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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

It really irked me that here in Canada the options were generally skewed towards mothers remaining home. You can split 40 weeks of parental leave, but many employers won't provide parental benefits and those that do often only provide parental benefits to mothers. For instance, my employer at the time provided wage top-up for women on leave but nothing for men.

Just one of _many_ structually sexist policies in society at large that ultimately contribute to the wage gap.

Of course I stayed at work, and of course my wife now has enormous gaps in her work history, and so of course my yearly gains in income have outpaced hers.

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Well we can’t do anything about employers, that’s why relying on employers as a social net is ridiculous (what’s the % of people that have parental benefits from their employers? Surely a minority)

This needs to be managed through the government. Quebec has done a good job at it. And yes, it can be used by either the father or the mother without any problem.

> Well we can’t do anything about employers

You can, indeed, mandate equal practices by employers and enforce that requirement.

The problem is smaller employers, which simply can't afford to shoulder the burden of paid maternity leave for 1 of their 10 employees. You can set up a graduated system like the UK has, where all employers have to pay and can reclaim a variable amount. But one way or another, any benefit the government won't foot the bill for is a benefit many parents won't get.

Canada provides EI to those on parental leave; the "top-up" is a common compensation perk that employers offer to women, and rarely to men.

Right, but the funding available for such a benefit is limited. If employers were required to offer the top-up to both men and women equally, I expect many companies on the smaller side would have to stop offering it to stay within their budget.

Honestly, so many of the problems in our work culture is caused by small businesses who don't want to play by the rules that I'm okay with just letting them hang.

This is the same argument that's used to justify lack of paid sick leave, lack of protections against discrimination (Title VII only applies to companies with 15 or more people), working people who don't have employer-provided health insurance, etc. Every single abuse a company can visit on its employees is magnified several times by small businesses.

It's time for the government to decide that small businesses not playing by the rules are a net negative for society and just let them go.

It's not a matter of willingness to play by the rules. A company with 5 employees is always going to struggle to handle a sudden 20% increase in labor costs, no matter how much its owner has good intentions.

It's certainly consistent to say that everyone should just work for big businesses who can absorb these kinds of costs. But I think we have to acknowledge that this process, where regulations end up building a wall only big businesses can easily climb over, would be called "regulatory capture" in a different context. Government funding really seems to me like the better alternative.

As a Swede the replies you get to this reasonable comment is like being sent back to the ~1970. The only thing that's "biological" is that women usually take the first months of parental leave and the father the second (and sometimes they overlap).

There's nothing whatsoever that's reasonable, and certainly not biological, about limiting that second period for the father.

Biology tends to be structurally sexist as well. The only solution is to essentially force fathers to stop working as well during this time. This is equality of outcome.

> The only solution is to essentially force fathers to stop working as well during this time

That isn't the only solution, but it's one that could work and would make the world a better place.

Why would it possibly make the world a better place if fathers were forced to not work?! Forcing someone to stop working would likely piss a lot of people off, and would generally hurt the companies these fathers work for.

It's a worldview that's pretty common. You equalize inherent advantages by denying everyone them when you cannot add them to some people. For instance, you cannot operate a store of a certain size without accommodating disabled people. i.e. even non-disabled people are denied the ability to shop there.

Another example (that is very different) is where UC Berkeley was forced to pull course videos it had put up because it didn't have a disabled-accessible version of them. The videos presented an advantage to normative people.

The world-view does not admit Pareto-optimal changes since benefit to some slice of humanity that is chosen based on immutable (or socially-considered inherent - like religion) characteristics is implicitly assumed to push everyone else back unless the benefit accrues to them as well.

> equalize inherent advantages by denying everyone them when you cannot add them to some people

So should we force men to take testosterone blocking drugs since testosterone gives an unfair advantage? The hormone is a main driver of competitive-ness and aggression and strength, which in business overall and especially some fields is a huge advantage.

Or give smart people some drugs to make them a little less smart, to even them out with everyone else.

The world is full of inequities, that’s a part of life.

Why would it possibly make the world a better place if fathers were forced to not work?!

Because they would be able to bond with their children during paternity leave, which is a huge positive for father and child.

Forcing someone to stop working would likely piss a lot of people off, and would generally hurt the companies these fathers work for.

So it’s better to hurt children then ‘companies’?

