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Comment by tinbad | Hacker News Reader

Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take severance and leave. We had twins so she wasn't going back to work anyway but the fact that they tried left us with a bad taste.

EDIT: Let's call the company by name indeed.

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My wife interviewed at Google and was asked how she'd be able to meet the requirements of the job while taking care of young children; the discrimination persists even after pregnancy.

Isn't that illegal?

I imagine that Google, famous for their participation in an illegal wage fixing cartel and with its literal army of high-paid attorneys, isn’t too afraid of the legal consequences of discriminating against one woman. Well, so long as the NYTimes doesn’t write about it at least.

I doubt the lawyers would OK such a thing, even if they weren't afraid of the legal consequences. Interviewers are just employees on the loop with minimal training, and as such you're likely to run into a non-trivial portion that do dumb things in the interviews.

Google isn't a person and high-paid attorneys aren't antibodies. It's much more likely that people doing the interviews don't have a clue how to do it (likely because their expertise is software engineering, not recruiting)

The sooner we stop blaming faceless corporations and start acknowledging that each person involved in recruiting (including you and me) needs to take training and ethics more seriously, the better.

> Google isn't a person and high-paid attorneys aren't antibodies.

Obviously you don't live in the USA.

When people say corporation they clearly mean the board, the C level execs and regulations need to be put in place that promotes a culture of morality for the people that comprise and make these businesses function. You're blaming the individual for a cultural context that has been set by poor and morally bankrupt leadership.

There's obviously room for C-level execs to improve just as well as there is room for the engineers conducting interviews. It's not an either-or situation.

Perhaps ironically, I currently work at Uber (you know, the media darling). Here, I (and many others) feel strongly that the responsibility of fixing things is on everyone at every level, rather than something that comes exclusively from above.

Somehow after people lost faith in the old leadership, and gained faith in the new leadership, they built up the awareness and courage to speak up.

There has been some stuff coming from above (mandatory training about harassment, for example), but for the most part, initiatives to fix recruiting (and other aspects that have been in limbo) are self-organized by the engineers via interest groups, with awareness efforts in guild meetings, etc, and then those efforts bubble up the org chart sort of as an FYI. We tie these into what we call citizenship goals, which essentially work as an organizationally-blessed reason to do good.

Obviously I don't wish for other companies to go through the mud like Uber did, but it would great if the ethically-minded employees at other companies could find some other catalyst to take matters into their own hands. Even here, there's still a lot to do, and it has to be an ongoing effort, but I'm hopeful.

As a previous hiring manager, it's easy to getting stuck in the mindset that when you are doing shitty things for that faceless Corp that it isn't you doing that shitty thing, it's you doing what the Corp wants. It's hard to have the presence of mind to realize you are doing something for a entity that rarely is moral, but many times is amoral or even immoral

Yes. But when you have Google money do you care?

There's something that has always nagged at me in these discussions, and I've always been somewhat afraid to bring it up lest I misconstrue, but I want to try and figure this out.

What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against parents. However, we don't live in a world where a business is spared the cost incurred by that. That's just not the pragmatic reality of employment in the US at this time, and my fear is that if unable to ask "do you have a good track record or gameplan for keeping up with the unique obligations of childbearing" we'll err on the side of paranoia in hiring, and the discrimination will occur in seeking to AVOID potential conflict or discrimination.

A govt stipend was one way I could see this, in that the business doesn't have to bear the cost and can offload work. I'd still be concerned that a business might be afraid about context switching/onboarding, but it's a step forward. Unfortunately, I don't even see that becoming a reality in a country where paternity leave is still the exception and not the rule.

There almost seems to be a "psychological game theory" question lodged in there, apologies if I was rambly in stating it.

I am very much the wrong person for you to recruit in an attempt to apply the axiomatic method to discrimination laws. Discriminating against pregnant women is wrong because it's wrong, full stop.

Your statement of "recruit" is exactly the sort of misconstruction I was hoping to avoid.

threatofrain got it right. This is a problem we need to address, but the solutions I've seen thus far don't take unfortunate pathologies of human psychology into account, and when we don't do that, we get very surprised at the lack of results down the line. You're more than willing to try to live in a world where you say "Because we said X this is what's going to happen" but I find that to be far less proactive than trying to ask what actual responses are, as distasteful as they might be, and ways to address them.

My concern is that Rayiner's response, "we prohibit it because we made it a law" is still ignoring the key point. _it's too goddamn easy_ to discriminate and paint it as something else, too many reasons I could turn down ANY applicant, for me to just brush it off as "a law is sufficient." I believe that if this is a problem we _really_ want to fix, it's going to involve delving into some unpleasant trains of thought that aren't really "acceptable conversation" right now. I just worry that by ignoring it, the problem goes unaddressed, and we potentially foment resistance against it.

It feels naive to me to think that just because a law is "full stop necessary" in our moral frame of reference, to think that's sufficient to implement it effectively such that it generates the outcome you want in the long run.

I'm super confused at what you recommend needs changing. The law against pregnancy discrimination exists, but because it's easy to circumvent you want something stricter? Or you want the gov't to subsidize it?

I believe what GP is saying is that;

1. Having a child incurs a cost to employers.

2. Regardless of legality, a business will try to minimize this cost.

3. Since it's illegal during an interview to even touch upon the subject of having kids and what a candidate's strategy may be to remain a productive employee while raising a child, employers may be even more discriminatory towards _everyone_ of a child-bearing age, in order to avoid discriminating against recent or soon-to-be parents.

So, how can we alter the incentive structure for employers such that they're not tempted to discriminate. Should we shift the cost burden of child rearing to the govt? Or should we allow an employer to ask you about your plans for having children and how it will affect your employment

If I understand correctly, although the GP may have been suggesting government subsidy as a possible solution, the point wasn't that this is somehow "best" from broad or moral reasons.

Rather, it addresses the specific issue of there being an economic incentive to discriminate, intrinsic to all businesses.

Addressing that issue is compatible with concurrent solutions that outlaw the discrimination on moral grounds, or do so more strictly, or provide more aggressive enforcement.

Murder is wrong yet we don't spend infinity $ on trying to prevent it. There's a point where we go "we could spend more to prevent more murders but it's not worth it". Everything is ultimately subject to the constraints imposed by reality and therefore the economic costs and benefits related to certain behaviors. Therefore, designing policy based on willfully blind moralism is a terrible approach.

If you're not even willing to consider the idea of regulations to deal with the matter pragmatically (such as the govt stipend suggested by the person you were replying to), then the situation is just going to continue unchanged.

