Paternity leave: The hidden barriers keeping men at work
bbc.com
bbc.com
I took two months off when our baby was first born. Then I took 4 months off when the baby was about 9 months so we could spend New Years in Japan with my wife’s mother. While abroad on leave the pandemic hit, flights we canceled and we got stranded. Upon returning everyone was working remote so we stayed in Japan for about a year.
I’m so grateful for that time. We spent the mornings watching morning kids shows, paying with grandma, going to the park, etc. My daughter speaks Japanese as a first languages and has advanced in so many ways because of that time off.
I’ve heard stories of very senior people being pressured to take less time. The logic being: If you’re gone for 6 months and everything functions just fine, are you really that important? My advice from those people was the company puts it there for a reason, take your time, you earned it, everyone is jealous.
Well, yes, I think that's the crux of it. If you work in a place you like then - if you're smart - you'll not only work well, but also make sure everybody knows you're an valuable asset and without you things could go awry. It kind of conflicts with your disappearing for a few months.
It means that you are worth your salary and that they'd rather take you back after some leave than not have you at all or replace you with someone else.
If things go awry when you leave it could mean there is a bus factor problem to be addressed.
In any case, it's in the best interest of the company to reduce the bus factor to zero, and by the same token, it's in the best interest of the employee to keep it above zero. You can understand how much it is above zero during salary negotiations, or when you say "I quit" and you are offered a raise. It's mainly because in order to replace you, the new employee needs to be trained and this takes time usually proportional to your experience.
Now, in the case we're discussing (paternal leave), you don't just make a threat to leave, you actually just quit - you allow the company to test the scenario of working without you. So basically you lose some bargaining power.
I'm not saying this is how things should be, but similar thinking processes are going on in the heads of many people in management positions, especially recently, when you need to put some extra effort justifying your position.
The issue here is you are treating employees as cogs that have to be “in the machine” for it to work (i.e. the value they provide is to keep the business running). Valuable employees don’t necessarily cause the business to stop working if they leave. They just continuously add value (individually, making people around them better, designing systems that provide advantages over the long term, etc.) when working that wouldn’t be created if they weren’t there.
It's like the learning curve. A steep one is supposed to mean something is easy to learn, but more people have it backwards.
I mean, if doctors offices and hospitals can get through these periods (and do, in countries that give leave to everyone), then so can most other businesses. Temporary employment for educated people exists.
Yes, that’s why no institution gives valued employees extended sabbaticals, for instance.
Oh, wait...
The truth is that you're never that important and eventually you'll go away from this place, so what is really important to you?
As you say figure out what you care about the most and double down on that if you can.
I mean I know it's just business, but I realized that I was replacable that day.
I mean with enough skill and money the experienced of us and he was replaceable. But not at the current budget. Maybe not even on twice the budget.
'Irreplaceable' is ofent with an implied 'at reasonable cost in a reasonable time'.
If you can leave your job in a state that means the next 6 months are problem-free then you are amazing. You've obviously planned ahead, documented things, and foreseen potential problems that you've mitigated ahead of time. Any company would be crazy to lose you.
If you leave your job in a state where the problems are fixable then you're pretty good. You haven't foreseen things or left good enough plans, and maybe there's issues with documentation and strategy, but things were in a good state that others can recover from. That's more than most companies ask for.
If you leave your job and everything falls apart then there are issues somewhere. You, or people you rely on, are basically winging it, and the company doesn't see that as a problem.
I would spin that arguement against the business rather than against people. It's clearly a business-PoV argument. If your business stops functioning after losing a small percentage of employees then it's a poorly planned businesses. It has poor redundancy measures and should fail.
This. Austria has generous parental leave policies but the effect of that is that as a woman in your late twenties or early thirties, you will have a hard time changing jobs in highly skilled positions as the employer will expect you'll get pregnant soon and will need to find a temporary replacement for you which is impossible as no highly skilled worker wants to be on a fixed short term contract for the same pay, so many employers who can't or don't want to eat the cost of redundancy will prioritize hiring males instead and spread your workload while you're on leave to the remaining workers, causing them to be overworked for that period.
That's the hidden cost.
Edit: Don't get why I'm downvoted for saying the truth on how many employers think when hiring. Is stating the hard truth bad or something? I don't like it myself but that's how our society works.
That sounds good, but who will pay for the extra costs of men being out of the workforce longer?
There is no free lunch. Like I explained previously, all generous benefits given by the government have hidden costs to the employers and end up biting some workers back through reduced job mobility as employers optimize by hiring employees who will burden them the least.
It's unfortunate that it's like this, but companies will always act in their best interest.