Edit: I agree that fathers should not literally be forced to take leave. That would be dictatorial. The grandparent poster used the term essentially forced, which implies strongly encouraging both parents to take the offered leave. For example, if they would still receive most of their salary during this time, and their position were protected.

The father should be able to choose when and how he bonds with his children. It isn’t for the state to decide the fathers work schedule that is best for him to raise a child. That’s government overreach. It’s one thing for the government to say you may stop working. It’s another thing entirely for them to force you to do so.

I'm not advocating for this, but I find the thought worth exploring.

I think with rasing children there's a question of where lies the responsability and consequences? Laws mandate many things that are meant for you to clean up after yourself and not leave a mess which others have to be burdened with.

In theory, one could argue raising a child is a similar scenario, and I think we already have many laws around it to some extent.

So it could be said that both parents must share the burden, and thus they could both be mandated to take time off. Or it could be argued that this will lead to children raised better and who will be more productive to society at large, so also could justify mandating it, etc.

I'm not really into the idea, because it assumes a lot and I feel so many situations related to parenthood are much more complex, so it's hard to blanket say what is best for all parties, but I feel it's not unprecedented to make laws around responssabilities of a parent towards their child.

Every worker deserves the same opportunity to spend time with their children.

The government wouldn't be forcing any father to do anything. The government would be forcing companies to provide all workers the privilege of time off for parenting. A father who didn't want to bond with his children could use the time off to go fishing, take up woodworking, watch youtube videos, or work on a side-business.

> A father who didn't want to bond with his children could use the time off to go fishing, take up woodworking, watch youtube videos

I mean, you can do these things with your kids.

Forcing them to step away from work is 100% 'forcing' them to do something.

Enough with this, and the 'Swedish shaming' as noted above.

People are offered leave, that's good, if they don't want to take it, it's none of anyone's business really.

> People are offered leave, that's good, if they don't want to take it, it's none of anyone's business really

Hum... wouldn't that depend on why you're not taking them?

Say you're not taking them because of social pressure?

Say you don't want to take them because doing so will put you up for promotion before your co-workers who do?

Say you don't want to take them because it result in a loss of money (if say employer offers reduced pay only)

And maybe others. But I feel some of those reasons call for further discussion. Like, it shouldn't be that you don't take them due to social pressure, lower pay, or to get ahead. None of these seem equally fair to all employees.

If you really just really were someone whose favourite thing to do is go to work day in, day out, then ok sure. It be hard to argue against that, but like... really?

"wouldn't that depend on why you're not taking them?"

No, definitely not.

You've made no argument here.

It's not the company or the government's business why someone would want to take family leave - or not - same for vacation time, or where someone would go, or what they do frankly.

Unless it's illegal or really adversely affecting the company, or obviously if the company is trying to 'suppress' people from taking vacay etc..

Forcing vacations and such things, to achieve some kind of ideological and probably unscientific premise is a bridge too far.

It could be seen as workers rights, that's my point.

If the company is promoting those who don't, that can be seen as retaliation against those who do.

If companies don't provide adequate pay for employees who have a child, it can be seen as punishment for those who bear the burden of children for all others.

And if you're not taking them because of social pressure, well then it's a vicious cycle, since no one takes them due to pressure, and now it invalidates the point of giving them in the first place. So possibly something needs to be done to break the cycle.

Etc.

I'm not saying any of this is reason enough to push for enforcement or anything like that. But it's also not simply a matter of "not being anyone's business". For example, it can very much be my business if I want to be able to take some time off, and not lose out to my co-workers on the next promotion just because I wanted to take some time to take care for my new born. Same could be said for sick leave or other.

So I guess we could reframe the debate in terms of:

Is it fair for a man who would like to take some time to care for his new born, that doing so could hurt his career? And off course, that asks a greater question: Do we want to promote fatherhood and give incentives for people to have kids and care for them properly? Or would we rather incentivize full time careers with little to no downtime and complete dedication to work?

How about mandatory education?

"So it’s better to hurt children then ‘companies’?"

It's your subjective opinion that not having 'dad's around 24/7 is going to 'hurt babies'.

In all pragmatism, there's no need for 'a second parent' to take 30 days off, and I'll bet most guys, while they wouldn't mind 'some time' - probably don't need or want 30 days.