> we could spend more to prevent more murders but it's not worth it

that's a contradiction in terms. What's "it"? What could you spend and why is it worth less than it's supposed to? I'd argue that it fails because most direct attempts to stop murder involve more murder. Which is to say, no, we could not, or we would've done it, but of course the reasons are very difficult. An easy solution is to restrict the definitions, which is necessary, because death is awfully complicated for the mind to process, but therefore also subject to abuse.

And, individually we have less interest in our neighbor procreating. But in a benevolent reading, tptacek's quoted question could be reduced to "how will you be able to care of young children, given that we require a high degree of commitment to the company?"

I don’t think the person you are arguing with is disagreeing that discrimination against pregnant women (or mothers) is wrong. I got the sense they are trying to figure out how we combat it.

Yes, we can make it illegal, and enforce strictly, and yes we should do that. However, as long as their is a cost to companies when women take maternity leave, you are going to have to keep fighting the battle because companies will find new and creative ways to discriminate to save money.

What we need to do, in addition to enforcing anti-discrimination laws, is to have maternity and paternity leave mandated by law, and paid for with taxpayer dollars. The cost of having and raising the next generation should be shared.

We can all agree that the discrimination is wrong, full stop, but we need to be pragmatic and realistic in how we combat it.

> However, we don't live in a world where a business is spared the cost incurred by that.

We also live in a world where the stock market ceases to exist if there isn’t a new generation of consumers and workers. (Facebook’s stock price is predicated on the idea that 1 years from now there will still be young people to advertise to.) Children create internalized costs (to parents, to businesses that hire parents), but large positive externalities.

We address that situation by categorically prohibiting discrimintion. Yes, businesses aren’t spared the costs of dealing with peoples’ parental obligations. But it doesn’t matter because that is a cost all businesses have to accommodate (just like the cost of providing for bathroom breaks and lunch breaks and other accommodations for human needs).

One interpretation of existencebox is that he has already assumed the moral position that shielding pregnancies is wholesome for society, but he's asking the policy question of where the money should come from, or if government should get involved in evening out the burden.

On a tangential matter, I think many people would agree that society should consider financial help for children in poverty. But who should pay? The potentially poorer neighborhoods where they reside? The businesses in the area? Or the national government?

>but he's asking the policy question of where the money should come from, or if government should get involved in evening out the burden.

From the businesses. Paid paternal leave is already a legal mandate in just about every country. The US is very lacking in this regard.

Actually; that (From the business) is the part I don't agree with. (You're right that the US is comparatively lacking, however)

As Rayiner accurately points out, children are clearly necessary from a societal point of view. Thus, it seems "most fair" for the whole society to bear that, and for it to not be unevenly distributed such that it generates perverse incentives for business owners.

Large businesses do not pay their fair share to society and therefore should incur the cost of helping pay for the people that maintain and build their business.

I also agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden than smaller ones, but if we make any business pay in a headcount sensitive way, then we are creating disincentives which may be explored in opaque ways.

I also think that some industries, such as education, have substantially more women than men and thus will shoulder disproportionate burden. I also think that richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily.

I think these things point to a collective model of burden. I think bigger companies should shoulder uneven burden, but I'm not sure if different industries or areas should shoulder substantially different burden.

I suspect that well meaning attempts to rig the system that way would just backfire. Big companies have the resources, lawyers and incentives to manipulate and exploit regulations like that to their advantage. I think the simplest approach, which is just regulating against discrimination, may not be perfect but trying to come up with a perfect system will just impose so much regulation and costs and exploitable loopholes that it wouldn’t end up any better and could well be both worse and more expensive.

Note I’m not taking a blanket all regulation is bad stance. I support regulation to protect pregnant employees and family life. I am recruiting right now for a contractor to cover for a pregnant employee in my team (in the UK). I just think in general the simplest approach is usually the beast, or anyway the least worst.

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.

I don't think companies like Google discriminate because of funding. They discriminate because they want their engineers doing tons of overtime and focusing on their assigned projects at the expense of personal time and private lives. No amount of funding is going to change that culture.

Your third paragraph you say that this points to collective burden, so you actually don't agree that larger businesses should shoulder higher burden. You are more worried about the actions of the company then the moral implications to actual human beings, so you are highly immoral, noted.

Your third paragraph you say that this points to a collective burden, yet in this one you say richer areas will shoulder the burden more easily. Aside from this being a statement as vacuous as "the sky is blue", you are also completely missing the fact that higher education is already highly subsidized by alumni, government and corporations. If you are talking about k-12, yeah they are funded by local property taxes already, and are completely irrelevant to this conversation, as this conversation is about corporations.

I think these things point to a collective model of burden.

It's hard to tell what you actually think.

Might this unfairly subsidise companies paying higher salaries? So Google and their employees would get more money from the government to support their pregnant employees than Joes Pizza Company? Why?

Companies that pay higher salaries by their choice incur higher payroll costs. That’s just how that works. Trying to engineer the system to even that out somehow is just introducing bureaucracy and costs into the system. The only case I do have concerns about is small employers who by chance might get hit with the costs of a large proportion of their staff taking maternity/paternity leave at the same time. That could be crippling and possibly there should be some special programme to help those companies out.

> Might this unfairly subsidise companies paying higher salaries?

If designed properly it would not. High-income employees would get more pay out of the program, but they would also have to pay more into the program. It would be a wash, just like employment insurance or social security.

>From the businesses. Paid paternal leave is already a legal mandate in just about every country. The US is very lacking in this regard.

Yes, and in those other countries, the vast portion of the cost (just like the cost of health insurance) is borne by the government, not the business.

For example, in the UK, 92% of the mandated parental leave costs are paid by the government (technically it's a refund but you can get an advance on it). Employers can (and often do) offer more if they wish.

source: https://www.gov.uk/shared-parental-leave-and-pay-employer-gu...

First, as threatofrain correctly surmised, I'm not disagreeing for a moment that it's a necessity. I'm questioning if we're going about it with the right tools. Nostrademons pointed out very aptly how the current approach is falling short.

Your own example seems like a great point to make of the exact sort of perverse incentives one can create though. Tons of discussions lately about the gig economy and lack of worker protections. I'm not convinced this isn't at least in part related to the cost of full time workers vs. contractors.

As I said in my response to Rayiner, saying "We disallow this legally" simply isn't sufficient to prevent behavior, to my eyes. As a society, it's illegal to pursue corporate fraud, yet a board of political luminaries will back it, to be topical about things. It's illegal to discriminate vs. age, yet those threads pervade HN.