But yes there is no free lunch. Either more money needs to be allocated to parental leave, or the current parental leave needs to be shifted over towards men at the cost of women. Somewhere something has got to give. But it's not some sort of mystical problem. We know how to solve it. Whether we choose to do so is another question.
Why do we want to strive for an equal amount of parental leave so much? Seems like an obsession borne out of a political ideology rather than an increase in productivity.
Could it be that the reality is that women have a lot more stress under pregnancy and childbirth cuz they are actually the ones giving birth?
This would lead to a lot more time out of the workforce and probably reduced productivity whilst caring for an infant the first couple years.
What if we just removed all employment protections/protected groups/parental leave and replaced it with a universal basic income? This would solve our leave-inequality problem as you get the same UBI payment everywhere and the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
The point of striving for equal parental leave in this instance is to even up the playing field economically for men and women. If they both have a roughly equal probability of going on parental leave and the time they'd take is roughly equal, then it makes no sense for a business to avoid hiring women of child-bearing age over men of child-having age (obviously it isn't as cut at dry, but generally there is a range of normal ages for men to dad's as well). It would of course not be perfect, but it has a chance of working at least.
Now if don't want to solve these issues (maybe you don't believe this is a problem) or if you want to look into entirely different ways of solving them (like universal basic income), then okay that's interesting but it's kind of a separate discussion.
> the FAANG can’t use parental leave as a selling point anymore.
Random aside. Why do we care if they use it as a selling point? If we want to remove that option we could also just make it national law. (Here I assume you're referring to the US since many countries have these laws already.)
I haven't heard of any actual statistics about the problems it causes, but I've heard grumblings from small business owners.
Maybe in some top echelons / old Boyd clubs these things are discussed, but I was never made to feel like there's a bias towards males. In fact, in tech and product it's more the opposite.
Also, Austria has stronger parental leave than Germany AFAIK from my German colleagues working in Austria so that could also explain why employers there are less affected by this.
That's not the point. In high-pressure, competitive environments being out of the loop for 6 months means that you have to catch-up for the next 3 months to get back to speed. It slows down people's careers.
Everyone at my company who is good at their job would have their absence felt over the course of six months. For different positions, it would be different amounts of time, but I can't think of a single role from entry level to executive where someone could be so thoroughly good at their job that the company could ride along fine in their absence.
What was your experience? Do you live there or was it just a visit?
I thought Japan handled the pandemic much more reasonable than what my friends reported in the US. Initially I was worried about the density of Tokyo but mask wearing was already high. Everyone used hand sanitizer, socially distanced, etc. Tokyo never went on full lock down, it was just very limited so we got to do things I don’t think we would have done otherwise. Eg. we went to Tokyo Disney / Disney Sea a couple times and at 20-50% capacity it was like having the place to yourself.
Two, four weeks, or whatever it is really isn't enough time, your partner needs support and you have a new child to look after.
Like you, the pandemic left us spending the first year+ at home with our daughter and it has been a benefit to each of us.
If the company can not function without a single employee, they also need to ban employees from buying lottery tickets. Or walking on streets patrolled by homicidal buses (is there any other kind when it comes to key employees?).
Bad management is a sign they are going to experience running the company without key employees sooner rather than later.
If the work you're doing is important to the employer in any way, they need to have a backup plan on how to get that work done anyway. Because employees also switch jobs, get sick etc. Simulating a situation where an important worker becomes unavailable for an extended period of time is probably even a good exercise from organization point of view.
At the end of the day, this is unfair. People who have - in this case up to 3 - kids get a structural advantage. We're in an era where not only do we expect a lot of people not to have kids, the ones who aren't having them are in some sense making a sacrifice of some very precious moments for the ones who are.
This is an expression of the same old arguments against maternity leave as well - at the end of the day, this is making private choices a problem for the company and (to some extent) the people working at the company. The effects of this sort of thing can already be seen in the differences between men and women's pay & career opportunities - it is a substantial handicap!
We should be winding back on this sort of thing, not encouraging it. People should earn their living and take time off at their own expense.
EDIT And, having thought about it a bit, it might favour wealthy workers. You end up with situations where effectively the janitor's wage has to go down to cover for the risk the software engineer has kids.
It is a cost for people who don’t have kids, but a net gain for everyone. A bit like healthcare. People who chose not to smoke benefit from paying taxes used to heal smokers, although a cigarette brings a lot less joy and benefit than kids.
It is my opinion and I’m politically strongly against demographic shrinking.
If there was a choice between a cash handout + keep on working vs. paternity leave a significant number of meant would prefer the cash handout.