7-14 days is reasonable for second parent.

There's no optimizations here, I think we are 'mostly past' these issues, whatever tinkering we do is academic.

Subsidized childcare is a different story though, that has major impact, for better or for worse, there's still a lot of experimentation going on there.

For example, we all pretty much agree at least on 'kindergarten' before that, it's still different from place to place.

Why is the father the second parent in all of this? The implication in your reply is that the mother is the "primary" parent.

> In all pragmatism, there's no need for 'a second parent' to take 30 days off, and I'll bet most guys, while they wouldn't mind 'some time' - probably don't need or want 30 days.

Speaking of subjective opinions, here's another one.

Nobody is forcing a parent to take 30 days, or 3 months off to spend with a child. If you get the time off and want to spend it golfing, go for it. But it means that the large number of fathers who _do_ want to take time off are now able to, and more importantly, a mother isn't forced to take 6-9 months out and suffer in their career for it.

Do you have kids?

The first few weeks can be really difficult for parents, having both of them free of work can be beneficial for the couple and the child.

Fathers would certainly not be pissed off. They'd get to work on being a father.

> Forcing someone to stop working would likely piss a lot of people off

Which people? Most humans are going to be parents some day, and even those that aren't can see that living in a world where every child has same opportunity in terms of having both parents with them for the first few days, weeks, or months of their lives is a net positive for society.

Which father doesn't want time off to be with their children if it doesn't otherwise impact them negatively (ie. they were taken of by their fellow man)?

> and would generally hurt the companies these fathers work for.

I don't believe that to be true. A company is a group of humans. Giving those humans time off to parent makes healthier, happy humans and a healthier and more effective workforce.

Mandating 40 weeks off strikes me as excessive, but I think there are reasonable arguments for mandating 2 weeks or a month - it's hardly an unprecedented imposition. Forcing people to not work is a common strategy for addressing systemic issues. For example, many bankers are required to take a contiguous 2 week vacation at least once a year as an anti-fraud measure.

FWIW, Canada's leave is not mandatory to take, and employers aren't beholden to continue providing compensation. The parent on leave receives Employment Insurance from the Feds.

The restriction on employers is that the parent on leave must be able to resume their employment after leave unless their position has been removed entirely, and even so that can cause problems for employers.

Let's start with making it an available option before making it mandatory. ;)

There's nothing biological about working a job. Why are women forced to stop working when they have a baby? Stop pretending our social problems are science based.

And yes, there are options for them to carry on but society pretty much forces most women to stop working, due to aforementioned social pressures, structural sexist policies and expectations we put on women.

If all men and women were forced to take 6 months off, we would see far more women succeeding in the workplace over the long term, as they would not be disadvantaged by choosing to have a baby.

This means we as a society get more people working overall in more jobs, being more productive, solving more problems and building a better future for us all. Capitalism is not zero sum- men do not lose when women succeed, quite the opposite. Limiting our workforce to 50% of our population is bad policy, even if you're sexist and in favour of men over women, you must understand the economic benefits of increased paternity leave.

> There's nothing biological about working a job. Why are women forced to stop working when they have a baby? Stop pretending our social problems are science based.

I agree with your last sentence but, like, having a child is one of the few situations where the biological "bias" really is unavoidable, at least for the first couple months.

So women are by default at a disadvantage in that situation, which makes forcing the same work absence onto the father even worse for the family's income as a whole. What we need is to make sure that that kind of prolonged absence from work doesn't impact either parent too much. At least some 100% paid parental leave would be a good start and enabling remote work, which is possible in the vast majority of jobs, would not only improve the mother's situation, but also allow the parents to freely balance who stays with the child more, increasing equality all-round.

Thank god humans invented culture and society ;)

A good start would be outlawing negative scoring of candidates due to gaps.

If a company gives you a negative score due to a gap that's explained by taking time out to look after a baby then you're probably better off not working there.

If it's just one employer, that would be their loss. If it's all employers, that would be your loss. And the reality is much closer to the latter than the former.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-ter...