Would I like to live in a world where we didn't need to play incentive games/work around unconcious bias, absolutely, but that's simply not my (pessimistic) view of things.

So here's a concrete example of the types of problems existencebox is highlighting:

My sister was laid off from her employer of 8 years 3 months after her first child was born. She was a top performer, and they'd been throwing raises and bonuses at her before she got pregnant. Over the same year or so (there were 3-4 rounds of layoffs), every single pregnant woman or mother with kids under 2 that she knew at the company was also laid off.

I mention this story, and people ask me "Is that even legal?"

And my response is "Of course it's not, but if you've got a 3 month old newborn at home, have just been laid off, and are trying to conserve cash so you don't go bankrupt before getting another job (which, BTW, you will never get if you sue your former employer), are you really going to sue them? Where will you find the money? Where will you find the lawyer? Where will you find the time?"

And then even if you do, they are going to trot out a multimillion-$ defense team who will argue that they laid off 40% of the company, they sold off a business division, the price of oil was down 2/3 from its peak, and all of the layoffs were necessary for the survival of the company. All of which might or might not be true. Look at just a few women's story and it's pretty clear they're breaking the law, but factor in macroeconomic concerns and you can muddy in the waters just enough that they might win.

That's the problem. "It's illegal" does not automatically mean that you can't get away with it. In fact, if you're wealthy and pick the right targets, you can get away with a damn lot of things that are illegal.

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)

You are right that laws aren't enough. It's the same situation with a school bully. You can complain to the teacher about it and they will make them stop. Often the bully will then recruit other kids to bully you because you are a "snitch" or teachers pet. Similar to the whole blacklisting issue. That person stopped my illegal behavior so I'll show them etc.

What we have to fix is the idea that because someone undertook an enforcement action that they are a risk. If your company treats it's people fairly, you generally have nothing to worry about. If when presented with blacklist info people reported it (especially when it is illegal) the culture around this would improve.

It is free to file a discrimination complaint with the EEOC if you are in the US. They will investigate your claims and attempt to settle them with your employer. If your employer is unwilling to settle they can and do often sue on your behalf to ensure an equitable outcome. Additionally the Department of Labor will investigate your claims and can bring enforcement actions on your behalf. Additionally pregnancy is considered disability therefore you can also lodge an ADA complaint with the DOJ who will investigate your claims and bring enforcement actions on your behalf.

To say you have no options is incorrect. Bona fide violations of law are routinely handled by these agencies at no cost to the victim and are very often successful.

https://www.eeoc.gov/federal/fed_employees/filing_complaint....

https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/wysk/conciliation_litigat...

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/fmla/13.aspx

Edit: ADA to DOJ

https://www.ada.gov/filing_complaint.htm

Nit pick: the ADA is a law, not an agency. The DoJ is the agency that will prosecute violations of the act.

If you work in an incestuous industry like tech, you will be blacklisted in many circles for going down this path.

And as always, even worse-- You won't ever know if you just aren't up to snuff as an engineer / interviewer or if one or more of your interviewers, recruiters or hiring agents knows of and/or participates in such "blacklisting"

Which is also illegal, but companies openly get away with it every day.

The worst that ever happens is a slap on the wrist when all the major companies have non recruitment ("no poaching") agreements with each other, suppress wages, get caught, and have to pay a token fine.

Those situations can often be solved in much the same way. If someone is giving out malicious references due to an enforcement action, you report it to the EEOC or other agencies. That is also a violation and can result in further action on your behalf. Many states have statutes on the books against blacklisting and you may be able to engage the state DOL or other agencies to help you. These agencies have the full weight of the federal or state government behind them and are not in the habit of losing enforcement actions.

Nobody needs to give out malicious references when everyone just does lunch with everyone else.

Silicon Valley is a small place.

Blacklisting is typically done covertly though.

This is not likely to be the case. It is not so easy to pursue a retaliation complaint. I suggest you look at the case law history here. America is not France where the courts almost always side with employees. It's just the opposite. There's a very high bar for retaliation complaints and it's getting higher all the time [1]. These days you basically need a confession from your employer to establish that the retaliation was the "determinative factor."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/business/supreme-court-ra...

You left off a pretty important qualifier. If you're willing to entertain the fact that tech jobs exist outside of Silicon Valley, finding another equivalent job after winning a discrimination lawsuit against a former employer is no problem.

you will be blacklisted in many circles

One revelation of the Damore affair was that Google managers a) participate in blacklisting and b) are utterly brazen about it

This is not true. If you're an employee actually brave enough to pursue a discrimination a complaint with the EEOC understand that you will be blacklisted and/or subject to retaliation by various firms (not just your immediate employer). EEOC understands that retaliation is rampant [1] but America's very pro-business courts have made it impossible to prove in court. It is hardly "free" and certainly not recommended for most employees to pursue an EEOC complaint.

[1] https://www.bna.com/eeoc-ponders-ways-n17179928871/

> Where will you find the time?

If she doesn't have the time to work on a lawsuit, why would she have had the time to work at her job?

Because if she’s finding the money for a lawsuit she’s busy working.

What I don't get is... forget the "illegal" part, how is that not dumb? 3 months after your first child is born is when you start to accommodate with your new life. They will spend another 6 months-1y trying to find a reasonable replacement, and might very well end up with a poorer employee, and for sure one that needs to ramp up for a few months. By that time, she will likely be fully productive again.

What baffles me the most is that my (US) employer practices rampant positive discrimination when hiring women (I don't mind, btw). And I find it hard to believe they're unique in this. How does a company go from "we ned more gender diversity" to "let's fire the young mothers!"?

WRT "how to fix this".... it's one of the few things that my country has done fairly well, but it'd be unthinkable in the US: you can legally take up to 2 years of maternity leave (or paternity leave, but not both; I think social security covers most of the costs for the company). It's at a fraction of your salary, and there are incentives to come back to work sooner, but you can also stay the full 2y. If you come back sooner, the company is often just grateful, they don't question "how will you handle it" because well... you could've stayed home; you probably figured it out how to handle a small child. And after 2y, nobody really doubts that you can handle work & parenting. Firing you while pregnant is rampantly illegal, I've never heard anybody have this problem - but, indeed, there is sometimes/in some companies a reluctance to hire young childless women. Still, overall I think the rule is pretty good.

> What I don't get is... forget the "illegal" part, how is that not dumb?

