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Comment by Mon29Oct | Hacker News Reader

This has been observed since Scandinavian countries pushed very female-friendly work laws, only to have differences in gender preferences more marked than ever. The book The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox submits two pieces of explanation to it, which are that 1/ One of the reforms was to offer sumptuous parent leave, encouraging parents to distance themselves from work for a significant duration, but which made the mothers gain less experience than the fathers who usually don't take the leave and 2/ Those reforms incurred strong taxes and diminished spending power, more especially making child care less affordable, again distancing mothers from work.

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I don't know that book, but it's wrong on childcare being less affordable.

Atleast in Denmark and Sweden child care is heavily subsidized, to the point of being free for very low income parents (in dk). So there is no way it can make economic sense for mothers not to work. And stay at home moms (for more than 1-2 years) is rare compared to the USA.

You still pay the opportunity cost, even if you are getting a monthly income. Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time?

Forcing parents to have equal amounts of parental leave, as we do in Sweden (well, we incentivized it,) is a form of imposed equality of outcome. Equality of outcome is often said to be some disease of modern feminism, but really, what's the alternative?

Going against our primal instincts is essential for a productive society. "Man strong - hunt food, woman caring - raise child" or some religious justification of similar dubiousness is _not_ enough.

At the end of the day, it's going to be a balancing act of imposing on individual freedom such that individual freedom is at all possible. I personally am more inclined towards letting people be who they are, but that's what created gender inequality and racism in the first place.

The alternative is equality of opportunity. If some people in society want to do some activity knowing they won't build job experience while doing so, let them, even if other people don't want to and become more employable as a result. That's freedom.

Whether e.g. women on average tend to take more parental leave is only a small subset of those sorts of situations in society.

I (a man) took a months-long parental leave fairly recently which surely hurt my job prospects, how could it not? But I chose to do it anyway. Should other men that didn't make that choice be forced to do the same to even things out?

A similar but slightly different anecdote - I'm a 34-year-old man, and my wife stays home with our two children. We're very aware that this has hurt her earning potential, which means that if I were to die suddenly she'd be in a real financial crisis. To offset that disparity in earning potential, we've had to purchase significant life and disability policies on me.

This, addressed at the macro level, probably calls for the societies to function in ways that incorporate exercise of sufficient sense of solidarity and empathy.

A relevant argument is made strongly here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBSUkDXekMM

I can't agree with much of anything in that video. The question is immediately reframed as a strawman ("childcare is not work"), but that's not at all what I'm saying.

My household absolutely derives value from my wife's labor. What is impacted here is earning potential; if my wife were to need to seek employment outside the home in order to earn income, her income would be substantially less than it would have been if she had been gaining relevant experience during this time in our lives.

The lecture and the Q&A where the points were made predates your comment here and is not necessarily about the pros and cons of an individual on the short term, assessed under rather unfair political-economic regulation.

The analysis is at the macro level, with a view to why/how a society can pursue reforms towards fairer socioeconomic reality, instead of being submissive to the prevailing order. Slavery, for one, seemed unmovable too at one point in history.

Money isn't everything. If you can afford it spend as much time as you can with your kids if you have the chance.

If you are a mere 'Salaryman' there's no way your loss of income is worth more than the experience and relationship you gain.

Equality of opportunity is a complex topic that sounds good to everyone but also means different things to everyone. The reason is that opportunities are, themselves, often the result of earlier choices.

For instance, the opportunity for a desirable job may be the result of earlier experience attained, which may be the result of choices about how much time to spend on work versus family or other pursuits.

It gets even more complex when you take this back to the time of birth. Differences among parents represent a huge difference in opportunity for their children. But it's hard to imagine this changing dramatically: parents work very hard to give their children whatever kinds of benefits they possibly can -- social, financial, cultural, educational. If you could ever truly prevent parents from giving their children benefits that not all children have, it would remove almost all of the incentive for most kinds of success, and the consequences would be unimaginable (and probably dystopian).

This aligns with my understanding. I applaud every experiment in this space. We just don't seem to know enough about ourselves for folks to speak as confidently about these terms and their impacts as we do.

As I'm raising my kid I'm amazed at how important just keeping her curious and oriented towards the unknown is. Just teaching her how to manage her own emotions and external frustrations. Even at a very young age I see parents conditioning their male children to physically _push_ through problems and frustrations but the girls are so often taught to communicate and understand their feelings _before_ acting. This then seems to really influence the types of activities they are introduced to and ultimately excel at.

If I'm being honest with myself when my emotional intelligence finally caught in my 30s it was a bit embarrassing. I just didn't have a good skill set for dealing with frustrations which weren't physical.

</ramble>

As the GP you're replying to: All of this is correct.

Commenting on this & the thread at large though there's a general confusion here between the narrow question of whether the right way to subsidize e.g. parental leave should be done at the employer level, and whether it's worthwhile to do so at all.

Many here are assuming that an objection to the former is equivalent to an objection to the latter.

That's not the case at all. It's possible to be a proponent of radically progressive social policies that would massively benefit parents raising children and be 100% against those policies having any negative downstream impact on companies trying to hire them as workers in the future.

E.g. one way to do that (just spitballing here) would be to recognize that a new individual in society is likely to have a long-term positive revenue impact for the government. Some percentage (e.g. 10%) of their taxes would be paid directly to their parents, and this amount could be paid on birth on the basis of median income in the country and adjusted past the age of 18 accordingly.

This would give parents a massive subsidy lifetime subsidy, and a huge incentive to steer their children towards lucrative careers which would have a positive impact on economic growth.