The basic "this is the deal you get" for men is if they work hard for it & finance the operation then they get a happy & loving family. There are men who'd prefer the time & men who undervalue the time. But there are a lot of men who correctly identify that hard work, maximising their career outcomes and earning as much money as they can is the best way to help their family and this scheme disadvantages them.
If people want unpaid time off I'm all for it. But paid vacation is not justified.
Where do you live ?
In country with free education and health care I'd say people definitely prefer maximising family quality time than working hard. When you don't have to worry about getting bankrupt at any point for any reason you start to see things differently. You're not going to be a dad/mom if you drop your kids to a caregiver at 6am and pick them up at 6pm
What's the point of having kids if you don't even take part in their education and just slave away at the office, get a tamagotchi, much cheaper and lower maintenance.
Every cent spent on kids education, well being and providing them healthy family environments is paid 1000 time back to society
If money could solve all problems, why don’t companies just send all their employees home and let their money do the work?
No they really need the employees to be there, giving their time and attention to the company mission. For that they are willing to spend a lot of money.
Parental time, care and attention is the most valuable thing you could provide a child with in the first few years of their life. Unless the time machine is invented, all the money in the world is no substitute.
No one is deciding though to have kids or not based on the father getting paid time off.
I think it is an easier argument that a knowledge worker who has been up all night taking care of a screaming baby is not effective anyway.
I think we should give fathers paid time off out of pity basically.
I am a father who was lucky to have a paid paternal leave. I am also a former freelancer who is happy to take care of himself in all situations.
I agree that this sort of benefits which you reap by choice is controversial; i don't see what I'd possibly consider a "fair" amount of benefits here. But I can't agree that cancelling it would make it fair.
All societies typically provide various parenting benefits, but then society also reaps the benefits of having the kids - up to drafting them into the armed forces and sending them to war. Now, some countries don't have mandatory conscription nowadays, but it is not unheard of for countries to introduce it at critical times.
I guess we'll see the abolition of animals farming globally around the same time. This would be the expression of humanity's "sentiment" against coercion towards the weaker in general. I believe this may happen but not very soon. (I am myself a meat eater.)
What would happen if the USA and PRC China got into a hot war over the ROC Taiwan? That would destroy the economy. Much easier to just insult one another and play games with currency manipulation and tariffs.
Capitalism and the global markets interconnectedness will save us from going to war.
Who is this ‘WE’ to whom you refer?
War is immensely profitable to many companies and individuals.
When those interests have the reins of power, there will be war.
As they should, at least in most of the Western world. People who make kids in demographically challenged countries are contributing more to society than those who don't, and accordingly deserve more privileges.
Regarding the economics: In the end someone is going to have to look after the kids. Looking at how much it costs to have kids, your argument makes no sense, too. If you just work and don't have children, you get paid the whole time and you also don't have to pay the enormous amount of money an extra human life costs.
So actually in the society you're proposing, having children would be even more of an economic drain than it is now, while parents would also miss out on the opportunity to form bonds with their child, therefore significantly worsening the child's life and maybe also even damage its psyche permanently ("my parents where never there for me" etc). Because not even remotely everyone can afford unpaid leave.
In the end, what you're arguing for is to worsen everyone's life just so you don't feel treated unfairly, even of you are not.
For the argument that the company has a problem by so called private choices: this is life. People get children. Self reproduction is basically the purpose of humanity. If your company (or to an extent your society) does not have the productivity to pay for their workers temporarily leaving, maybe it's just a shitty company. If your workers don't care for each other well being, maybe the company is just not a place worth of existence. Humans gotta look out for each other. That's basic human social behavior. That's what we're here for. As an employer of 10 people, I'm always happy to allow my workers taking off time for their children. Happens about once a year since I'm in the organization. Also we don't pay the full amount of the costs because it's subsidized by the state.
Children are awesome. Parents are awesome. And giving both the opportunity to form a bond, to not be stressed out and depressed, to make a basis for all the things they will become, all the things they will achieve in their later lifes, because they are healthy, loving, social humans – that's awesome.
It really depends on how you look at it. In my view companies are here to support our lifestyle and societies, we're some robots working for a corporate overlord for the kick of it, having a kid isn't (or doesn't have to be) a "sacrifice" you have to pay a price for.
A company offering maternal/paternal leave is a company that supports its employees and society at large. We evolved in societies and its structures to support each-other, not to slave our life away for some faceless corporation.
Don't forget to live your life, like, out of the office, real life, with people, kids being born, parents dying, taking time of to breath, taking a few steps back, realising work isn't the be-all and end-all of life. Taking time to educate and bond with your kids is so much more important than a few months of typing shitty code no one will ever read or use in 5 years tops
Salaries are usually not a zero-sum game.