A negative score due to a gap is the same as a positive score due to an extra years employment, and that's a harder mindset to overcome. Only the most toxic of workplaces would say "hey, they took a year out to raise a child, no way" but many workplaces would say " these two candidates appear equal except this one has an extra year's experience in $foo"

You're trying to defend this practise by suggesting it's 'only the most toxic workplaces', but that's not the case. Given two candidates who both have 5 years experience but one has a gap of a year to raise a baby, lots of companies will chose the other candidate. Talk to parents. Understand the problem. Companies assume that if you've taken a year once then you'll probably do it again if you have a second child, and consequently they avoiding hiring you. Don't be an apologist for those companies that do it.

I’ve been involved in many recruitment processes. Companies are far more scared of you having done lots of short jobs than of having taken gaps, especially if the gaps are easily explained away as “time spent caring for family” or “self-directed study”

It's not so much the gaps that are the problem as it is the effect that the delay has on growing compensation.

For every gap there's missed yearly/quaterly reviews, there's missed opportunities for promotion, and there's a stall in your compensation growth overall. When you come back to work you typically come back at the wage you left.

I call BS on that one. What about the fact that switching companies is by fare more effective than staying at the same company salary-wise? Then it should also be a problem to employers if someone stayed at a single company for a long time as it constitutes as "missed opportunities for promotion"

It's not "structurally sexism", it's biology.

Practically no women ever will make it through the entirety of a pregnancy without needing (not choosing) to take some time off work if she works a full-time job. Even if this is just a single day of delivery.

Generally though, it's much more than a single day that needs to be taken off. In contrast, at no point in a woman's pregnancy does the father need to take time off.

There is nothing sexist about this. It is more efficient to extend one person's required time off than it is to give two separate people time off. An extended maternity leave generally means that one company needs to find one replacement or otherwise shuffle work. Maternity + paternity leave means you need to do that, 2x.

I fully support longer paternity leaves because I do think it is important for having equality in the workplace. But the idea that it's society that is sexist in this regard is ridiculous.

Honestly I don't think we will really have equality until babies are grown in test tubes, and that's not society's fault.

But you can't close the salary gap between men and women by only mostly having women taking childcare responsibilities.

So if you introduce mandatory and equal leave for both parents, not only do you get happier parents, but you also don't advantage men over women for their biology.

That's all there is to it really, pretty simple and already implemented in plenty of countries.

Yes, that's why I literally said I support longer paternity leave in the end of my comment.

Paternity leave is an example of society taking biological differences and the reality of bringing a child into the world (that it asks a helluva lot more of the mother than the father) and making everything more equitable.

The purpose of my comment was not to say paternity leave doesn't make any sense. It was to say that the lack of it is not an example of sexism. It's an example of men and women being different and therefore the non-egalitarian default being different for men and women. That's not sexism.

Do you think the work stops once the baby is born? This is exactly the effort that these parental leave laws tries to cover.

Did you read my comment at all?

Employer payment structure is biology?

This has nothing to do with payment. People work jobs in society. Even if you don't live in a society where you get paid a wage for working that job, time still needs to be taken off work to have a baby.

It's more economically efficient (it takes time and effort to replace the work that was being done by someone, regardless of how employers are remunerating employees) to extend that person's leave than to arrange for two separate leaves for two separate jobs when there was no necessity for the second person to take time off in the first place.

Why do you think this is about economical efficiency?

Because that's reality?

It's emergent behavior based off efficiency and the harsh realities of childbirth (i.e. men and women have very different parts to play in childbirth). It's not sexism.

What's your point? You said:

> It's more economically efficient [..] to extend that person's leave than to arrange for two separate leaves

This isn't about what's economically efficient, it's about what certain societies think is well spent money.

My point is literally the first sentence of my comment.

> It's not "structurally sexism", it's biology.

There's nothing biological in denying fathers parental leave even if the mother takes the first months of it.

And it is sexism to ignore the effects to womens careers if this is not shared.

Nobody is denying anything.

Paternal leave is a privilege, not a right.

Not doing everything you possibly can to make everyone equal when it comes to sex is not sexism.

> Paternal leave is a privilege, not a right.

So what?

> Not doing everything you possibly can to make everyone equal when it comes to sex is not sexism.

If something inherent in our society - having children - causes one gender to have unequal opportunity it's sexist to be against counter-measures due to some sort of bullshit "biology" argument.

I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

You can be not sexist without supporting every possible measure to attempt to achieve a perfectly egalitarian society.

Sure, though you use an inherently sex-centered argument to oppose it so I'm not sure why you try to fight the sexist label?