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time?

Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad.

I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone.

We're living in an era where, resource-wise, we could be post-scarcity, but politically, it's all locked up in a shitty, shitty system.

I want to keep imagining a world in which people are truly free, and not just free to keep grinding away at a job because the alternative is starvation or privation.

Scandinavian countries do not go that far. This privilege is only granted to parents. The goal is NOT to give people the right to go on un-paid leave for any reason, but rather to promote gender equality as well as encourage people to have children. (The latter to prevent birth rates to fall too far below the replacement rate.)

The Scandinavian economic model relies heavily on high work life participation for funding, so encouraging people to take time off for other reasons would not make sense.

Also, maybe it’s good for the newborn to have a parent around during their most formative time.

> I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone.

Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year?

Your idea is fine utopian, fluffy unicorn, ideology. But practically it just won't work. This doesn't have anything to do with politics or a shitty system. It is just the facts of reality, if you are out of practice of your profession for year your skills won't be as sharp as someone who hasn't taken a year off.

Surgeons can and do take a year off from their practice, and return to work. I would absolutely be patient #1 after some surgeon's sabbatical.

I also find it deeply depressing that "a person should be able to take a year off work" is now utopian, fluffy unicorn ideology on a forum for forward-thinking technologists.

Oh, you totally should be able to take off for a year. The same way you can elect not to go to university. Or look in the laser. You just have to live with the consequences. And in many, many professions, a year or so out of practice means that you are measurably worse. Maybe (but likely) worse than before you left, but almost certainly worse than you could be if you would have used that year to get better at what ever you do.

Are you still going to be worse after a month of work?

Are companies that short-term-oriented?

>Are companies that short-term-oriented?

Publicly traded ones. There are only 3 months between Earnings Reports.

Depends really on what work you are doing. Garbage collector, probably no. Helicopter pilot, probably yes.

In software, a year off might mean you get better. If you have more time to work on your own ideas and explore new paradigms instead of cranking out fizzbuzz all day in between commutes, you can become better.

Totally. Same goes for sabbaticals in science, for example. It really depends on what you are doing in that year though, and how fast your particular field is moving.

The year off isn’t the fluffy unicorn bit. The fluffy unicorn bit is that you think your choices should have no consequences.

If you want to take a decade off work, you certainly have that right. But that doesn’t mean employers should pretend that you have an extra decade of experience, just as your choice to forgo a degree doesn’t mean an employer should pretend you earned a doctorate.

Ah so discriminating against the posh kid who took a "Gap Yah" is ok now.

Presumably we should discriminate against all 4 year graduates as they took an extra year to graduate's who do it in 3.

> Presumably we should discriminate against all 4 year graduates as they took an extra year to graduate's who do it in 3.

We do. All things being equal, the person hired a year earlier will have higher pay. As they should, since they have an extra year of experience. Assuming equal candidates, the one with more experience will do a better job (second system syndrome notwithstanding).

What's absolutely amazing to me is that one of the biggest complaints about unions you see is how pay is tied to seniority; the worker who's there the longest gets the most pay, not the one who "deserves" the most pay.

And here people are arguing the exact same thing!!! One extra year of time working means higher pay!

That's exactly what a lot of union pay scales are structured like, but that's evil unions; this is somehow just right???

You’re misunderstanding. Rewarding for merit will bias towards higher pay for experience. More experience will in general lead to higher merit and thus higher pay.

Also HN, despite the meme, is not a hive mind. Some here are in support of unions and don’t consider them evil.

> I also find it deeply depressing that "a person should be able to take a year off work" is now utopian, fluffy unicorn ideology on a forum for forward-thinking technologists.

There is nothing stopping you from taking a year off work. Go right head. You won't get paid, and they won't hold your job, and you will have gap to explain when you are interviewing for a position when you want to return. Don't expect the world to bend backwards and ignore realities so you can take a year off.

>Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year?

There can be something like a transition period. The world is not binary. Surgeons get sick. They get injured. They take time off. Just like everyone else. The reason they took time off should not be relevant.

The reason should not be relevant.

The fact that they did could be (in some cases), IMO.

Many people here have echoed the fears and complaints I've heard on this topic. Simply that somehow taking parental leave at all puts you at a disadvantage. Or puts you in a position where you have to explain yourself.

I feel like what is being done here is to [ironically] force an equality of outcome on every metric _except_ the one that swings the argument.

The very nature of equality of _opportunity_ means to me that it doesn't matter at all that I took time off. Am I qualified? Do I have demonstrable expertise? References? Education? A unique perspective?

You may be generally curious about my year off but the idea that it somehow invalidates _any_ of my other qualifications feels silly and limits my opportunity based on external factors which don't impact my ability to do the job. It's just that you don't seem to fit the world view of others so it's suspect.

_This_ is the complaint: that a talented professional coming back to the work force loses out not because of ability but because of violating social norms.

I'm not at all curious about your year off (other than as incidental conversation if you choose to bring it up). I am curious about your experience and competency, both overall and in terms of recency/currency, as I believe both of those are strongly correlated to your projected contributions to my company.

A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

The point I'm trying to make is that you do seem to be making this A > B comparison without caring about the quality of those hours. Again, it seems to present the argument in a way that echoes the concerns I've heard. "A" simply starts off with an advantage in how you keep presenting it.

There doesn't seem to be room in your opinion or examples for a pilot with 3k hours flying commercial vs someone with 5k hours flying as a hobby on the weekends. 3k is simply less that 5k, right? You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

If you agree that this is a ridiculous over simplification in order to prove my point then we may be on the same page.