Having kids is a full time job. When you get kids you can kiss all your free time goodbye, say goodnight to the side projects. Having kids is not good for your career, or other life goals. And if you are alone, eg. you have to pay for everything yourself, it also means a life in poverty.
This is a very self-centered view of the universe. No, you are not important nor you need to be.
I do my job, if I leave someone else is going to be hired to do it. That is how it works.
If you are "important" then you should be receiving a share of the profits, not a salary. A salary just means that you can be replaced, no matter how high it is.
I guess that it is a cultural thing, that many people have been convinced to work extra hours, to not take vacations, to slave away their lives for a sense of "self importance".
I get a fantastic salary, I enjoy my work, but I am not important. It is difficult to replace me, it took 2 years to get another person in my position. But, if I tomorrow leave, the company will manage. I bring value, but I am not the center of the universe. I bring value, but I am not irreplaceable. I bring value, but I have to take (by law) vacations and the company will continue running without me.
All jobs in a company bring value and the employees needs to be respected for that. It does not matter if you have a low-paid low-skilled job, you are still being paid because you bring value and you should be respected for it. And you should be able to go on vacations, because the goal of all this capitalist thing is to make our lives better, to be slaves we do not need capitalism. If in your society low-paid low-skill workers cannot take vacations, then you are failing at bringing well-being, health, and meaning to the members of your society. And for what? To produce another plastic shit that will be polluting the ocean in one month? To show more ads to people that cannot afford to buy more shit?
I guess that this is a difference in society values. But for me the question "are you really important" should be answered as "yes, because I have friends, family, children, hobbies, etc." and what you produce is only a small part of that value.
I mean, the only reason the tech giants are able to offer such generous leave is because their businesses are almost unfathomably profitable, with limited competition, and because they are big enough that the work of any individual worker will not be missed that much. But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
My paternity leave was fully paid by the government, but it was capped. Moreover the amount of paid months is limited and I had to share them with my wife.
However because sexism is more complicated than just lack of equal access, parental leave is still mostly taken by women and women still find it harder to get back into regular employment after extended periods of maternity leave.
I know several mothers who planned to have children and go on maternity leave and because of this accepted jobs that pay the bills but aren't places they enjoy working and now face the prospect of having to go back to a job they hate or have a second or third child (only to then have to either go back to a job they not only hate but also haven't done in years or find a new job with a multi-year gap in their resumé).
For this to really change will likely take generations because the behavior and the social expectation of that behavior are mutually reinforcing.
Google do it anyway because they and their employees like it and because they can afford to. The local restaurant could do it much MORE easily. But they have less profit margin (like you say). So we need a law to force them to do it, so everyone does it and puts their prices up to stay in business.
That's exactly why countries mandate it: mandating it allows less profitable companies to do it because they know their competitors have to as well.
It's not about replacements, it's about still getting paid. Try your argument again with the premise that that small restaurant now has to pay two people for that one position.
However, as someone who, for a short period of time, gave a small loan to an Italian friend (professional cook, very good too and able to produce in restaurant environment) so that he could (once again) open a restaurant, and also has another friend with a (better quality and very good environment) Mexican restaurant, and also other people managing hotels or restaurants and clubs/bars, in Germany, your argument about easy replacements does not hold water at least from what I witnessed. They struggled hard to keep people they knew, and any loss was not easy to replace at all.
We also have seen headlines recently that those kinds of jobs are harder to fill now, after over a year of shutdown or very limited restaurant business, with many workers having found other jobs, for example "Covid and jobs: Why are hospitality workers leaving the industry?" -- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-57241370
Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation. That's what almost every other western country does. The effect is the same either way though: people pay a few cents more per meal and employees get parental leave and we all get on with our lives.
Restaurants have way too few employees so it would not "even out".
> They can do that because all restaurants are charging a bit more because they all have to pay
That is not what will happen.
I'm sorry, that would be nice, especially here in Germany food quality comes way after trying to save a penny (not my random Internet opinion, an Italian friend of mine representing Italian food makers arranging sales here in Germany said they sold the good stuff to Spain and France and only then to Germany - not because of bias, but because to German buyers the price matters more than anything else). I've got some money and quite a few diverse contacts in the restaurant and hotel business here. What do you base your argument on? It sounds idealistic but not very realistic. Even if you could avoid those small businesses not hiring anyone that could be a "danger", somehow, which restaurants would be impacted would be extremely uneven, only a few would have to pay.
Their margins, at least here, are already atrocious. Germans just stay home and get the cheapest stuff even if it's objectively bad food. I lived abroad, for example in the Bay Area for a few years, and that was paradise for going out (ignoring all the posh restaurants that want to appear to be better, when a lot of "ugly" places have far better food and atmosphere) for food, now I'm in the 3rd food world.