It's a kind of bourgeoisie management ideology. The bosses insist that you, your time, and all of your attention belongs to them (we only want 110% players, etc).

When a child enters the picture, they have concrete evidence that the thing they believe is not true, and that's a subconscious threat. They need to either admit that their shitty paper distribution company is not actually the be-all-and-end-all of existence, or just eliminate the threat.

Which is to say that this behavior _is_ dumb, but it does serve a function in preserving the ego of management.

Weirdly enough "it's illegal" does in fact work just fine in a lot of countries. The US legal system being a borderline p2w scam is probably part of the problem, likewise that American companies rarely feel like they have a shared social responsibility and proudly adopt a "I gotta get mine fuck you" attitude.

> And my response is "Of course it's not, but if you've got a 3 month old newborn at home, have just been laid off, and are trying to conserve cash so you don't go bankrupt before getting another job (which, BTW, you will never get if you sue your former employer), are you really going to sue them? Where will you find the money? Where will you find the lawyer? Where will you find the time?"

That is one thing unions are good for.

But there's still a new generation of consumers and workers if only one company discriminates and everyone else plays fair.

Every company just thinks it gets to be that one company. It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario.

From general interest POV, FB stock price is peanuts compared to problems arising from to many people and overconsumption.

Maybe that's a problem in developing countries, but population increase is very slow in the US. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/usa-population-grow...

It does not make sense to quantize this based on national borders. We're all in the same atmosphere and biosphere.

And of course, any growth is bad in the current situation since the current level is so unsustainable - population should decrease, not increase.

> And of course, any growth is bad in the current situation since the current level is so unsustainable

Which resources are currently constrained? You'll find most of the growth is occuring in "low-maintanance" developing economies that don't consume as much (energy, food, goods, or any random metric per capita) as developed economies.

My counter-thesis: it's not the growth that's unsustainable, but the wasteful and environmentally unfriendly throw-away consumerist lifestyles.

Or, it should stabilize, and we should focus $$$ on sustainability rather than endless economic growth. Incidentally, the entirety of the world population could fit comfortably in the US alone, including the requisite farmland. Here's an interesting visualization of this:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-7-billion-people-live-in...

> We address that situation by categorically prohibiting discrimintion.

I think a part of existencebox's point is that this prohibition doesn't entirely work, because companies discriminate anyway, and craft the playing field so that they either don't get caught, or that the cost or repercussions of fighting back end up being too high for an individual to bear.

Perhaps if we were more willing to look at the actual negative effects (on job performance) caused by pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing, we could actually create incentives to "pay for" those negative effects and stamp out discrimination.

But no, instead we just "prohibit discrimination", without trying to find remedies for the reasons why companies want to discriminate in the first place. It helps, sure. But it falls far short of actually fixing the problem.

This is a very important part of the problem in my view.

Pregnancy and child rearing has a real cost for most businesses, and it is not surprising that discrimination occurs as a result. Trying to ignore those issues and simply make discrimination illegal will never be particularly effective because the underlying issues have not been addressed.

I think we would be better off acknowledging that those issues exist, but fostering a culture where making sacrifices to support families is considered absolutely worthwhile since it is such a fundamentally important part of our society.

There should still be laws against discrimination, but we should not expect the existence of those laws to police our behaviour. A person's behaviour is primarily controlled by what they believe is right, not what they believe is legal

Businesses aren't spared the benefits generated by their employees.

Employees are a benefit, not a cost. The fact employees have requirements of their own is something that happens in organisations run by humans for humans.

If you think employees are a cost, you're doing business wrong - and doing humanity wrong too.

This really comes down to a political issue - who is business for? In capitalist economies, business exists primarily to make money for shareholders and management.

The belief that this can excuse all kinds of incredibly inhumane behaviours is far more of a problem than the fact that women get pregnant and need time off.

Now - you can argue there is huge inconvenience in not having someone turn up to work for a while. From one point of view, it's certainly not ideal.

But a mature business should be able to deal with all kinds of challenges, including human issues, technical issues, political issues, and financial issues.

Being amazed and blindsided by a pregnancy, or even multiple pregnancies, suggests poor planning and a brittle culture. It's not evidence of freebooting capitalism, so much as of not being very good at management.

Everyone has to juggle various demands on their time. You could just as easily make the question more generic, and ask everyone "do you have a good track record or gameplan for keeping up with personal obligations and balancing them with your professional obligations as an employee?" Of course my answer to that question would be 'yes'.

This is an awful suggestion. Next you're going to be suggesting employers ask where on the Andre Walker Hair Typing System potential recruits fall so they don't have to ask whether or not they are black.

I have no idea what the "Andre Walker Hair Typing System" is or what it has to do with being black, but if it has anything to do with hair, it would seem completely irrelevant to how good of an employee one is (As is ones skin color). Further, the question I propose is a simple yes or no question, with the option to elaborate. And if you couldn't tell by my last sentence, I don't actually expect the response to be particularly meaningful in most cases.

> We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against parents. However, we don't live in a world where a business is spared the cost incurred by that.

The policy solution is:

- A per-child negative income tax sufficient to cover the risk/impact of employer discrimination.

- Give mothers and fathers equal leave.

- Limit the compulsory work week to 50 hours for salaried (or overtime hourly) employees.

- Penalties for violating the above sufficient to convince lawyers to take the case on a speculative basis if the client has a legitimate case.

That balances out the differences between genders and parents/non-parents sufficiently that anyone with sense wouldn't take the risk.

> A per-child negative income tax sufficient to cover the risk/impact of employer discrimination.

Wouldn't this just lead to employers discriminating, on the grounds that "hey, you already got your tax benefit to make up for it"?

Not if the penalties harsh enough that a decent lawyer will take an average case on spec.

You need to remember the effectiveness of a law is penalty * odds of getting caught. You just need to make discrimination unattractive financially and provide some incentive to the parents to cover the risk.

Other solutions, since we aren't going to see policy solutions in the US anytime soon, might include: - insurance to help companies pay for parental leave - state level policies (eg: California, but it only has 6 weeks which is hilariously short) - stronger enforcement of current laws

True, I agree under an ideal framework including a form of insurance for parental leave could also work in place of the negative income tax.

The world must be peopled!

Why?

The economy exists to serve the people not the other way around. The purpose of life is to preserve and develop life. If the economy is making it hard to live and reproduce the economy is maladaptive and will fail.

The problem is that the people refers to a group as a collective. The economy deals with individuals that make up a group. Individuals always triumph in the long run, which means that if you set rules where you discriminate against individuals that want to be different for the benefit of the group then you end up with a system that will eventually collapse.