The very nature of your comments makes me envision a women on the other side of your hiring decision wondering why she couldn't get you to focus on the _quality_ of the work and stop fixating on the _quantity_ of time spent doing it. Because that is exactly what I'm trying to do now.

> You don't care _how_ they spent those 5k hours...simply that they have them?

I didn’t go deep, because this isn’t an aviation forum, but sure the quality of hours matters. Retract, multi, instrument, PIC, dual given, high-performance, turbine, jet, 91, 135, 121, etc all matter. Smash-n-goes in a 172 aren’t the same as flying the line/signing for a transport jet.

Anything past the FAA ATP 1500 hour mark, the quality matters. Before that, quantity dominates for airline candidates.

Blerg. Then also an apology. You did say that your post was in your _opinion_. I chose to engage. You were kind enough to respond and expand on your opinion. If I missed that and used a needlessly harsh tone then please know that was not my intent. At least not originally.

No sweat; it's impossible in a typical HN-length post to cover every possible expansion of an argument; I took no offense to the post that ended up flagged/dead [by others] and hope I gave no offense with my own.

>A pilot with 5K hours of experience is more experienced (in the pilot job market) than one with 4K. I don't care that you could have had that extra 1K hours if you'd worked an extra year instead of doing something else. I only care whether you do or don't (as it pertains to this dimension of the evaluation).

This example, along with ones others have given, all reduce to the same thing: You are not interested in determining the skills of your candidate - you are interested in determining experience. Presumably with a dubious belief that your metric is a good proxy for those skills.

>I am curious about your experience and competency

Yet your example only addresses one of these.

To the last point, I believe that, ceteris paribus, competency increases with experience and decreases with time out of the daily exercise of those skills.

Of course everyone tries to evaluate absolute competency (ceteris non paribus) in an interview. I’m not suggesting that anyone stop doing that. I am stating a belief that experience is positively correlated and perhaps a necessary precondition of competency. If that's the case, considering experience as a component of the overall evaluation is indicated.

But we don't want surgery from an overworked surgeon either.

I completely agree. In fact the whole residency thing in the medical profession, is an awful, awful, system.

Taking a year off probably isn't "being held against you" per-se. But after that year, you're competing against all the people who didn't take a year off. And in many contexts that year of honing skills, staying abreast of industry developments, etc., is valued enough to tip the scales.

I'm surprised nobody thinks that people who come form a leave may be more "thirsty" to catch up with their time off and filled with a good energy. Am I alone to think that? People also reflect a lot while on their leave and may end up knowing what fits them better upon returning to work.

Agreed. To arbitrarily rule against someone who took time off is very short-sighted. So please don't think that I'm exactly defending that mindset or the practice. Just trying to point out how (some|many|???) prospective employers might view the situation.

What on Earth are you actually proposing, that all else being equal someone who takes a year off work should earn the exact same pay or get the same job as someone who spent that year working? You are falling down an extremely slippery slope.

> Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad.

Why?

It makes me sad that anyone would want to force business to take on risk that it wouldn't otherwise in the name of "equality".

Choices have consequences, if you choose to stay out of work for a year to raise your child then you will be less employable.

Businesses exist at our leisure -- not the other way around.

As we build and refine our society, it's entirely up to us to determine how best we want to put businesses to work, to improve society.

Anyone who wants the benefits of owning a business can be subject to those rules. Anyone who doesn't want to play by those rules can go solo or work for someone who does.

> Anyone who wants the benefits of owning a business can be subject to those rules.

Oh, those benefits of running a business. You know, like working more hours than everyone else, putting your own money on the line, being the last to get paid. Here's some hard facts:

1. Most businesses are small businesses

2. Most people are employed in small to medium businesses

3. Most businesses fail because they lose money

If you push for more and more requirements of businesses to fulfill, only the biggest corporations will be able to survive, because those are the companies that can deal with all the regulation, all the legal risk, who figure out all the tax loopholes, who have the best standing with banks, etc.

You'll eventually kill all the competition from the bottom. There won't be any more artisan bakeries or coffee shops, there will be McDonalds and Starbucks. Everywhere. No more innovative software startups, only Facebook, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Apple.

> Anyone who doesn't want to play by those rules can go solo or work for someone who does.

Good jobs don't fall from the sky. Big corporations also happen to be really good at making people redundant.

McDonalds is primarily a franchise operation, with the actual restaurants being owned by what could (if you squint) be considered "small businesses".

The financial resources required to buy and run an McD franchise are pretty hefty, so it's not exactly going to first timers, or people who don't already know how to run a franchise.

I'm aware of that, though not so much of the details. I'm trying to make a point of the blandness of the food. In a way, it's the worst of both worlds.

Many small businesses I've seen are also incredibly exploitative. I don't believe we should be defending these practices; if a small business really can't afford basic human decency, maybe it should not exist? And maybe the effort should be refocused on asking how to allow small businesses to afford being humane while not losing ground to large corporations.

What are the biggest hurdles (challenges) to starting and running a small business?

What would you change to encourage, empower small businesses?

I find this response, and the downvotes on the parent comment, incredibly sad.

If you want to live in a libertarian fantasy world with no safety net, you are free to create one, and try to attract citizens to your country.

Even in prehistoric times, it was generally understood that there was societal benefit to letting women take care of children when they were extremely young and that perhaps letting a new mother skip some of her normal chores so she could breastfeed would be better for the tribe as her baby could grow up to be a hunter and help bring in more food and resources.

HN moderators, you should check the biases of the mod brigade.