> Personally I'd prefer it to be funded via taxation.
Yes, indeed.
But your idea that trying to force the small restaurant would work even remotely as well - no, it won't. In large companies the laws of large numbers start to work and it averages out, the variations in tiny businesses, who ends up with a parent that has to be paid, who doesn't, are different. Only a few will end up with that cost but much of their competition will not. Those are not exactly life-long employments when it would even out over time because most employees would be impacted at one time or another.
Maybe you can Google-translate, it's in German, how it works here in Germany for small businesses: https://www.personal-wissen.de/7414/arbeitsrecht-in-kleinbet... -- The business does not have to pay it, it is paid by the state, in summary (also see - again in German - https://www.arbeitsrechte.de/elternzeit-gehalt/). Over a third of workers only work part-time though.
Google doesn't want you to leave for two to three years to raise your kids. Google wants you (as a woman) to work yourself to the bone into your 30s and then either drop out over reduced performance from a burnout or take your family leave and leave the industry forever. Or alternatively, not to take your leave and instead use the free child care to maintain the illusion that you still get a fulfilling family life while living for the company.
The fact they choose to do anything shows at least some degree of decency. I'm sure there is a degree of calculation there too (we don't want to lose 30-something women who are skilled and well integrated because they want kids). But it's still positive and generous.
All the perks companies like Google offer are carefully optimized to increase productive time in the short term and extend the duration of that short term as much as possible. Only as you rise through the ranks does mid and long term become relevant and then they have perks to address those factors as well. But at no point is a company purposefully being generous except to extract as much value out of employees as possible. The purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value, not to make employees happy.
Yup, that's what the article says at the end:
> But ideally, says Banister, leave for fathers and financial support for that leave should be the state’s responsibility, because putting the onus on employers – as is the case in the US – can lead to a “two-tier system” where only certain sectors offer paternity leave.
[...]
“The government should offer an appropriate minimum package which encourages behaviours that support a more gender equal society,” says Banister.
Businesses do exist and function perfectly fine in countries where these policies are universal, so I don't buy the argument. I've only encountered this belief in North America.
But yes, US tech giants pay voluntarily because they are quite profitable and hiring devs is (relatively) hard, and yes society should enforce it through government policy (I think whether it is taxpayer or company funded is a smaller detail IMO - e.g. annual leave and other entitlements are company funded - but yes 6 months paid leave for a very small business might be an expense it cannot pay, compared to predictable amounts of annual leave you can plan around, so it might make sense to "pool" the cost via taxation).
Other countries mandate these leaves and spread them out as social programs, and therefore the small companies in those countries ARE able to function - because the costs are spread out.
In the US that is not the case, because the spreading of costs and mandating of leaves isn’t universal, and they can’t afford to take it on themselves.
Afterwards both parents can take up to 3 years time-off each while their job will be protected. Between both parents up to 14 months are paid, each parent has to take at least 2 months off or only 12 months will be paid. Note this is not full salary but 65% of the net salary (and not taxed) plus a cap that TBH huts as a tech worker but is fine for most people.
Now here’s what the employer is on the hook for: - Need to keep your job available during all the time taken off. You need to be able to renter at the same level and salary. - Time off during the mandatory protective leave for mother’s is paid by the employer but fully reimbursed by the public health insurance (so net 0). Companies pay into this system a small percentage of payroll, currently between 0,14% and 0,88% depending on the employers chosen insurance. - The 14 months paternity leave are fully paid for by taxes and the employer has to apply for it themselves
This is still a burden for very small companies but overall it creates a situation where there’s almost no financial impact for companies when people become parents. Society as a whole shoulders that.
> But why do virtually zero, say, small businesses like restaurants, cleaners, mechanics, etc. offer leave policies remotely like this? Because these businesses actually need all their workers to actually work, and when they don't, the business actually stops functioning.
With a good parental leave system, any business no matter how small must be ready for any employee to disappear for 3-12 months. It’s just the reality of running a business. But again (and this is what’s important) if it’s universally used then the same applies to the restaurant across the street too! It’s not a competitive disadvantage.
The same applies for employees: if your manager with 99% certainty took 6-12 months paternal leave with each child, just like every man in the company, then your taking 6-12 months will not be a disadvantage for your career as a man either.
> If we really believe that parental leave and parental bonds are beneficial for society, then society should pay for it, instead of hoisting the cost onto companies, where only the richest companies are able to do so.
Absolutely 100% agree. This isn’t a benefit for the parent it’s a benefit for the child. Non-transferable tax funded leave of at least 3 months per parent should be par for the course.
