your wage while on leave so that it's not a giant burden for companies
There is an alternative. We could amortize the costs of maternity leave over the entire working population.
This way we get the desired outcome (companies have no financial disincentive to hire women) without creating weird forced life-decisions.
That is, I'd propose we let some government pay the maternity leave, and finance it from income tax.
No incentive is probably an overstatement, but there would certainly be less incentive. Every employer would pay the average cost of paid parental leave, regardless of who they employed. That would reduce discrimination against those likely to use parental leave.
Though, I would probably fund it via a payroll tax so it could remain employer-paid. I don't think it makes any difference to the economics whether you tax the employee or the employer, but changing who pays is an additional decision you'd need to explain and that would be attacked by political opponents. A payroll tax is a smaller change and equally effective, so it's the better option.
You'd still have the costs of training or reallocating another employee to fill the persons role, and that risk would be higher in women if our society doesn't change its norms about whose the caregiver and whose the provider.
I'm aware of that. This is a case where one right is in conflict with another. There's no good answer. One group of people is going to lose and another is going to win.
The disadvantage women have is that they can't hide a pregnancy forever. Men can go to extreme lengths to hide their relationships. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a man to have two families at the same time, each one hidden from the other, and maintain this state of affairs for years before getting caught (otherwise we'd never hear about it).
The point about multiple hidden families was an example of the lengths men can go to in order to hide their relationships, not an endorsement of the practice.
The fact is, an employer has no right to know what, if any, relationships the employee has, let alone the pregnancy status of them.
The fact that employers discriminate against pregnant employees is the problem we should be addressing directly.
Birth records are public records, and if they aren't together, many states will require the father to pay child support once they figure out who he is. Sure, no one would have to know, but they can find out. If the non-pregnant partner carries the health insurance, they will probably want the pregnancy covered and the baby once it is born. An intelligent non-pregnant partner would change his tax exemptions to mirror their new family size (except in a few cases).
The tax forms might be a key: Require everyone to be honest about their underage children, whether or not they are dependents, and give the option to claim fewer dependents on their tax forms.
Yet another option is to handle it much like FMLA. The employer doesn't get the right to know exactly what is going on and the doctor can use medical codes instead of plain English. My ex's psychiatrist did this when he needed time off for a major mental illness (he later went on disability for said illness). The employer doesn't have to know, but he'll need similar notice.
Most of these are already in place and they already have your information about your family. Insurance providers, the IRS, and so on. Women already have absolutely no choice in people knowing they are expecting a child. For health reasons - both theirs and the baby's - they already need to take time off. It isn't like women can claim a back injury when they are pregnant. A few bad employers already put their hands in whether or not health insurance covers birth control. If this stuff is dystopian to you, you are already living in one.
Birth records are already there. Most employers won't look unless law, and I agree this isn't the best way to do it. However, if some time off is mandatory, it'd be reasonable for the state to inform the father he's required to take time off after the baby. Following the law would be his responsibility: The employer would only be forced to comply if they knew.
There are already regulations (either through law or company policies) about adding a child onto your health insurance. Most times, folks have to upgrade their health insurance to a family plan if it is their first child. For other children, they already have to report that to health insurance so the child is covered. A reminder from the insurance that the law requires parental leave as well as maternal leave would be prudent. These folks already are handling your information now.
FMLA is already in place. These folks already handle health records, and as mentioned, the reason can stay hidden from employers to an extent.
Yeah, so what if the father is the sole income earner of his starting family and being forced to take leave (with its attendant pay cut) causes him to miss a rental payment and his family gets evicted?
This is a draconian idea. Besides, employers don't want it! If they didn't want you coming to work, they would lay you off. Otherwise they're going to look the other way. Families living on the edge will do anything to avoid this problem, including leaving the father's name off the birth certificate, if it comes to that.
Don't think that you could, or that you'd want to. There's multiple groups here with conflicting interests and not everyone is going to get everything they want. Does a subset of men's desire to privacy trump both women's right to equality and the child's right to get care from its parents?
Google gives 12 weeks of gender neutral baby bonding time (on top of physical recovery time, for birth moms). Andcdotally (sample size between 5 and 10), men do take less time off than women, but not due to any kind of pressure. With both of my wife's pregnancies I took six weeks, by which time I really wanted to go back to the office so I could just sit quietly all day.
This. Going back to work is kind of a vacation after the first 6 weeks of having a baby. Heck, I’m currently a stay at home dad for my 18 month old while my wife works, and I often think she has it a bit easier :).
Many companies already do discriminate against people in committed relationships by making people work long hours in stressful conditions. At my last job several of the employees started having some serious relationship problems because of how demanding the company was. It's subtle enough to not be recognizable but it's there.