I'm out of this conversation. Immediate downvotes because I don't agree with the toxic alt-right views that seem to dominate conversations like these.

I'm done with this discussion; seems we can't have a meaningful one.

"people disagree with me so they must be alt-right"

Please.

"toxic alt right"?

I express anything not patently left and i'm instantly vote brigaded into oblivion. You're living in a fantasy world if you think anything here is "alt right".

Boo for whining about downvotes and accusing everyone who doesn't agree with you of being alt-right.

You're being intellectually dishonest here. You expect to be able to share your point of view without critical response but you insult others for expressing theirs.

You shouldn't express points of view through moderation. Replying to the comment is the appropriate way to express differing points of view.

I agree. Unfortunately that's not the HR stance. I can't find it now but PG stated years ago that downvotes are appropriate for expressing disagreement on HN.

Also, I'm not sure votes count as moderation. Moderation is generally something that exists at a level above community feedback.

Parental leave is not a safety net. Parenthood can be planned - it isn't some random catastrophe that befalls you for which you need an insurance safety net.

Note that I do support strong parental leave policies, and advocate for such wherever I work.

> Parenthood can be planned - it isn't some random catastrophe that befalls you for which you need an insurance safety net.

While you're obviously right that one can plan to become pregnant, that doesn't make unplanned pregnancies a non-issue. So, that safety net is beneficial.

Whether an unplanned pregnancy results in parenthood is a planned choice.

It's not always a choice. And even where there is a choice, it's not an easy one.

A couple in their early 30's just meet up after getting home from work. The wife, nervous, approaches her husband and says, "I have something to tell you". She pauses, taking in the moment, and him. "I'm pregnant".

Is that an easy moment for you? If she has an abortion, then chances are higher that she could never have a child again. It's not just a "choice". Christ.

>Even in prehistoric times, it was generally understood that there was societal benefit to letting women take care of children

In prehistoric times a village raised a child, not an individual.

> If you want to live in a libertarian fantasy world with no safety net, you are free to create one, and try to attract citizens to your country.

For better or worse, you just described the early industrial United States. And people flocked from all over the world to come to it.

That might a lot to do with the highly available and relatively untapped resources and cheap land. Britain was more industrialized and progressing faster than the US at the time, but only received a fraction of the amount of immigration, but it was also highly settled with much more expensive land and most resources already claimed/owned and being tapped to fuel their industrialization.

>It makes me sad that anyone would want to force business to take on risk that it wouldn't otherwise

I think the conflict is between those who value people more or businesses more. In the US, businesses are often seen as a core and fundamental part of a society. In many other countries, it is not. That's why you get responses like "Businesses exist to serve people, not the other way round".

>Choices have consequences, if you choose to stay out of work for a year to raise your child then you will be less employable.

There really are not many jobs where things change fast enough in one year that your ability to do the job is adversely affected. Including SW. I've looked, and it's hard to find a SW job that involves cutting edge technology (AI may be the exception these days).

I get the sense a number of people feel that the person who worked instead of taking the time off should be given extra credit for that work, but I do not find the argument compelling. At least where I work, he does get something extra for it - a higher pay. People who go on parental leave in my company do not get the same income while they are off as they did at work - they get a percentage of their salary (I think it is tax free so it's "about the same" as their salary). But everything extra (i.e. bonuses) is prorated - they get nothing for the time they are off.

1. Have you ever wondered whether there's other human values - perhaps kinder and more loving values - than venal self-interest and capital accumulation?

2. The word 'choice' is not really apposite here, given that one sex, by the mere lottery of birth, carries the burden of pregnancy (and, culturally - with a similar determinacy - women are expected to rear their children in their early years).

> 2. The word 'choice' is not really apposite here, given that one sex, by the mere lottery of birth, carries the burden of pregnancy

Welcome to life, it isn't equal, and never will be. Maybe we should stop trying to make the playing field level and just appreciate and celebrate the differences.

'Welcome to life, it isn't equal, and never will be.'

Right, that is 'life' in the sense that it is, to some partial extent - and I say partial because women regularly successfully reintegrate back into the work force, and many employers don't have your dim view of things - the existing state of things. But humans, if you had not noticed from the ideological and political revolutions of the last three-hundred years, can change and improve society. It is simply factually and politically absurd to say that X is reality at the moment, so X should or must always be reality. You would not say that of the various inequalities - of sex, race and class - of the past, so why say it now?

'Maybe we should stop trying to make the playing field level and just appreciate and celebrate the differences.'

There is nothing intrinsically valuable in 'difference', e.g. a master is different from his slave, but that hardly justifies the difference. So no, I don't think we should bathe in the glory of our inequalities, and chastise people who think we could do better.

>There is nothing intrinsically valuable in 'difference'

There is nothing intrinsically valuable in equality.

FTFY

I said what I meant - obviously - so you didn't 'fix' anything.

I was arguing against your suggestion that inequality - and the ways in which society is gendered to the disadvantage of women in particular - is a natural part of 'life' that we should just fatalistically reconcile ourselves to. Maybe I was wrong, and you don't object to equality on empirical grounds (although perhaps they were never serious, anyway), but because you're an anti-egalitarian reactionary.

Why should celebrate some people being underpaid for their efforts?

> Maybe we should stop trying to make the playing field level and just appreciate and celebrate the differences.

Funny how I never heard this argument when the anti-poaching agreements between tech giants were revealed. Maybe we ought to have celebrated the unfair differences between man and employer?

HN's capacity for empathy seems rather limited until they (we?) are at the pointy-end of the stick. Drifting back towards the topic, I believe in the hacker spirit of experimenting/striving towards how things could be, instead of being satisfied with the stolid status quo.