Except it is because your business is the one that hired the young woman and the other business did not, so now you have 4 people working for a year and the other business has 5 at the same cost.
For small businesses, if this is not tax funded, this is a huge liability and an incentive to discriminate when hiring.
Oh absolutely. It has to be tax funded. The damage to the employer has to be limited to finding a temp/replacement - no more.
Vacations are kind of a tax too: They take a portion of your income, and give it to you in June of the next year.
Not everything has to make things rough on the employer. Though, to be fair, if people and companies are taxed fairly, the richest people and companies would still be paying a larger share simply because they can afford to do so without slipping into despair.
Slightly meta, but I wish people would stop saying "the US" as if it's a monolith. It's not. It's a federation of smaller entities. It's saying "the EU" parental leave policy as a monolith: it's non-sensical.
The EU has a whole bunch of different countries which do their own thing, and the US has a whole bunch of states that do their own thing.
Just like people might compare Denmark versus Spain on weeks given, you have to compare (e.g.) Illinois to Oregon.
The EU as a whole has federalism, and so does the US.
I’d challenge the word “cause” here. My guess is it’s just a leading indicator signaling the dad is engaged in/places high priority on the family which extends to the marriage.
Aside from the cases where there is some kind of fundamental incompatibility being papered over by absence (which, sure, is a thing that happens, though), I fail to see how it could fail to be.
For example, if covid reduced number of cars on road and thus absolute number of accidents. Your saying you'd determine it's safer to drive because covid. However, in a relative sense, maybe pre-covid you had a 1% chance of being in an accident and during covid you had a 5% chance of being in an accident. What caused that? You can't just said covid made everything screwy and caused it all. You need to dig deeper. Are people running red lights because there are fewer cars on the road? Are people distracted because TikTok? Are they racing around trying to find toilet paper? Sure covid did all those things, but simply blaming covid is not really a useful analysis except in casual conversation; not academic research.
a father bonding with his children may also be more willing to avoid divorce.
but are these really significant factors? only research can answer that.
Couples where finances are stable enough that the person who didn't just pop out a kid can justify taking the time off are going to have the spare resources to maintain a marriage. They can afford all sorts of lifestyle crap that puts less stress on a relationship than living paycheck to paycheck in a double wide with a toddler running around causing problems. The correlation between stable finances and a stable marriage has been studied written about at length.
No evidence offered, just some philosophical symmetry “it has to be” argument is concocted.
I don’t buy it: in western countries you are protected by law if you want to take parental leave, so if men want to do it they should do it regardless of what “society” thinks. The law gives them the power to do so, hence who cares about the hypothetical existence of these “deep prejudices”: even if it is as bad as they say, it’s not like anyone can fire them.
But you might miss out on your career: and that is logical… if you go away for 5 months, then your colleague who is ultra competitive and childless and was waiting for his chance will just snatch up your position and when you are back you will find yourself sidelined. I see zero issues with this: you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all. Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem. No one owes you anything in life: if you think otherwise, you are set for a disaster.
Even if the two populations aren't equal on average, undoubtedly some men are more communal, and some women are less so. You can't do comparisons on populations as though they were individuals!
But with a stereotype that becomes a norm, even especially-communal men, married to especially-non-communal women, will be pressured into not taking parental leave because people think the wife should do it. That pressure could include, for example, harsher career consequences than a woman would face for taking parental leave. And that's neither good nor fair.
So stereotypes are dangerous, even when they're accurate. (Which this one might not even be!)
Hold on - this doesn't follow.
It's entirely possible that you value both your family and your career.
It would be good to talk with people who are actually in this situation in order to verify the assumptions you've listed.
If you give priority to your health,then you shouldn't care about the fat guy eating chocolate restlessly.
I forgot cocoa has health benefits, should have used cigarettes as example.
If you’re ‘competitor’ is one of those people, well…..
Sure, you can value 100 things, but your time is limited. At some point you will make decisions that favour one of the things at the expense of the others.
The major issue with this is that it discourages having children and that is a major social problem in many countries of the world. Many developed nations are on the cusp of devastating demographic decline and fertility rates have been falling in developing nations for decades which can't replace 100s of millions of retiring Europeans/Chinese etc.
What we’re seeing is the beginning of a sudden and massive drop in the working population across vast regions of the planet. That’s a recipe for famine, decaying infrastructure, war, burning wood and coal instead of maintaining sophisticated energy infrastructure.
Most mothers take one year off. And most other half probably are in the 8-12 months as well.
So why are you whining about "entitlement" here, but aren't also defending that "If you can take it, it's yours"?