What exactly am I opposing?

All those non-racists that were not supporting the civil rights movement.

The difference here being that the civil rights movement was needed to overcome an artificial injustice.

Biological differences are not artificial.

Yet again, there's nothing biological that mandates that women should be disadvantaged due to having children. It's artificial and modern Scandinavia proves it.

Huh? Biology absolutely does mandate that. Unless wires have been completely crossed here, when you say "women should not be disadvantaged", you are presumably talking about employment / work.

The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that any time I say "productivity" in the rest of this comment, I mean it in the sense of doing productive work for other people, e.g. employment.

As a side-effect of childbirth, women lose productive capacity. Men do not. This is not a societal choice, it is a physiological reality. It will continue to be true up until the moment women no longer need to carry a baby around in their wombs for 9 months in order to bring new humans into the world. Note I'm just talking about pre/perinatal here, not long-term child rearing.

Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave. I agree with you that this is probably[1] a good idea. But not wanting to overcompensate for actual biological differences is not sexism. This clearly doesn't fall into sexism because it doesn't apply to all women. It only applies to women that can + want to have children. The discrimination is not based on sex, it's based on a demonstrable loss in productivity that occurs naturally and by choice.

Again, this is very much unlike the disadvantage experienced by black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, which was not a result of natural processes but rather a result of completely arbitrary bigotry and absolutely not in any way, shape, or form brought on by a choice made by black Americans.

[1] I say probably here because obviously paternity leave only applies to men who are having / have had children, so you will continue to have a similar problem (discrimination based on a loss in productivity), except now the sides are not "women having children" vs. everyone else but rather "people having children" vs. everyone else (i.e. people that don't want children). As I said though, I agree and still think this is better than the completely natural version of events, where only the woman side of the equation loses productivity, because at the end of the day in situations like these it is both the woman and the man who are choosing to bring a child into the world. And even though it is a choice to do so, it is obviously the kind of choice which we need people to make otherwise society will cease to exist, which is why I am happy to compensate for the loss in productivity due to this choice. That being said, once test-tube babies are both easy (easier/safer than natural childbirth) and normalized, I probably won't be able to countenance advantaged maternity/paternity leave (at least before the "birth" of the baby), because then it will be an entirely optional choice and you would be effectively punishing people that choose to have babies in the test-tube fashion.

It's artificial due to society treating child rearing as womens work. That's a social construct. In Scandinavia it's seen as an event handled by _both_ parents, equally. So both parents are expected to be just as absent from work as the other. This results in women not being singled out as a more "risky" employee over men. This is the default. That history has been cruel to women is no reason to treat what you describe above as the default. To assume that men need not take part in child raring before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.

You're treating a biological difference (the actual birth) of a few weeks as a valid reason for a much larger societal disadvantage.

Finally, child rearing should not be seen as a "loss of productivity" but as unpaid work, since without it, as you also noted, we would cease to exist.

Please re-read all of my comments with the fresh understanding (though it really shouldn't be as this was obvious from context and even explicitly stated) that I'm not talking about child-rearing. I'm talking about the pre/perinatal period when I am talking about a loss in productivity that women face by necessity due to biological reality.

I realise that you're now being deliberately obtuse but still; what is parental leave if not child-rearing?

The biological part is a couple of weeks, child-rearing that parental leave is a part of is for at least 12 months until daycare can take over. Fathers can and should do that as well. So in the end the amount of time away from work should be the roughly equal. So once again, if this sums up to equal portions away from work, which there is no reason not to, is there a biological argument for lower wage etc for women?

Do you also think that pregnant women get their salary deducted for their supposed loss in "productivity"?

Please let me know why this statement isn't true:

> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.

I am not being deliberately obtuse about anything, though I am starting to question your reading comprehension if I'm totally honest. Most of the questions in your comment can be answered if you'd care to actually read over my previous comments again. And then there is the last bit.

> Please let me know why this statement isn't true:

>> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.

This can be answered quite simply with: that statement is in fact true. Not sure why you feel like I should answer such a question, as I haven't implied anything like that.

You have implied that:

> Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave.

You call men caring for the child as artificial. But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's, or do you actually think that women usually start to work again after just a couple of weeks on average?

I hate pulling the I've been around for a long time card. But I'll pull it now.