We're all building a future together here, and "life isn't equal and never will be" is a dire, shitty attitude to take.

You said I have fluffy unicorn ideology in another thread here, and I think that's bullshit, especially in the resource-rich 21st century. As resource-rich as we are now, the future's gonna be even brighter.

If you just want to recreate the "life is unequal" structures in the 22nd century, why fucking bother at all?

You can get outraged and mad, and kick and scream all you want.

But it is completely and utterly stupid to "fight for equality". If you want to waste your time and energy, feel free. But people are born differently, some have better bone density, some have a high metabolism, some can build muscle faster. Some people are stronger, faster, smarter, etc. than others.

This makes the world INTERESTING. I am glad there is resistance. I am glad that people need to fight for a better job, or higher pay. How rewarding is it when you finally get that better job, or get the raise. How fucking proud and good do you feel when you claw your way to the top and reap the reward? You want take that away and just hand out the same rewards to everyone? Nah, sounds like a great way to have a dull life and meaningless world.

Not outraged, not mad, not kicking and screaming, I think your attitude is damaged.

"Completely and utterly stupid to fight for equality."

"I'm glad people need to fight for a better job."

Retrograde and sad, and a recipe for a continually miserable world.

Give everyone enough, give everyone what they need, and let's see what humanity is actually capable of. Any other attitudes, any other goals belong, rightly so, in the dustbin of history.

Most businesses are small businesses. Think restaurants, cafés, small retailers, etc...

Most are owned by individuals who have families, employ individuals with families and cumulatively small businesses such as these employ a rather large percentage of the labour force.

For many individuals and their families, the fact they can put up a small amount of capital and start a business is the only way they can ensure a future for themselves and their children.

Not all business owners are already rich SV venture capitalists or multi-millionaires. And his point is valid - how much risk do you force upon blue-collar small business owners who are already operating on small margins?

it's not just unfair to the business though. if i have five years experience as a c++ dev and you have four years plus one year as a stay at home parent, it is unfair to me if the hiring process treats us both as if we have equal amounts of experience.

Is it actually unfair to you that someone put in the appropriate effort needed to raise a functioning member of society? Lot's of people in this thread are failing to value parenting appropriately.

I think it is the opposite. Lot's of people in this thread are conflating parental responsibilities as being somehow equivalent to professional career development.

This is like saying a year of attending a trade school to become a plumber is equivalent to being a first grade teacher for a year.

1 year of experience + 1 year of experience is already more years of experience than 1 year of experience + 1 year of parenting. And it isn't too rare that it becomes 3-5 years of professional experience being more valuable to a company than 1 year of experience + the last 2-4 years of parenting when a parent tries to re-enter the work force.

You either have an impressive resume beforehand or accept that you traded career advancement for having children. Children are a choice and it isn't fair to people who chose not to have kids to further their careers to be brought down to "fair ground" by people who chose to have kids instead of furthering their careers.

But the business is not hiring them to "raise a functioning member of the society", it's hiring to fill the role of c++ dev. Your one year at home with child might count as "work experience" if you were applying for a job as kindergarten teacher, but for other jobs it is a disadvantage.

first off, i don't actually agree with your implicit assumption that an arbitrary parent is doing some charitable service that i ought to be grateful for. i may benefit marginally from an additional birth by the time I reach old age, but the actual parents seem to benefit more, unless my peers are just bullshitting me about what a rewarding experience it is.

if you're in a position where you can afford to shoulder the financial burden of having children, that's great and I wish you the best. if not, don't expect the small sliver of childfree folks to make up the difference for you. if we actually get to the point where society can't replace itself, maybe we can talk again.

It’s nonsensical and of no benefit to society for the child-free to absolve themselves of any and all stake in how families are supported.

that is a strongly worded, yet totally unsupported claim. is there an argument that goes with it?

"if you're in a position where you can afford to shoulder the financial burden of having children, that's great and I wish you the best. if not, don't expect the small sliver of childfree folks to make up the difference for you. if we actually get to the point where society can't replace itself, maybe we can talk again."

It's exactly as rigorous as your argument. We've both submitted opinions to be considered. I'm not expecting more rigor nor inclined to offer more because I think we've both put out enough worth considering. But if you want to bring more rigor I'll read it.

i guess it boils down to you wanting me to help pay for you to raise your child(ren) and me not wanting to. an impasse indeed. there are many more of you than there are of me, so you will likely get your way if you wait.

More like I want you to pay for your fair share of having an educated workforce available made up of a generation that are contributors and not takers.

>an educated workforce available made up of a generation that are contributors and not takers.

When this is this is the case let me know. All I see is system pumping out special snowflakes that only know how to bitch and complain and scream at the slightest amount of discomfort or offense.

Look outside your bubble.

You are an extreme miserabilist and a hateful person - please stop and think about what life is about.

Personal attacks will get you banned from HN. Please remain civil, regardless of how bad another comment is.

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

The part about "parents seem to benefit more" is questionable. There ARE benefits, but I'd say good parents are doing a service as much as they are exercising a privilege.

>it's not just unfair to the business though. if i have five years experience as a c++ dev and you have four years plus one year as a stay at home parent, it is unfair to me if the hiring process treats us both as if we have equal amounts of experience.

In one negotiation book I read, they call "fair" the "F" word. It means different things to different people, and throwing the word around doesn't further discussions much.