Only the childless would be at an advantage in the 'experience' world.
Sure, and I assume this is part of the reason men (and women!) feel concerned about taking parental leave. The law has no effect on people's perceptions. But...
> you prioritised family, hence where your career will go from that point shouldn’t matter to you at all.
... this is just a false dichotomy. People don't have to choose between total dedication to one or the other, and it's quite possible (and practically achievable) to be good at both.
> Are people supposed to modify business objectives due to personal choices? If people do believe the answer is yes, we are entering the land of such deeply ingrained entitlement that to me that is the real problem.
You suggest it's entitlement when people want to have kids while also maintaining their careers, but I think you have it backwards - the real entitlement here is thinking you should be able to profit in a society that is fundamentally dependent on people who choose to raise another generation, while refusing to do so yourself or even acknowledge that what parents do is in general a service to society.
What do you think society would look like if everybody took your advice? The best minds would never want to reproduce, because they'd lose their careers, and many good minds who did choose to reproduce would be sidelined at great cost to their respective industries.
(we know this incidentally from studies that were investigating the pay gap)
It's extremely obvious why it tends to be women choosing to raise the children over men. Men value their work more and women value children more. It's as simple as that and if that seems wrong to you, look at the evidence and accept that truth.
A key here is that one does not need to take all days at once. You can choose to work half time etc. for some years if you prefer and use half-days of parental Leave, making them last twice as long.
It's also pretty common to save days to use them in conjunction with vacation each year up to the child reach 12 years of age (100 days can be save after child reacheas 4 years of age).
This means you can extend the vacation from 1 months to 2-3 months a year instead and the the full summer to hang out with your kid. Very nice.
Both parents are even allowed to be on parental leave simultaneously for 1 months in case you want to go on a longer trip together.
The only way to get rich in Sweden is through capital gains. There taxes as still very low :)
Imagine if you will, a society that didn't want to go extinct. A society that had discovered that birth rates were falling and that paternity leave was just one of many straightforward government sanctioned initiatives that could tip the balance.
Now imagine an individual or group that thought 5 days was enough. Yeah. About that.
My eldest son is nearly 30.
When we were expecting him, his mother was suddenly `managed out` of her job in IT working on GCOS7 systems; no problems whatsoever until she was pregnant.
When I told my boss (again in IT) I needed to plan in a weeks annual leave, he was clear that he was pissed off and fed up about it, because we were busy doing some technology transition.
Three decades later; I cheerfully cover for colleagues taking a couple of weeks of extra paid paternity leave.
My own archaic view about paternity leave is that it is designed for female equality; which I believe is a good thing.
Since there is no changing biology, my proposed solution is to make paternal leave mandatory.
I think it's counterintuitive at first blush to help women by forcing men not to work but that absence is exactly what puts young women behind the eightball at the beginning of their careers and they play catch-up for the rest of their lives.
There should definitely also be mandated minimum vacation days in my opinion (where I live, four weeks of paid leave per year are the legal minimum for full-time jobs), but that's quite unrelated to the issue at hand.
I am extremely against enforced handicaps on people as a way to achieve equality. I can't think of precedent where this has led to anything positive (I'm reminded of the Harrison Bergeron short story as a write this). If the man (or woman) can afford childcare, then why should the government force them out of the workforce, exactly who is benefiting from this handicap?
Young women don't get promoted before they have kids and that hurts their future earnings.
To answer the second question, I think the children would benefit.
I am, however, pretty nonplussed about the idea of forcing people to... do anything really. I'm with you on that.
Ask any recruiter or whoever is doing hiring at your company.
Eg. In the UK it's illegal to discriminate by gender / race, unless it's done in favour of a category that is deemed unrepresented.
We routinely had recruiters bringing only female / non-white candidates to make our quota look good.
Childless people will still get sick, depressed, burned out, they'll quit... They're not robots. How much more productive will they be, 1%?
There are several trends the can explain why there are differences in the aggregates (old generations had a more traditional family/work split, old rich men are over represented in the market, more families could survive on one salary in the past, young women have better qualifications than young men, women don't start a family before 30 these days) and there are also tons of biological reasons that make men and women different.
On the subject of paternity leave; while I was grateful to have extra paid time off (it does push your pay per day up), I didn't really enjoy my paternity leave and ended up using it as a work 3 days per week for a long time.
A mandatory paternity solution sounds like a terrible idea for the men who don't want it and it just reduces men's freedom for the increase of a meaningless metric.
but do you think all mothers enjoy to stay at home? mandatory maternity leave sounds like terrible idea for women who don't want it and just reduces a womans freedom...
the leave is not just for you but for your child too.
btw: the pay gap is not in the pay levels for equal work in equal time, but in the fact that on average women spend less time working and get promoted less into higher paying positions. and especially that last point is a problem.