Reminds me of a time when G.K. Chesterton saw a banner that asked, "Should store clerks be allowed to marry?" To which he retorted, "Should store clerks be allowed to be store clerks?" We do tend to forget the proper order of things at times.

Now that you mention it, a government stipend in some form seems like the only good solution. Without it, we're automatically punishing good nondiscriminatory businesses and rewarding discriminatory businesses who do get away with it.

It's spreading out the costs to everyone instead of focusing it on the one company that suddenly happens to have 10% or 30% of its workforce suddenly gone.

It seems much fairer to all parties involved.

It's stories like these that makes me thank God my wife (and mother to a 1.5 year old) doesn't work in tech. In her field of pharma there isn't a stigma associated with women of child-bearing age and when they announce they're pregnant.

What a field we're in when ranked output is all that matters at the cost of being human with human needs. I needed a kid as much as my wife. I guess I shouldn't expect any different by a field dominated by a bunch of male douchey autists.

> That's just not the pragmatic reality of employment in the US at this time

Correct, look at the German approach.

I'm not sure if the government subsidizes the companies for the lack of production, but the state mandates 1 year paid leave, and up to 3 and ability to get the same job back.

Now I know that is totally impractical for the tech sector, taken verbatim.

The US can learn from it anyway.

The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations.

Companies are nothing but made up of people. The irony is at one time or another these same people would have wanted the exact same benefits for themselves but they don’t like extending those same benefits to others.

If they can’t act in the larger national interest on a few of these occasions then they won’t have a population to sell to.

If they can’t act in the larger national interest on a few of these occasions then they won’t have a population to sell to.

Apple sells globally, should Apple also pay for the welfare of the countries where it sells its product?

The corporate tax rate has been reduced to something like 20%. Most companies in the US pay much less than that. The state is already subsidizing a lot for big corporations.

Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.

Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)

Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.

> Apple sells globally, should Apple also pay for the welfare of the countries where it sells its product?

Yes. And they do in countries which charge VAT. They should arguably be taxed on the profits they make in the territories they sell in, but that is much harder to do in practice without international cooperation.

> Some part of which flows to investors who purchase securities. Capital gains and dividends are taxed.

Capital gains are only taxed when they are realized. E.g. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway hasn't paid a dime in taxes on the 15.4 billion dollar capital gains on its 16.7 billion dollar stake in Coca Cola (a position he initiated in 1987). Since Buffett has indicated he isn't planning on selling Coca Cola ever, those capital gains won't ever be taxed.

> Companies can't earn record profits without government running deficit (by healthcare/infra expenditure) and without people running out of savings (by spending on the goods and services being produced)

Of course they can: by becoming more efficient or by growing GDP.

> Part of the value produced will be taxed in the US while the individuals and governments all over the world run out of saving and run into deficits respectively. All that flows to the US. Stopping this is much worse for the US.

Nonsense. If you had looked at the OECD government deficit data [1], you would have known that the US is running one of the biggest deficits in terms of % of GDP (4.94% in 2016 vs 1.546% for the EU as a whole, or a surplus of 1% for Germany). Similarly, personal savings are 2.8% in the US [2] vs 10% in the EU [3] or 50% in Japan [4].

Of course, this has little to do with the balance of trade, as you seem to be thinking. The US runs a trade deficit: it imports more than it exports. This is offset by capital inflows from abroad, meaning that a bigger and bigger share of the ownership of productive assets are being owned by foreigners. Returns on those assets will accrue to foreign investors.

[1] https://data.oecd.org/gga/general-government-deficit.htm

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/indicators

[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/indicators

[4] https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/indicators

GP mentioned the Corporate Tax.

VAT is an indirect tax. It's not a tax on profit but consumption, often paid by individuals.

Supplies used as input by companies are vat exempt.

I also mentioned taxes on dividends.

Buffet is not the only one operating in market.

Of course they can: by becoming more efficient or by growing GDP.

And how can they grow GDP or become more efficient without investment? Where does that money come from if not from the individuals (buying product/service) and government (spending on infra/healthcare)

Not sure what you are trying to prove by this random data.

US is the largest Foreign Direct receipent.

Yes, Europe the largest buyer of the US securities.

As US become more attractive to the foreign investors. The trade deficit will increase and will be financed by the foreign investors. Where is the problem?

> What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance?

Make the penalties for such discrimination large enough that, even when factoring in the uncertainty that they will be applied in each case, they outweigh any conceivable benefit.

So insurance actually is the vehicle that most companies utilize to protect against shortish-term disability (which does cover pregnancy). Second, tax credits exist for FMLA leave, which stack on top of normal favorable wage tax treatment. The financial burden is being collectivized already.

If you’re talking about the general time treatment that parents have vs non-parents, then I don’t know what to tell you. 40 hours a week is pretty attainable especially with flexibility around work day, which a progressive workspace like google should be able to support. If the problem is that google is set up to expect people to work themselves to death, that’s not smart and they should focus on that problem instead.

I agree. You can't have it all - a man with one butt can't dance at two weddings. You have to make a choice between aggressively getting ahead in your career and family.

I think more couples should think about the effect that thier (not just her) career will have on thier family and choose to make the necessary lifestyle choices accordingly.

I married my wife in our mid thirties and she had two kids she was raising by herself - in a good neighborhood (meaning they weren't struggling). We've made plenty of career limiting choices to put our marriage and our family first. She took a pay cut to work a job with fewer hours and less pay and I gave up all of my side hustles and refuse to work a job that requires extended frequent travel, long hours, or a long commute.

I don't expect a business to accomadate my family choices or to reward me as highly as someone who is willing to put in 70 hours a week. On the other hand, a business shouldn't expect me to sacrifice more than 40-45 hours a week with my family for their benefit. I'd much rather lose my job than lose my wife.

You look at workplace performance directly, that's how. Employers fundamentally aren't entitled to the residual value of workplace performance above and beyond the standards they demand for the renumeration they provide.

Possibly you can create an option that allows employees to self-discriminate. Say, "drop down to 30 hrs/wk with some work-from-home flexibility" for a significant drop in pay. You'll get roughly the same level of performance in many creative arts like programming, but since it's the employee's choice to take the company isn't responsible for "discriminating".

You seem to assume being a parent (as an employee) is all downside and no upside (for the company). Let me suggest this unstated assumption is not accurate. You learn a lot when you have a family that you aren't likely to learn any other way.

