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Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

Have a look at:

* The impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages, and children https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-007-9023-0

* Is there a glass ceiling over Europe? Exploring the gender pay gap across the wages distribution https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/92046/1/2005-25.pdf

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> 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?

I think that's not the issue under discussion.

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.

RE your analogy, I don't think this is true in general. There are many jobs/people where the downtime is needed to perform better. That's certainly the case for me and in my field.

To your main point: You are absolutely right. Germany, for example, tries to symmetries the problem by allowing fathers to take part of the maternity leave. But of course, especially in high paying jobs where companies have to invest a considerable amount into a worker to train them, a maternity leave, or any other reduction of total working time at the company, will affect the salary. The question is now: Do we, as a society, treat the privilege to raise a child as adequate replacement of the lost salary/promotions etc? If not, who makes up for the difference?

As a (happy) dad, I'm very surprised by this :

>>> Do we, as a society, treat the privilege to raise a child as adequate replacement of the lost salary/promotions etc?

I'm very surprised of the opposition you make here.

I'd prefer : Do we, as a society, treat the choice to raise a child as one that doesn't imply the loss of salary/promotions etc?

(but in my case, my employer has never spent tons of money on me; "considerable training" means to me : a year of full time training such as : mastering a foreign tongue, mastering a technical field besides IT, etc. It's certainly not "we'll leave you learn by yourself at night and pay for your lack of efficiency during the first 6 months of work"))

My point is this: There is a business cost associated with people who choose to be parents: They may be absent for an extended period of time (which in some fields is a big problem), they are often less flexible with hours/week, which hours on a given day, when they want holidays. They choose a more healthy work-life balance, which for the employer means "more life, less work". It's also opportunity cost for you: While you care for your kid, you can not go for an extended trip to a different country, or jump head first into a technology to learn at night because your kid will wake you up at 6, and on weekends, you are out and play with him. Clearly this will reduces your chance for a promotion compared to the workaholic who knows all the new buzzword technologies. One could say, yes, ok, I took that trade-off, but now I got to be a dad, and that's worth more to me.

Or, as a society, we can say: You should not need to make that trade-off. Or at least: You should not lose that much. It's hard to correct the disadvantage in terms of promotion, but other things are possible. Some examples, some are horrible: - Force the companies to maintain open positions for (m/p)aternity leaves. Either pay for that with taxes, or make the companies eat the cost. - Give people with kids tax breaks / money. - Force people to take a sabbatical every n years if they don't take maternity leave. (But of course some people will use that time to work on their skills anyway...) - Provide good child care so that people can more easily work and have kids. - Shun people who don't have kids...

What society can not do is make this difference magically go away.

I think you might underestimate the amount your employer has invested in you. Maybe a better benchmark is: How much would it cost him to replace you if you quit your job in three month.

>>> One could say, yes, ok, I took that trade-off, but now I got to be a dad, and that's worth more to me.

That's it ! More precisely : I've chosen to be dad for reasons which are absolutely not rational. Therefore, the question of the trade off is not that important.

>>> You should not lose that much

yep, that's what I'm aiming for.

Thing is, the way you put it, I understood that "business suffers from those people who choose to be parents". For me parents are like taxes : as a business, that is as a member of the society, you abide to respect the rules : you pay your taxes because the society decided it's positive for everybody, ditto for parents.

But I think we agree :-)

>>> I think you might underestimate the amount your employer has invested in you.

>>> How much would it cost him to replace you

Not much : maybe waiting a year to find an ideal candidate (so I'd say a month of work), and then a year to train the guy (say, 6 months). So basically 7 months of salary. not much. Hint : I don't work in hyper hitech stuff, I just run very big, long lived applications; nothing fancy.

> if a woman (or man) spent 8 hours every day of every vacation secretly working, they would definitely get better wages and career progression

In a meritocracy, sure...

But you want humans to have children, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fathers in Norway are forced to take a maternity leave, which are equally long as mothers' leaves. That's seems like a fair solution.

> But you want humans to have children, right?

While I do, I don't think most of Western public policy does. It seems like we've fundamentally outsourced children to third world countries. Raising a child in any state is going to be much costlier than raising him/her in the Philippines for example.

When the children become economically valuable adults - or prove to have enough economic potential (say by being admitted into a university), they are imported into the West. In a very cynical way, this is sort of what immigration has become. Instead of tackling the issue of why people are not reproducing, public policy seems happier to drain the most economically useful citizens from other countries.

Friendly correction: for fathers, it's called a paternity leave. I thoroughly enjoyed mine, and recommend all parents to if possible do the same :)

And some fathers would LOVE a paternity leave (you would't have to force them). I just had a baby 6 weeks ago and took 4 week off (3 paid, 1 unpaid) of my own vacation time.

I understand that the baby is more dependent on the mother and childbirth is obviously more physically taxing on women, but I'd like to see more equality for men too. Women at my company can get 6 months PTO.

> But you want humans to have children, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fathers in Norway are forced to take a maternity leave

In Norway, if you choose the 100% paid leave, it's 10 weeks for the father and 10 weeks for the mother and then 26 weeks distributed between the father and the mother however they like. But those 10 weeks of the father's paternity leave you cannot transfer to the mother.

But it's not forced: If you'd rather work than take 10 weeks of 100% paid leave, you can. The Norwegians might find it hard to understand why someone would not take the leave, but different countries have different cultures.

https://www.nav.no/en/Home/Benefits+and+services/Relatert+in...

> 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.

Any kind of leave is a gap in the worker's experience and in the value the worker provides to the company.

No, there's no evidence that paid maternity leaves harm women's wages or career progression. Uniformly across the world, paid maternity leaves correlate strongly with more gender equality in the workforce, including in pay and career progression.

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.

Your comment is like saying that outlawing murder makes more murders happen. It takes a whole lot of motivated reasoning to make that leap.

> 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.

The claim wasn't that all paid maternity leave harms women's wages. The claim was that _long_ maternity leave _may_ harm women's wages or career progression in Nordic countries.

Please avoid 'hot takes' and read the article listed yourself.

>There is significant empirical evidence that shows that policies such as long paid maternity leave harms women's wages and career progression.

That's the problem -- not the maternity leave.

That's why civilized countries are moving on, from mandatory leave for mothers to mandatory leave for both parents.

I think using verbiage such as 'civilised countries' to indicate those mandating one's policy preferences (with the implication that those which do not mandate them are correspondingly uncivilised) is counter to the tone HN asks for.

Stop posting evidence, you can see by your downvotes, that when HN asks for "substantive" comments it surely doesn't mean evidence-based.

I got the impression that the downvotes are because of:

> There is significant empirical evidence that shows that policies such as long paid maternity leave harms women's wages and career progression.

Which is not untrue, but has nothing to do with why maternity leave is beneficial, namely for the individual.

Since we asked you to stop using HN for ideological battle and you've continued to do so, we've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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