True. But now it is a risk to hire people in certain age groups in general. Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?
Not an economically viable strategy for any company looking to stay in business more than a year or two.
In my experience, employees who are bad employees and blame it on time commitment to their children have usually been bad employees to begin with. I have a child, spend upwards of 4 hours a day with them on average, and work at a FAANG, while hitting promotion tracks more quickly than my colleagues without children. I know a bunch of people doing the same.
Not for a good company. I've had several employees go on maternity and paternity leave. I've given them respect, and time, and money, in order to make this time of their lives as unstressful as possible.
I've done it because it's the right thing, but these people remember being treated well. They've come back to work and done very well. They feel safer knowing that their day job explicitly supports their families.
The time someone needs off work to care for a new family is a drop in the bucket compared with a whole career, or even a few good years spent at one company. Optimize for the humans, and for the long term.
Realistically, 1 person missing from a small business can mean 10% of their workforce is gone - and due to the size of the company they may not have people to cover the missing staff.
10 people or 10,000 people, if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick / vacation, you don't have a sustainable business.
You've never run a startup or small business. At the beginning margins can be razor thin, and unplanned or extended leave can have a huge impact.
If you run a business on the assumption that you're going to have all your current employees working for you continuously for the foreseeable future, you're going to have a bad time.
No. The only real way to avoid this is to just not hire folks who can birth or father children. You'd be mostly safe hiring folks over 45 (Though men over 45 would be more risky than women). This probably isn't a good strategy for an employer.
Marriage doesn't lend itself to children: Having sex does. Having a stable relationship does. Adoption does. On the other hand, lots of married folks don't have children, on purpose or by circumstance. There is no real way to sort folks out.