Getting to the C++ dev position, as a person who hires, I've never cared how much experience a person has. I care about how much skills and knowledge he can demonstrate. And an extra year doing C++ is information-free. It tells me nothing that sets him apart from another candidate who has one less year.

I mean, seriously - in my former C++ job if I ranked people by their C++ coding abilities (which includes SW design, etc), there was probably no correlation with years of experience. My manager even complained to me privately that people who had over a decade of experience were performing noticeably worse than those who had 5 or less years.

I've never actually encountered a case where a few months off, or even a year, made any real difference. In my company people occasionally take a few months off every so many years (sabbatical). Their performance does not degrade. A former coworker of mine left the job and wandered the world for 10 months, and got rehired back to his old job. His performance was not impacted (in fact, they prioritized him over someone else external to the company because he was already familiar with the job, whereas an external person would slow things down as he ramped up). I've seen people change careers (e.g. transition to marketing), do it for 1-2 years, and decide to return to engineering/software - no measurable impact.

This is probably a point in which state should step in, at least if private greed starts getting out of hand.

Sure, businesses in principle don't value employees that are parents, it's a pure cost for them. But from a higher vantage point, life is not just about commerce. Parenthood may be a problem for business, but it is a critical function for both nations and societies. Unless you propose that the primary driver for society should be accumulation of wealth by whatever means necessary, this is one aspect where capitalism should not be allowed to reach its natural endgame.

I do not believe there is any data to back up this assertion. Indeed, it's exactly this kind of discrimination that people are looking to combat.

Looking around my office there is a person here who's about a year younger than me but I don't think it's a given that this one year difference makes them somehow less experienced than myself. We're both adults in our forties with many years of experience each, quibbling over a year hear and there strikes me as pointless and counter productive. There are other, more important, differences between us.

You could argue that women are less like to die young from risky activities and should be preferred. I know a director level guy who had to agree to give up his sports bike as a condition of promotion to director level.

Even having less time off from sports activities - broken legs from five a side foot ball cost a surprising number of days off.

The risk of dying in your 30s in an accident is minuscule, while IIRC 87% of women have kids.

Also, companies can get insurance on an employee death (although limited to X% of highest paid employees): https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/an-employee-dies-and...

I might be wrong, but I don't think a company can get insurance on an employee getting pregnant.

But it is on an actuarial basis

It makes me sad to think that business is put above human needs. Overall business will thrive no matter what kind of rule set you impose. If you or another individual stops doing a specific business because you don't know how to deal with new rules, the whole point of capitalism is that somebody better than you would take your place and do what you cannot.

Trying to protect business, to me, has always seemed like a problem of personal greed being leveraged over the community's interests. Those who are individually benefiting by the current systems don't want to change it because they could potentially lose their current advantages or be superseded by others who are more willing to do more.

But it isn't "discriminating based on parental leave". It's "discriminating" based on experience. The reason why someone takes a year (or whatever) off isn't the issue.

Does this feel unfair in some sense? Yeah. But would it be less unfair to artificially punish the person who didn't take time off? Questionable...

It occurs to me that you're kind of equating a year of holidays with that of having a baby, which ensures the continuation of our species. In our (HN) case, that is putting a few more technologist offsprings into the mix for what that's worth.

I can assure you looking after a baby the first year is not leisure time.

I am in no way saying that taking care of a baby is leisure time, or anything of the sort. I'm just saying from the perspective of an employer evaluating two candidates, if all other things are equal, and one took a year off and one didn't, and the employer chooses the candidate who was at work continuously, they weren't specifically discriminating against "parental leave".From that point of view, the reason doesn't actually matter at all, as they are just comparing two candidates.

Of course in reality human nature being what it is, some people probably do actually care. And rarely are "all other things exactly equal". I'd guess most employers would be more favorable towards someone who took a year off to raise a baby, as opposed to taking a year off just to lounge around.

>I'm just saying from the perspective of an employer evaluating two candidates, if all other things are equal, and one took a year off and one didn't, and the employer chooses the candidate who was at work continuously, they weren't specifically discriminating against "parental leave".

Gender aside, this is still discrimination based on a persons “experience”, as you call it, or very simply: their employment status.

This is against the law. Plain and simple. Look at some of the laws enacted over the years, starting in 2011 [1].

[1]: http://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/discrimina...

> Gender aside, this is still discrimination based on a persons “experience”, as you call it, or very simply: their employment status. This is against the law. Plain and simple.

I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't sound right to me.

Consider four people who graduated at the same age, then took different paths:

* Experienced Eric worked for the same company for 11 years, is still there, and is considering a new job.

* Younger Yenina worked for the same company for 10 years, is still there, and is considering a new job.

* Late Larry searched for a job for 1 year, worked for the same company for 10 years, is still there, and is considering a new job.

* Unemployed Ursula worked for the same company for 10 years, got laid off, and has been looking for 1 year.

The law you quoted appears to say it's illegal to discriminate against Unemployed Ursula for being currently unemployed, so she should have the same shot as Younger Yenina and Late Larry. It doesn't say her year of unemployment must be considered equal to Experience Eric's extra year of work.

(There are also age discrimination laws that say you can't prefer Younger Yenina simply for being younger, gender discrimination laws that say you can't prefer Late Larry simply for being male, etc.)

>The law you quoted appears to say it's illegal to discriminate against Unemployed Ursula for being currently unemployed, so she should have the same shot as Younger Yenina and Late Larry. It doesn't say her year of unemployment must be considered equal to Experience Eric's extra year of work.

The argument made prior to this is not that an unemployed person is equal to a continuously employed worker but merely that unemployment should not and cannot affect your qualifications for position X. The law is pretty general as it states an employed person is anyone who does not have a job, is able to work, and is seeking work.