My ex was a really smart guy, but not much of a people person. He once told me that most of what he knew about being a good manager he learned from being married to me. Otherwise, he would be good at the technical parts of his job, but he wouldn't be any good at dealing with people.

Part of what I knew about dealing with people came from being a full time parent. I'm also much more of a people person than he was, but potential gets developed by practice and real world experience. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.

It's amazing to me that a single company can be simultaneously fending off the recently-sealed Damore suit and still be discriminating against women. It's as if it's lip service on both sides, while all actions are just made in the company's interest (rolling over employee's interests whenever they contradict it, discrimination or not).

I hate to be rude but why are you surprised? Companies are not a single person and that goes extra for big companies. It’s possible for all of the above to be true.

Don’t forget local managers and do things against company policy which causes weird stories like the above.

This predates Damore by several years.

How did they found out? Did they ask?

They asked about the resume gap from when she had our kids.

Unfortunately lying is the correct response here.

Oh, that's different, IIUC, if an employer asks about a history gap, and the candidate volunteers the information "I had kids," they can take that into account.

The system's broken.

None of that matters. An employer is free to ask any questions they want.

What they aren't free to do is make discriminatory hiring decisions based on membership in protected classes.

Avoiding asking certain types of personal questions is one way to avoid the appearance of discriminatory hiring practices.

>they can take that into account.

They can't take that into account just because you bring it up. Whether or not you bring it up or they ask doesn't matter. Some jurisdictions have laws explicitly forbiding discrimination against parents, and the federal prohibition on sex discrimination means that discrimination against caregivers is generally prohibited (since women are more likely to be caregivers, discrimination against them is defacto discriminatory towards women)

Well, that's like... a whole different situation. Why wouldn't you mention that ?

And there's... "hey Joe's got young kids and needs to be 9-5 now, you're single so can't you pick up the slack?" Or "you're not married, can't you be on the pager during Xmas/Turkey-day/weekend". They are two abusive sides of the same coin.

The abuse is the compulsory, unpaid pager, and the expectation that you’re working 7a-9p. “Joe” with the young kids pushes back because he has to. You’re the sucker saying yes.

The fix for this is easy. You pay for on-call, and have a understood system for assigning it. My brother in law is a fireman... he misses many holidays, but can plan around it because there is such a system.

I think you're agreeing with me but, actually it's not clear that Joe pushed back or that "I'm a sucker"... it's that boss Fred has kids too and gives some slack to people like himself.

And the reason your brother-in-law has such a system with paid overtime is a union... which is unlikely to affect IT until AIs organize and demand work-life balance.

> “Joe” with the young kids pushes back because he has to.

Having children is just a choice of a hobby that takes a lot of time, but in our current culture it's reprehensible for me to say I can't fill in his hours because I have my own hobbies that I want to do instead.

Children are sort of a social necessity, hence carrying more gravitas than conventional hobbies. Obviously "I can't work because I'm cartooning" is gonna be met with more skepticism than "I'm taking care of a sick kid"

Can guarantee you that all large (tech) companies have mandatory interview training whose main goal is to avoid these issues... unfortunately when you have a company this large, there's always going to be that-one-guy that will still act like a jerk.

Questions about race, age, religion, pregnancy, civil status, disability are all off-limit. This interviewer was out of line, and should be reported to the recruiter.

Not that it doesn't happen, but even asking that question is legally actionable.

It's a fair question. Though it needs to be asked regardless of candidate's gender.

I'm the father of a young child. No company would ever ask me this question. But maybe they should.

Because I'm just as distracted from my work/career by my toddler as any mother would be. And if they decided not to hire me on account of that I certainly would not blame them.

Wait... you guys had “pre-existing” kids and they asked that? What the actual f?

How did your wife respond? :)

According to this web page (https://www.californiaemployeerightslawyer.com/family-respon...), using that information as part of the decision-making process would be against the law if it happened in California.

I don't think there's much controversy about that.

I'm curious to know whether she reported it, either to the company or to the relevant branch of law enforcement, or whether she considered reporting it.

That is insane that they asked this during an interview. Wow. Either HR has no sway over things or they are complicit.

What's funny about big corporations is they will always always always ask employees to pitch in, help out, make sacrifices, etc. for the betterment of the corporation: to get work done, to survive lean times, etc. And yet when the shoe is on the other foot they are always the most incredibly reluctant to make any sacrifice, even small ones, to help their employees. And this isn't just a matter of finances, financially it makes sense to retain good employees at almost any cost, because it costs a ton of money to hire and train new employees (sometimes upwards of a year's worth of salary for the position in equivalent costs), and that's aside from the ancillary benefits of retaining employees longer (better work environment, higher skill level workers, more able to reliably execute on challenging projects, etc.) So much of it just comes down to power dynamics.

You see this at small companies and start ups as well. I've seen it first hand myself.

What level was your wife? I hypothesize that the higher your level the more insulated you are from being mistreated. I've seen quite a few L5+ (Senior) go on maternity leave and come back seemingly without issue, but then again I don't know for sure.

My manager at said company once said to me that my planned paternity leave "is untimely" with a straight face.

What's wrong with them saying that?

Because the timeliness of paternity/maternity leave is determined by the childbirth's date, not by anything else.

That's obvious to anyone who knows how humans replicate.

The sentiment of the comment was that the timing was unfortunate because the kid was born in the same period that had presumably something else going on on the work side. Not that the child was born. So either the OP had some prior "history" with his manager, which changed the literal meaning of the comment, or he is reading too much into it.

What is the childbirth's date roughly determined by? There's an event that must occur before childbirth is even possible.

Are you legit suggesting that people should do their family planning around their employer's convenience?

Is that how you read my comment? Odd, because that's not what I wrote at all. The comment I replied to suggested that the timing of a child's birth was completely random and unpredictable. I suggested that's not the case. I don't know how you got from what I wrote to what you read, that's quite a mental leap!

so you wrote it to just state the obvious and in no way to imply that i should've planned conception around my future promotion attempt? got it.

12 months paid and not having to show up for work?

> ... wasn't going back to work anyway ...

Adding in severance pay on top of that, sounds like a sweet deal!

Who knows, may have received more in a lawsuit.

Interesting. I'm genuinely surprised that a company like Google with both massive financial resources and who actively court a progressive public image would be so shortsighted as to start systematically discriminating against pregnant women.

Google isn't that shortsighted. The behavior described in that comment is both disgusting and horribly against policy. (I work there part-time; I get most of the "don't be stupid in this way" training.)

