This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting.
Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us.
Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.
I think the primary point of the article is that this flexible planning is not functioning as an equalizer in the workplace (Title: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home...) and that it could, and should. To turn it into more direct phrasing; a woman has to take a significant chunk of time off during a pregnancy by virtue of the condition, and this has a net effect on her career.
When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing). So an employer accounts for the loss of that duty in different ways such as shifting responsibilities. And many of these ways become a limit to career success. Imagine she is closing a large sales deal but has to leave before close due to pregnancy - so she is no longer the clear performer in that sale, as it is closed by someone else. This reduces her effectiveness on paper (becomes a detractor) due to gender differences (becomes unequal).
A man has been given flexibility to give and take that same time in a way that permits some juggling of work and family supporting efforts - i.e your example case. You worked part time, she could really not do that in her case. This lets you stay active in your role (little effect on your responsibilities) when she could not.
My point basically boils down to this: making parental leave about something other than enabling parents to recover and take care of their kids is really kludgey, and probably would have made our experience of raising our son more difficult unless it was really, really long (like one year long).
The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.
I see your meaning clearly now - but your point then is obviously tangential.
To your argument I also personally don't know there is any reliable way to equalize this problem. Men and women are created differently, and nature is unfair - just ask the fly and the spider. The social contract means we so far mostly anyway agree it is better treat equally than to force equality (shades of Bergeron is poignant - and yes this inches us closer).
Any intervention like this won't be perfect for some people. Just like the status quo isn't perfect. The question is not, "Would change X be equally great for all people?" but "Is change X net less bad?"
If you think that there's a change X' that would be better yet, you should definitely propose it. But if you're just saying, "I don't care about fixing a problem that benefits me if the solution isn't perfect for me," you can see how that's not the most compelling of arguments.
> When a woman takes off for pregnancy it is known up front it is for several months, and she is also indisposed during that time (can't answer questions or take quick phone calls, because she is not able to perform at peak levels while convalescing).
So wouldn't it be ideal for the mother's partner to be able to participate 24-7 to help her recover and to help both parents bond closely with the child? And not be expected to be tugged back by ties to work?
FWIW I had a lawyer who was messaging with clients from the delivery room. So not sure about your stereotype.
I know for a fact pregnancy is hard on the body - my experience was nearly 12hrs delivery and my wife was in the ICU for 3 days following. It took months to recover completely.
In your rush to defend your personal 'stereotype'; I hope you understand that being able to message clients from the delivery room is unusual. No matter what your intent in saying this, never underestimate the serious nature of childbirth.
But women don't have to have children, in fact it would be much better if they didn't. You write your post as if it's all miraculous conception.
Women can make a choice to do something that will impact their career negatively. Men don't have that choice.
People who don't intend to have children subsidising people who do (who are on average already richer and more privileged) is deeply messed up. This only makes sense from a very narrow middle class upper-echelon-gender-equality is the most important thing in society lense.
But employers know that you might have children and if you are a woman that you will have a certain amount of time off work as a result. So they might choose to employ a man instead even if you don't plan to have children yourself. Obviously illegal in many jurisdictions but extremely hard to prove.
This is more of a problem of our current system of maternity leave being company funded rather than publically funded which would actually solve this problem overnight.
So if being born means that I have to approve of any measure which causes more births, then logically I should be in favour of for example reducing contraceptive programs in Africa, etc.
Being born doesn't automatically force you to support population increase or be a hypocrite. Even if you had a moral obligation to maximise (total number of people that will ever live), then that number is probably larger (because of humanity surviving into the future) if we drastically cut population in the present.
It begins with “Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap”. Not, what would be valuable for men.
A woman who just gave birth just spent an increasingly personally costly, and completely requisite (so long as the pregnancy is wanted), nine months simply getting to the maternity leave portion of the process. I can’t immagi how a woman would perceive for men to gawk at it even being suggested they be forced to take maternity leave. If a man won’t take maternity leave the woman must and that is after the pregnancy they just sacrificed during.
Given the SCOTUS hearing at the moment, for such a tone deaf comment to be on HN says all you need to know.
Could you please not up the ante like this on HN? This comment and the ones you added below take the thread into flamewar. Picking a gotcha phrase from what someone posted and giving them a smackdown leads straight to degraded discussion.
Instead, please follow the site guidelines and (a) assume good faith, and (b) react to the most plausible interpretation of what someone said, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Both of those are necessary for thoughtful conversation, which is what we're trying for here. That still leaves plenty of room to disagree, and then your disagreement will be much higher-quality, be more likely to convince others, and much more likely to lead to interesting (a.k.a. unpredictable) responses.
I meant valuable in terms of what I was contributing to the family ... when I took 9 months of part-time paternity leave. I feel like you didn’t really think about what I was saying. All of this was the result of lots of planning and long discussions between the two of us about how we would take care of our son, and how this would affect each of our careers — you really don’t need to lecture me here.
That is an unedited opinion piece [1] from somebody who works for an antifeminist organization [2]. If that's what you count as proof, then maybe consider you're not being objective here.
It's described as anti-feminist by some critics, namely the critics who are being disingenuous in their use of statistics lacking proper controls, or outright lying or misrepresenting what the statistics mean. It's not the brand of feminism they identify with, but it's still feminism.
Perhaps "proven" wasn't the best word for the parent, you can't ever prove a negative, but considering the wage gap vanishes to less than several cents with proper controls in every serious study, even those done by "pro-feminist" organizations that you claim would be objective[1], it's simply a myth.
Objectively, a gap of 4 to 7 cents may exist, but also may just need further statistical controls[2]. The 70 cent gap oft quoted is entirely meant to incite emotion, social unrest, government action, and is dismissive of the progress that has been made.
[2] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy/hr-public-policy... * "Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous
conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a
multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify
corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be
almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers."
It is described as antifeminist by most feminists. And by me, for what it's worth.
I think you're burying a lot in "proper controls". And quoting a Bush administration official suggesting it's all about "individual choice" as if it were a neutral statement is not even vaguely giving a fair picture.
Under capitalism, the whole point of market signals like wages and prices is to shape individual choice. So it's tautological to suggest that accounting for individual choice proves that there's no sexism embedded in the system.
The reasonable feminist critique of approaches like this is that women don't just magically prefer part-time, family-friendly work any more than they just happened to prefer to be homemakers through most of history. In that view, we have been removing structural impediments to a fair society for centuries, and the work is not done yet.
Can you dispute the claims made? I grabbed the first Google result but there are many. I can’t find a single piece of data that says women are paid 70% of men for the same job. Can you?
You're seriously asking me to do free research for the guy who started with an opinion and uncritically posted the first Google hit that agreed with his position? Why would that be a good use of my time?
I’ve already done the research, but you don’t seem to believe me so I’m telling you to go look for yourself. The “wage gap” is not a thing and it’s inevitable people are going to tell you that if you try to promote it.
If you have done the research, then a) why did you cite an unreviewed opinion piece as your only evidence, and b) why did you ask me to do the work of disputing your claims instead of just providing the evidence?
That's a nice bit of PR but if you look at Salesforce's old blog, you'll see there was no gender pay gap:
"Our assessment showed that we needed to adjust some salaries—for both men and women. Approximately six percent of employees required a salary adjustment, and roughly the same number of women and men were impacted. Salesforce has spent nearly $3 million dollars to eliminate statistically significant differences in pay."
Not doing any work 2 months in would have seemed wasteful, and being expected to go 100% at 7 months in would have been inconvenient for both of us.
Not everyone has access to this, but I feel really grateful that I did. It seems like the best arrangement possible, at least for us.