If Eric, Yenina, Ursula, and Larry are all able bodies, placing Ursula in her own category based solely on a gap year is in itself discriminatory.

The parent comments are taking the gap year into account—something that can be elaborated on, but should never be a deciding factor. The general consensus ITT is that Eric automatically is a better fit for position X than Ursula based solely on their employment history.

That argument in itself shows biases toward length of employment and current status, with the latter being something that should be irrelevant in a hiring process.

Edit: to show an example, most job postings on P&G have this disclosure:

>Qualified individuals will not be disadvantaged based on being unemployed.

That one line is what everybody is arguing againat, that unemployment automatically declines your qualifications.

> The argument made prior to this is not that an unemployed person is equal to a continuously employed worker

Isn't it? Maybe that's not what you meant to say, but even now as I re-read your earlier comment I think that's what you said. Based on the downvotes and jimjansen's reply, I'm not alone. jimjansen's reply in fact seems to have taken you to mean that you simply cannot consider someone's experience at all, which is a totally unreasonable position and consistent with your wording. I tried to be more generous in my interpretation but simply can't interpret your earlier comment in way that's consistent with the (correct) idea that one can legally hire Experienced Eric rather than Unemployed Ursula because of his additional experience.

(By the way, unfortunately I think these discrimination laws are basically toothless because in real life there are many factors that legally can be considered, they're all subjective, and employers are under no obligation to explain their reasoning. So you can almost never prove discrimination unless they are dumb enough to tell you about it.)

>But it isn't "discriminating based on parental leave". It's "discriminating" based on experience. The reason why someone takes a year (or whatever) off isn't the issue.

The commenter clearly stated their point. Businesses don't care why you have a one year gap. They only care that you have a one year gap.

In no way did they call having a baby a vacation.

This is what is taught in our schools. Grievance studies. If someone can take offense by reading between the lines and constructing a strawman, you must conclude that offense was intentional and attack the offender. Benefit of doubt, presumption of innocence is gone.

on the other hand, there are already quite a lot of us on this planet. not every single parent is doing a Good Deed by bringing yet another life into this world.

Many people have posited that a shrinking population will have a more deleterious effect than a booming one.

We’ll see in Japan in the next two decades. Europe is next.

There are too many, but look at where that population growth is coming from.

Looking at the bigger picture we should be doing everything we can to encourage family growth within our own ranks. I'd argue that most people on HN etc would make excellent, above average parents if only because they are so engaged.

Sorry to go further off topic.

I guess there may be some situations where one year of experience more or less makes a big difference, but it doesn't seem like that big a deal? It would be like hiring someone one year younger.

For women it makes a big difference as there is generally a choice to make between 25-35 as To whether they’d like to further their career or take time out to have a child.

Most women also reasonably choose to prioritize family over career when their children are very young further inhibiting them from advancing their career during that time.

If you're getting X% merit increases every year and miss one, it will look forever as if you're underpaid relative to your peers. So people who take a long parental leave will have a permanent "pay gap" unless either the company pro-actively bumps them up (pay for the absent time as if they were present) or the employee overachieves to catch up (in which case they still have a pay gap relative to their overachieving peers).

Of course, there's also ramp-down and ramp-up time on each side of the leave. I'd expect a leave of 12 months is probably closer to a total productivity loss of 18 month, which will drag pay down further if there's a reduction to a second merit increase. If you take years off, as many do, staying home until the kid enters kindergarten, then you're probably looking at a massive relative gap when you start back.

But yeah, taking a year for parental leave is not a death knell for most professionals' careers. It will realistically result in a long-term salary depression relative to peers, though.

Since I started out working for startups, I guess I'm used to people changing jobs so often that you can't really generalize about salary like that. Like, I can't imagine judging someone by their previous or current salary versus age. (Or even knowing either data point with much precision.)

You're right that it's not cut-and-dry. A year out of the workforce doesn't guarantee a lower salary for any particular individual. It does bias toward a lower salary, though. This is the case whether you're job-hopping or not.

I wish this were true, but in technology (my field) one year can make you fairly outdated and unprepared to perform strong interviews. And in some tech industries such as frontend web development, one year is practically a lifetime.

This idea that putting aside the amount of parental leave candidates took when evaluating them for promotion is somehow "punishing" people who didn't take leave seems like a real stretch to me.

I don't think it'd be difficult to let people enjoy the benefits the company has agreed to provide without punishing them, indeed, this strikes me as the only reasonable way for the company to behave. Ideally, as time goes on, all employees with avail themselves of the full suite of benefits making this discrimination againts those who use their benefits will become moot.

> Does this feel unfair in some sense? Yeah. But would it be less unfair to artificially punish the person who didn't take time off? Questionable...

It's not even about punishment. Calling it discrimination is like saying that hiring based on years of experience discriminates against younger people. It's the wrong point at which to solve the problem.

We know that taking a year off impacts employment prospects. If we want to compensate for it, what should we do?

The implied solution is to force employers to hire less experienced workers. But that has all kinds of known problems. The quality of their work will be lower. It creates an incentive for businesses to cheat and benefits the ones that do. The cost is not uniformly distributed, which creates risk and surprise for smaller businesses that may not be able to absorb the sudden cost.

What problem are we trying to solve here? We want to encourage parenting and help parents, so do that. Have a social insurance program for parental leave equivalent to unemployment insurance. Have a generous tax deduction for dependent children that compensates for the resulting lower salary. Do things, in general, that spreads the risk across all taxpayers rather than creating asymmetric costs for the employers who happen to employ parents, so that we avoid giving employers a perverse incentive to find ways to offset the cost.