What I noticed is the time out for having children doesn't really interrupt a woman's working career that much. Not to mention women typically work up till the 7 to 8th month of pregnancy. So what gone for six months, two years? Out of 40-45 years of working? That's a couple of percent.

But boy does the system punish them for it.

> But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's

Yes, this is true. Neither the actual mother nor the actual father is required to care for the baby after delivery. Believe it or not, this is how adoption works. That is one half of the point I've been making this whole time.

But now, if you go back and read my original comment, you will see the bit about how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences. This has nothing to do with sex/sexism and "believing women should stay home and raise the kids" and everything to do with the fact that this is just the reality of replacing someone with actual responsibility. If you've never been responsible for replacing someone who quit/took leave, then this might not be obvious to you, but it takes much more time and effort to replace two people for T/2 amount of time (each) than it does to replace one person for T amount of time. Hopefully you can see how this then relates to maternity/paternity leave.

And that is the second half of the point I've been making since my original comment.

> Yes, this is true.

So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?

> how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences

So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard.

This is blatantly sexist also. "Well, it's easier to just extend one, and whoops, this just happens to always be the mother". The result of this strange rationalization is of course a deep skew to mothers being home and bearing the brunt of the negative effects of it.

This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable. How could you think that that is of even remotely proportional importance to the negative effects of always extending the mother's leave?

Ok, so there are two problems. The first is that you continue to put words in my mouth and project stances onto me that I have not taken. The second is that I think we fundamentally disagree on an important issue: what constitutes sexism.

> So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?

It's still there. The question is "why is the default to give women maternity leave and not have like equal maternity and paternity leave or something?". You (and GC) are claiming this is rooted in sexism. I am claiming it is rooted in biology. Making decisions based on actual physiological differences between the sexes is not sexism. Not letting women participate in men's boxing because they'll get destroyed is not sexism, it is recognizing that there are literal biological/physiological differences between the sexes.

> So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard...

What argument? My only argument is that this is not sexist. In order for something to be sexist, you need to be discriminating based on sex. Discriminating based on time lost is not sexism. "Small" differences have outsized effects when compounded across millions of people. Sure, if you take a single instance of this and look at it it doesn't seem like much. Unfortuntately though, we're talking about society-wide effects here. We're talking about why a society as a whole has adopted certain norms, not why an individual manager might do something. And honestly you're underestimating how much of a pain it can be to temporarily (that's how leave works) replace a valuable team member. You can't just actually replace them because they'll be coming back eventually. Do you hire and train up a new person only to fire them after the leave? Or keep them on when the other returns, so now you have two people when previously you only needed one? Or do you try your best to foist their work onto existing team members even though hopefully the entire reason that employee existed in the first place was because their work could not be easily handled by others. It's not easy.

> This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable

Well, yes, exactly? Replacing two different people in two different workplaces with different managers is more of a hassle than if it was one manager and one team replacing two people. Thanks for helping make my point for me.

Your habit of "you haven't read", "you put words in my mouth" without substantiating either of them is pretty annoying.

If you perpetuate, support, or defend a system that knowingly creates an unequal outcome depending on the persons sex, you're a sexist. This isn't something that's undetermined, it's a fact. We know that if there's only leave for the mother, the mother is disadvantaged in the work place.

To take it really slow:

* Two people get a child, mother and father.

* The mother needs a couple of weeks after child birth to recuperate.

* The mother can take additional leave beyond that, the father can't take any leave at all.

* Whoops! Who's gonna work and who's gonna take care of the child now?!

This is a sexist system since it blatantly throws the responsibility of child-rearing on to the mother. Not granting fathers parental leave REQUIRES mothers to do it. And the only way this is accepted and seen as a default is because of traditional, sexist, gender roles where the mother is assumed to do the child-rearing.

The whole "it's more administration!" argument is just so pathetic that I won't bother commenting on it any more. Not even the most right-wing nut here in Sweden would try to argue that the administrative overhead is a significant problem. You also just skipped the actual point in my last paragraph - the question about proportionality.

I didn't think I would need more than 1 week off, but my wife needs a break from watching a newborn all day (and all night). I'm glad in a way that with COVID, I can stay home a day or two a week and it's not a big deal, and I'm also forced to take off 1 day per pay period.

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