But I'm not surprised that in a company of > 70k people, there are some who either shouldn't be involved in hiring, or desperately need more clue. The real question is if on a per-capita basis, Google's managing to make it better over time.

Same thing happened to my wife at Facebook. They waited a few weeks and then tried to dredge up anything they thought would stick before relenting.

> We had twins so she wasn't going back to work anyway

But the company would have still had to keep the position open anyways. Here we see the root causes of pregnancy discrimination.

I'm not doubting what happened in your wife's situation, but it strikes me as strange that this would happen at a company where both men and women are given longer parental / bonding leave than is required by US law (and, in China, more than is required by Chinese law). The obvious reason why the company would offer this, is because it helps with employee recruitment, retention and productivity over the long term.

And, given how hard it is for large companies in the bay area to hire enough people who fit their needs, it seems irrational to let someone go for only this reason.

That helps the company in general, but on individual teams the incentives are different and the manager may have decided it was worth it for him to try and kill this behavior or just get the employee gone now so that he could get in queue for getting a replacement ASAP.

> the fact that they tried left us with a bad taste.

This is really one of the fundamental reasons that not taking care of mothers & fathers (and in fact: going after them) is just such a boneheaded move. It’s a statement of culture. Companies are full of mothers and fathers, and how you treat expectant mothers is a statement on your corporate values. If you need to put it into financial terms — which you shouldn’t — you will lose more value with a weaker talent pool and higher recruiting costs treating people poorly, than you will by doing the right thing.

You should name the company, assuming there are no legal barriers to doing so. How can we possibly fight back against abuse if we default to anonymizing the perpetrators out of fear?

"EDIT: Let's call the company by name indeed."

I'm glad you decided to do this. The practice is not going to change if people don't call it out when it happens.

> After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take severance and leave.

How does this also not result in expensive lawsuit.

Possibly. We were/are lucky in that we both have good job prospects and plenty of opportunities to pursue, at the time we just wanted to enjoy our family time and the last thing we wanted is to engage in a legal battle. I'm sure we could've gotten more out of it had we wanted it (at least financially), not sure if same can be said for the time and energy put in though.

Having been involved in a lawsuit, and despite winning it, they sap the life out of you.

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand you were totally in the right and should have sued if they persisted. At the same time I have a hard time being emotionally upset at a company/manager behaving rationally. The fact that your wife didn't go back to work will subconsciously reinforce the idea to not hire birthing age women. This is also a huge problem in the UK if anecdotes from my friends are any indication, women of birthing age have a very hard time finding work because employers don't want to be saddled with paying massive leave and then severance.

A good argument for parental leave not being tied to employer, and instead being tied paid by the state.

I've heard of moms before who would rather tell the truth that they're not coming back after leave, but there's little upside and a lot of risk.

I'm not sure the paid leave and severance is really the primary issue. Sure, money is money, but it's very expensive to find a good employee. When someone goes on leave like that you can't fill the position. Since they can't fill your position your team is stuck having to work extra to pick up the slack, and then if 90% of women don't wind up coming back it's just that much longer before you can find someone decent to fill the position.

90% of moms not coming back is an exaggeration for the bay area.

Part of what we're not talking about here (in this whole thread) is the cost of child care. Child care in SF is over $1700 a month, and hard to find for 3 month olds, which is why a lot of parents quit after leave.

I reckon we'll get a lot more parents staying in the workforce if the government helped more with childcare across all income ranges. Childcare comes at a lower income time of life, often when around when people have recently purchased a home.

We're also likely to have fewer parents drop out of the workforce if they can get their infants to 6+ months with a parent. Childcare is easier to find for 6 month olds than 3 month olds.

I looked it up, the stat is 43% of mothers leave the work force after having a baby. Yeah, 90% is an exaggeration, but 43% is a huge chunk of women. This isn't intended to debate you, just to put a real number on it. The article I got this stat from talks about some of the things you mentioned.

I'm far from an expert so I could be totally wrong but the little bit of literature I've read on outcomes for children suggests a full time stay at home parent provides the best outcomes. That almost certainly doesn't have to be the mom specifically, but if we're going to subsidize behavior, I would prefer to subsidize whatever behavior provides the best outcomes for children. The article below suggests part time work from home opportunities with deadline based projects. That might be a reasonable answer, but again someone with actual expertise on child rearing/psychology should set policy here. The best outcomes might not be [parent] getting back to work in 6 months or even a year.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/why-43-of-...

If 43% of women leave the workforce after having a child, it’s still more likely than not that your employee is coming back. And my guess is that the number of women who plan to come back and then don’t is much smaller than 43%, because - to the surprise of many - women often know what they want in life. (That snark is not aimed at you, btw, just that this thread is full of people second-guessing women.)

It's ok to name companies that do bad things, even if it's effectively a powerful company like Google. Especially if it's a powerful company like Google, they are almost a nation-state at this point.

Account deleted

This sounds contrived, at the very least extremely anecdotal with a bit of hyperbole sprinkled on top.

The article has a form to fill out to submit additional anecdotes; you should encourage her to do that if she's comfortable. I bet Google would really like NYT readers to think this is only a thing that happens at "other companies" and people need to know that it definitely isn't.

How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy?

I know the law doesn't care, but I care. There's a difference between informing your manager one month after you're hired that you're pregnant (been there, felt totally fooled - as the manager, that is) and will need to take time off quite soon, and doing it like a year or so later.

The "always positive performance reviews" bit implies some sizeable amount of time before the announcement, which is why I'm asking.

What do you want people to do when they are job searching while pregnant? Are you just wishing you'd been told on her first day on the job?

Let me answer this with a counter-question. If you're pregnant and somehow hiding it really well, do you think it makes sense for you to job-hunting six weeks before you're due to give birth?

FUCK yes. Kids cost money. Jobs are how you get money. And I say this as someone who hired a woman who then told us she would give birth in two months, and we were fine.

Wow, that sounds like straight up fraud to me. Do companies in America get financial support from the government for employees on pregnancy leave?

Do companies you work at not hire employees for the long term?

They mainly hire people to replace others that quit/retired or to fill a new position created to support a team with a steadily growing workload. New hires are subject to a 3 month probation period during which both parties can end the contract at will. More than 80% of all positions are long term.

I would hope that someone looking for a long term employment at a company would be honest and upfront with something like a planned 1-year vacation. My only gripe with the parent poster is that they are hiding(rightfully so) this so close before their planned leave and thus do not appear serious about a long term employment at that company.