It's not a problem if you make $5000/year less in salary if you also pay $5000/year less in taxes. Or $10,000/year less in taxes.

You make very valid points about determining the actual outcome we prefer and channeling solutions to achieve them.

There is some nuance. For example, a $5k tax credit might help me level the playing field today, but that $5k difference still exists for social security calculation.

> There is some nuance. For example, a $5k tax credit might help me level the playing field today, but that $5k difference still exists for social security calculation.

Sure, so identify the problems and fix them. The way social security works is illogical. It's supposed to be a safety net, so why do we pay in proportion to past income rather than giving everyone the same amount? Do the affluent somehow need a larger safety net? If anything they should be expected to have more of their own savings.

The system is perfectly logical, the more you pay in over your career (based on income), the more you receive annually upon retirement. The real question is whether this is the optimal setup for broader society.

Its still indirect discrimination and is there really much difference between a woman with nine years and a man with ten.

What is the opportunity cost of the mother going right back to work and spending no time with their newborn? Does society absorb that cost?

The father could do that task.

Certainly could, I just finished doing that for my kid. Which still doesn't answer the question of how it benefits society to push parents back into the workforce after birth of a child. The entire "opportunity cost" argument here is focused on the parent's ability to maximize wages or skills, in reality there are other "costs".

"At the end of the day, it's going to be a balancing act of imposing on individual freedom such that individual freedom is at all possible."

That's quite the rhetorical pretzel you are tying yourself into there.

The idea of freedoms being mutually exclusive is quite well established. To the point of being trite; imposing on individuals' freedom to reduce other people's freedoms, improves individual freedom. Hence laws against murder, etc.

> Going against our primal instincts is essential for a productive society.

I’m debating with myself about that statement. Is the goal of society a high amount of productivity, or stable, happy families and relationships? It seems means and ends are getting mixed up.

That's a very interesting question. I would say the point in society is to organize and through this organization improve overall prosperity and happiness in the society. A chaotic society will be outperformed in most metrics by an ordered society. Order is therefore beneficial to society, and to individuals by extension.

Stable, happy families are those that don't need to worry about the necessities of life, don't need to worry about their income stream going up in smoke. This is where productivity enters the picture, because a given society can lose the productivity race, and therefore its prosperity. It results in negative impacts on the population of that society.

This paints the financial crisis in new light, where a societal function has been so rotted from the inside that it is able to damage every globalized society on earth. These people should be made examples of, but sadly, the power is so indirect, and the nepotism so strong.

The highest paying companies in the field don’t care about counting individual years of your experience and probably would hire a fresh grad over senior engineer any day, so as long as you crack the leetcoding interview, what difference does it make if you spent the last year on a parental leave?

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time?

I think all the other answers to this have been arguing either yes/no, but it's really the wrong question.

If you have 2 candidates, you should take into account their experience, but you shouldn't otherwise penalize the parental leave taker. So by taking parental year you put yourself one year back in the experience cohort.

There is nothing discriminatory or gender specific about this. If it turns out that women take more parental years than men, we return to your question of incentives and equality of outcomes, to be decided separately.

It is worth noting that Nima Sanandaji, the author of that and many similar books, is a proponent of small state, free markets, low tax, self determination and responsibility.

In other words, he is a libertarian type, that doesn't support the welfare state, and by extension doesn't support requiring employers to offer maternity and paternity leave.

He has also argued that Scandinavia is doing well due to the free markets, in spite of its social policy, in his book Scandinavian Unexceptionalism.

PS - Just trying to give some context. "Nordic Gender Equality Paradox" isn't an apolitical academic study, it is a book trying to push a certain political agenda.

I downvote you because the research withstands your attempted ad hominem attack. If the result is good we should not cast dispersion just because the researcher has a particular bias.

In fact those times when your ideology does not line up with scientific results are precisely when you should sit up and take notice that perhaps your ideology is failing you.

I wasn't commenting on academic research, I was commenting on the book The Nordic Gender Equality Paradox by Nima Sanandaji. Which is what the comment I was responding to was about.

You downvoted because you either didn't read the comment I responded to or didn't read my own in the context for which it was given.

Nima Sanandaji isn't a researcher and doesn't product academic, scientific, or sociological research. He's a political commentator who writes books and produces opinion pieces for political think-tanks.

As far as I know the research doesn't say much, and therefor doesn't withstand much either.

They can't tell you why preferences are different. It is all implied. A much more straight forward explanation is that developed countries have long histories. To become developed you need to have developed industries for a long time without too many wars. The idea that the preference of Indian women, were many industries are being developed as they get into job market, is remotely comparable to the preference of Swedish women were industries have already been developed for centuries isn't credible. It simply isn't an equal comparison. Yet, that is exactly what people are drawing these conclusions from.

> that doesn't support the welfare state, and by extension doesn't support requiring employers to offer maternity and paternity leave.

The second doesn't follow from the first. I generally support the welfare state, but I don't think that employers should pay for it directly; doing so significantly hinders smaller companies where a single ill/pregnant/vacationing person can cause a serious productivity disruption (especially if unplanned), even if they don't have to pay for it! Instead, I think the society/government should pay for social security, via taxes, that way it works like a very distributed insurance policy.

If anyone is looking for the book, evidently it is sold out, but you can download the ebook for free from the author:

http://nordicparadox.se/

Download is near the bottom of the page. PDF here: http://nordicparadox.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-Nordi...

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