Not always. At the fortune 200 company I work at, they just introduced paid 8 weeks maternity/ paternity leave that can be taken in any form over the following year. All the engineers think it's great(ok the ones past prime childbirth age are a little jealous) , and a VP (a man) just took a substancial leave after the birth of his kid.
It's all about the culture. Get the culture right and the decrimination goes away.
Fathers face pressure to provide for their pregnant wife. I too would take five years off to look after babies. However, without a husband of my own, I cannot. The fact is that between my wife and I it makes more sense to invest in my career. We both graduated at the same time with the same degree. We both worked and earned the same salary. Then she wanted a baby. For the past two and a half years we’ve been dealing with very complicated pregnancies and my wife wants more babies. Okay, I love babies, but the fact is that while she could have worked had her pregnancies been easy, she cannot work now. Thus, I work because I am forced to provide for our family, not because I don’t want to spend time with babies. It’s just biological reality that no matter what we do there will be women like my wife who have complicated pregnancies and good men and husbands who will make the sacrifice of not spending time with children to ensure their children’s future. It’s not just about money and food. It’s about securing a place in society, which is not something any government welfare program can provide. Making business connections, colleague relationships, etc now will have a lasting impact on my family’s social status and it simply makes more sense for men to do that. Believe me, my wife and I would love for things to be different, but it really comes down to biology.
When I express my sadness that I have to work and can’t be with children all day long (same complaint my father and grandfather had), my wife often jokes that I should find a husband. It’s funny, but it’s ultimately true. Men are simply better able to do the sorts of things I take on in my family and women at the things my wife does
Fathers don't have any biological pressure, but mothers have a biological pressure to take the time off. Hence, on average, more women will take time off than men.
You are giving a reason not to deny a mother time with a child, not a reason for a father to spend less. There is no "biological pressure" that forces fathers to go back to work.
(as it happens, fathers can breastfeed, albeit not literally. Mothers can pump breastmilk for fathers to feed to the child, or they can use formula. It's a perfectly viable way to raise a child, and people do)
The fact that a factor in baby care taking (breastfeeding) is only possible for females creates a small bias in favor of female care taking.
The factor is small, and can be mitigated with little (but not null) effort.
My point is that OPs argument holds some water. Notably, it suffices to support the statement 'women are more likely to want to be care-taker than men'. There remains an argument about magnitude, and compensating effects, but there is a difference.
I agree completely. I think this effect of paternity leave is under appreciated by men and greatly feared by employers.
I can understand how an employer gets concerned about an employee being gone for 3 or 4 months and whether or not they admit it selecting/biasing against that possibility in hiring rather than just figuring out how to deal with it.
How is it regressive that compensation during parental leave depends on salary? Without that, women higher in the career ladder are disincentivized from taking maternity leave. Moreover, you might even get women who earn more on leave than during the job, which is simply weird.
> How is it regressive that compensation during parental leave depends on salary?
People who make more money for working make more money for not working. That's literally the definition of regressive.
To quote Wikipedia: "In terms of individual income and wealth, a regressive tax imposes a greater burden (relative to resources) on the poor than on the rich: there is an inverse relationship between the tax rate and the taxpayer's ability to pay, as measured by assets, consumption, or income."
If it's a fixed based on your salary, it would be neither regressive, nor progressive. It would be flat.
And that's assuming the government takes the money from thin air. If the government gets the money via a progressive tax, then distributes it in a flat manner, it's overall a progressive tax.
I think you are misunderstanding what a regressive tax is. A tax can be flat AND regressive (in fact, those are usually the kind that are). It is about the BURDEN of the tax being unequal, not the dollar amount.
For example, a speeding ticket is a regressive system, because a $200 dollar ticket is a lot more damaging to a poor person than a rich person.
By "flat" I mean a fixed percent of your income. A fixed $200 isn't a flat tax, because it's not a fixed percent of your income.
Yes, apparently-flat taxes can sometimes be regressive, for example a flat sales tax can be somewhat regressive because poor people spend a higher percent of their income compared to rich people. But this thread isn't about sales tax, so I don't think the flat tax in this situation is regressive.
We currently let companies have wide leeway in what they negotiate for compensation with their employees (and contractors). But the problem that you think deserves to be banned is that some companies pay the people on parental leave?
Man do I have bad news for you, my company gives people bonuses when they have children.
My wife thinks this is a terrible idea, why should she suffer through my depressed wages to pay for two income families to be subsidized to having dual leave for children?
This leave doesn’t come for free. Why should she pay for that when she chooses not to work?
What about if non-working moms also got the paid leave? Basically get a wage for the first six months?