1 year vacation? ROFL. In America 3 months of paid maternity leave is a good dead. Also, in America both parties can end a job at will at any time. Also also, referring to parental leave as "vacation" is pretty weird.

I sure hope you are not involved with hiring at your company because your perspective on this is a great way to get sued into oblivion.

It's actually in your best interest as the hiring company to not find out if the person is pregnant or expecting to have a child. Let's say that you decided not to hire someone for a set of reasons unrelated to pregnancy, but along the way you asked the candidate if they were planning to get pregnant. Good luck proving that you didn't make the hiring decision on the basis of knowing they would take leave. Which of course is illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. This is why most companies make it a policy that you can not ask these kinds of questions so as not to taint the interview (even though technically it's not illegal to ask the questions, it's just illegal to use them as a basis for your decision).

As a candidate you might actually be acting more in the interest of the company to not tell them you are going to be having a child so as not to put them in that position? I honestly haven't thought through it that much so I could be convinced of a different opinion.

If you're planning to continue working after having a child, I think you should go about your career as if the pregnancy wasn't happening and just take the leave as appropriate. If that means you work 6 weeks before leave, so be it. You'll be back after leave to continue on.

What would the company do if instead of getting pregnant you got hit by a bus one day? I had to take 2 months of medical leave on 2 weeks notice when I got deathly ill, that was way less notice than a pregnancy. The startup I was at had only 12 people and they handled it. I'm unconvinced by all these arguments that it's too much of a hardship for companies to deal with their employees having a life.

People get hit by buses, but would you hire someone who you KNEW was going to get hit by a bus in six weeks?

Raising a newborn is not a vacation, that’s a highly insulting statement.

My team has hired more than one person that immediately went on leave. We literally paid them for months before they started. We did this knowingly, and I cite this with other candidates as a concrete example of how well we treat our employees.

Guess what, in our industry the people that are planning to have kids are also very likely to be senior and experienced. They're hard to recruit. Consider leave as part of the cost of hiring good people.

If you're not doing things like this, you're not actually competing for top talent.

>We did this knowingly

Great, but the parent poster is hiding(again, rightfully so) their planned leave from their future employer.

Fraud is intentionally misrepresenting information in order to affect how the other party would act to cause a financial gain/loss. It is illegal for the other party to change how they act based on information about a pregnancy, therefore there is no legally admissible injury to the company. Legally, you're probably in about the same situation as a drug dealer accusing someone of stealing some of his goods - if you can prove that they actually caused you damages (ie: that you had a stash of drugs, or that you would deliberately not hire a candidate because they were pregnant), you're worse off than before.

Literally the only reason to tell a prospective employer about your pregnancy status is to enable them to unlawfully discriminate against you based on that status.

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.

While we're at it, why shouldn't any prospective employee with a health condition that might require extensive time off be required to disclose that? And, since people aren't often the best judge of their health conditions and the impositions they'll make on future employers, perhaps it'd be better if we all just disclosed our complete medical records along with our job applications.

Well, philosophically, at some point yes. There should be some level of personal responsibility not to sign up for a job that you don't intend to do. I don't think being required to provide detailed medical records is reasonable, a good faith, optimistic best-case is enough for me.

And while you might see pregnancy as equivalent to having a medical condition there are actually a number of fairly important differences. For example, in the modern era, pregnancy is more controllable than illness. Quite a number of people enthusiastically plan on it. Those aspects, intent and control, are important for determining who should bear the cost. The cost should not settle on an unwitting employer looking for a new hire.

I have a health condition which causes me to be suddenly absent for a week at a time 1-4 times a year. I absolutely disclose this to any prospective employer because I don’t want them to grumble when it happens.

It points to the state sponsored solution. If a single employer is supposed to carry the burden then they will obviously want to hire young healthy men above anyone else.

Fortunately this is exactly how it's implemented in most European countries: if the employee is not working the employer doesn't pay. The (usually state run) insurer does.

Requiring businesses to pay for someone taking time to care of their children is patently stupid and unjust and there is fully justified pushback against such laws.

"Employers should not be forced to ignore relevant factors when hiring."

But they are - that's the law. The same legal system that allows the corporation to exist at all and earn money in this environment requires them to ignore the fact that someone may be going on maternal leave and not discriminate based on it.

We the voters have decided that this is more important than the profits of any company, and in the end the voters (i.e. mostly employees) get to decide the rules of society, not the companies.

If you knew you had to take time off in two months to recover from a scheduled medical operation, would you rather spend the next two months earning a salary or surviving on your savings?

I think it always makes sense to go looking for a job when you don't have one and you wish to be an independent adult and support yourself through employment.

But, obviously, we're not talking the same kind of "makes sense" here, are we?

If you're un-/under-employed and need the money, of course.

If your old job doesn't provide halfway decent health benefits or paid parental leave, of course.

If your old job sucks your soul and makes you want to slit your wrists, of course.

My wife been searching for a job for quite some time (about a 2-3 years), during that time we've been trying to conceive a baby, but no luck, went through few eco sessions, still no dice. We decided to give up on idea of having a baby and just relax and live our lives. Then suddenly she gets a job offer she was dreaming about and one week later, guess what? She is pregnant. Now what would you tell your wife? Give up job you've been dreaming about?

a) 2 years, b) ~4 months in

And yeah, I would understand it better if she had just joined or it was a smaller company. We we're in extra shock because the company goes out of their way to publicly promote these benefits and the work-life balance blabla.

Ok, gotcha. I'm also kind of shocked by that kind of behavior by Google. This goes against so much of their employer branding that they've spent so much on.

(Was it in Ad sales? - I guess I could see that unit being run in a more "rough" way - sales teams tend to be super macho.)

"How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy?"

It can't be more than 9 months. A year, tops.

In all seriousness, if you've gotten multiple performance reviews, that implies they've been there for a while.

A friend of mine interviewed and was hired while pregnant, and disclosed that fact immediately after signing her contract. The response, correctly, was "Oh. Well, we'll make that work." And they did.

That's both the legal thing to do and the ethical thing to do. What else are you proposing?

That's disgustingly unethical.

Google doesn't offer 12 month paid leave. Are you thinking of a different company? Edit: sorry, this is a U.S. centered viewpoint. Other countries will mandate different leave policies.

"WE had twins so SHE wasn't going back to work anyway"

I'd say you were discriminating her way more than Google.

Kids are ruinous for women careers but only partly for practice like one described.

The other reason is that we as families, partners and society in general accept that kids are, essentially, a woman job.

Some women actually like taking care of children more than working their job.

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