We could cap it to only 2 or 3 times per person, to prevent someone just having a bunch of kids for money (although, as a parent, the idea that six months of salary would make having a kid financially beneficial is laughable)
If you're going to make a financial argument (as opposed to the moral one), you should take a look at how we fund entitlements in this country. You want population growth. The financial disincentive for having kids is a real problem.
If we actually take long-term economics in mind (broadly, the opportunity-cost and overall net effect style of economics, not the myopic just-count-real-dollars one), then we do NOT want population growth.
We don't want an aging population that has to be supported by a shrinking working-age population, but we don't want to be trapped in a growth bubble either. We want sustainable population with ever increasing quality of life due to scientific and technological advancement.
Population growth might be truly desired if we get to colonizing other planets…
If you want to make an economic argument, we don't want exponential population growth, unless you are looking forward to an unmitigated ecological disaster.
You want a steady population level, whether via births, or immigration, or both.
From all of us single people who are likely never going to have children. I'm fine with that. Hell, you can take it out of the mortgage interest deduction that I will never get.
Let’s stop pretending that this is some fantastical idea. Good employers in the United States do this today. Employers across the world do much more than this. Or perhaps you’re ignorant of Sweden’s 240 days of paid parental leave per parent?
I believe this is the path forward, as well. Using your example above in a gender-blind scenario, I can't imagine a scenario where a hiring manager would't choose the potential employee who would only take 2 weeks leave.
You could simply make it mandatory time off. But either way, he has a point. A company doesn't want to risk hiring someone that might miss a huge swath of time, for any reason. Not in every job but in many jobs, an employee isn't just an employee, they are an investment. If it was mandatory for both sexes though, it would level the playing field.
Then I won't notify the company when I've had a child. Simple as.
Don't consider going down the road of "you must declare what is happening in your private life to your private employer" as someone else did either, without at least considering what an absolute breach of privacy that would involve.
It wouldn't matter, because in the end the company would hire you or promote you with the same expectation as women. It would start to make less and less sense to not take the paternity leave because the opportunity cost would diminish. If you didn't take off, it would be your loss. The system wouldn't be perfect, but it would -help-
We've already decided as a society, in the US at least, that your right to privacy from your company concerning the existence of your children does not exist. The government is willing and able to inform your employer to garnish your wages when it comes to child support payments. They also know if you take dependents on your tax forms.
There are arguments to be made that this right _should_ exist, but since it doesn't currently its not a reason to stop mandatory leave
Biology doesn’t have much to do with it. Being a parent of a newborn is incredibly difficult, no matter if you’re the one bleeding continuously for eight weeks or not.
Women “need” to take more than zero days off. That’s true, at least in our modern conception of child rearing. Both parents should take at least two months off, especially in the current system where people don’t have much community or family support.
Or, you know, businesses and societies could leave that as a courtesy to just those that did chose to have children -- a group of people that every society that cares about sustaining itself forward should encourage and respect.
I was born the year with the most births in my country. We're paying my parents' generation retirement now. But when we will retire in 15..20 years, it's my son's generation (much less people) that should pay for us. Also we live longer and longer.
So unless drastic measures are taken now, crap retirement is waiting for us. No need to be a math genius to see. Some people is confident that the problem can be solved with taxes, but that's just wishful thinking.
Obvious solution: increase people that will pay in the future. Problem is we have a sky high unemployement. Even if we allow more inmigration, there are no jobs for them.
Another one: using a "capitalization" system. Instead of spending, save what we pay for later. Problem is no party will do that. A few weeks ago there was a massive demostration demanding retirement is updated with inflation. Everybody agrees that our elders deserve the best. Even a gradual transition to capitalization (the most reasonable measure) would cause the party defending it to sink.
Edit: in my previous comment there's a "that" where there should be a "than", maybe that caused a misundertanding?
This is a fallacy because there isnt some level of comfort people want to hit to comfortably retire, it will always be relative to the society around them.
>One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave.
One of the solutions to this is litigation, like in other countries, and burying any company that does it to the ground (including with consumer backslash and media shaming).
"Matching paternity leave" doesn't solve the problem for single mothers -- and it just provides a broader target to discriminate against.
Symmetric leave would help solve the problem for single mothers. The strategy doesn't rely on both parents getting leave, it relies on everyone at the company getting leave. The flaw with this strategy is it still allows discrimination against men and women who are likely to have babies, even though it discourages discrimination for men against women.
>it just provides a broader target to discriminate against.
Isn't that an improvement? If we could broaden it entirely such that everyone falls under the net of "potentially long leave taking" then effectively there would be no discrimination.
If I gave you the choice of two employees, one of whom would take 12 weeks of paid leave and one who would take 2 weeks of paid leave, which would you choose?
If you offered both sexes 12 weeks of paid leave, you wouldn't have to make this decision.