California is pursuing gender equality by enforcing female presence in the board of directors (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...) and yet there's no mandatory maternity/paternity leave.
Congrats btw!
This of course nothing for the fact that bad employers may not see it that way.
For me this has been some of the best time of my life becoming much closer with all of my children then I believe I would have otherwise.
Being the primary caregiver for a significant amount of time made us more equal when it came to parenting later on to the point where there are really no difference between who can do what. This have given us more flexibility and reduced stress in every day life and it is easier to let the other one take over if you need a break.
During the pandemic lockdown we alternated who had the children and who where at work.
Flip side, we are slightly surprised if we come across men who aren't taking advantage of shared parental. It's very rare now but those who don't are unspokenly seen as "traditional".
Or when people who lose someone get a few bereavement days and you get nothing?
I also get sick leave and bereavement time..
So bereavement should be declined if the dead made a conscious decision for suicide, and sick days should be banned if the person say made a conscious decision to take care of a family member with a communicable disease?
I would argue parental leave is only unfair against those who are simultaneously infertile and legally barred from adopting. If both of these don't apply to you then your position is intractable.
On taking care of a sick family member, no, your family member didn't choose to be ill.
These are both straw man arguments IMO.
It's absurd to claim taking care of a sick family member isn't a conscious decision. Have you ever slept walked your way into the position of caretaker? It certainly has negative externalities (like you transmitting the communicable illness to others).
A nice straw man is suggesting that everyone who chooses not to adopt or have a child doesn't have the option to, and thus somehow unfairly disadvantaged by the offering of parental leave. If you live in the US and you dislike parental leave you know you can simply choose to work for a company that doesn't offer it, don't you?
edit: choose to work for a company that doesn't offer paid leave beyond FMLA mandates.
Not having children is incontrovertibly better for the planet, why am I not getting eco-leave for my decision to help mother nature while you get parental leave for yours?
Now if you live somewhere where paid parental leave is not consensual but rather legally required by government and funded at gunpoint, then we are in 100% agreement. Taxation is theft and non-consensual.
How many of your employees actually did the same thing? (I'm not asking if they were encouraged to do so, I'm asking how many of your employees did take full paternity leave when they fathered children). That would be a more relevant information about the company.
Parental leave should be guaranteed by the government and funded via payroll (or similar) taxes. It should not depend on who you work for.
A company obviously would prefer you stay at work. Going further, it's probably best for the company if you don't have kids at all. One less thing to pull you away from work.
The government is in the opposite position. Governments need population growth. Having a child is, for most people, the biggest impact you have on the economy. You just produced another productive worker/consumer!
But right now the incentives are all messed up. My wife is a freelancer. When we start thinking about kids the rational thing for her to do would be to apply for full-time work at a company with generous maternity leave before having the kid. That's not really fair to the company, but it's the rational economic choice.
If so, it will not be easy to convince poorer voters to vote for a policy that gives more money to the rich than the poor.
If not, the incentives will still be imbalanced but in another way: lower paid employees will be more likely to accept the leave than higher paid employees.
Higher paid employees pay more taxes (just like they pay more for unemployment insurance) so it shouldn't be a problem.
In the end the social contributions are proportional to your salary when you work, it's not unfair to have this particular benefit match your salary too.
Some conservative napkin math: let's say that people have about a 30-year working career and have on average 2 children. Let's say we want to give them 3 months off per child.
That's 6 months of paid time off in a 30-year (360 month) working career or 1.66% of their career off. So taxes in that range would cover it. And actually people only need to get their after-tax salary in payments, which is smaller. And companies would probably be happy to pay into this because they no longer have the burden of paying the full PTO, it's amortized across the economy.
Beyond taxes, the main contribution of the companies here would be that they need to hold the job for you while you're out and continue to provide non-salary benefits such as healthcare.
My math is probably off but I think it's in the right ballpark!
https://bel-india.com/what-is-the-state-of-paternity-leave-i...
I met someone who took leave for their first three months at Amazon, because the baby was born just before their start date.
I’ve only been working for a little over 10 years, and I can’t imagine this has always been the case.
I think the first-wave of modern startup land is having kids themselves - the change in most companies seem start with the founder - like Zuckerberg taking time off (the last generation feel like the opposite, with folks like Marissa Mayer having a nursery in the office).
That said, in my close circle, I was the only one who took the whole 3 months off work while being on a H1B visa.
There are folks who have the option, but did not take it because they are really worried about replacing themselves at work in an active fashion for a whole quarter.
On the career ladder path, there's a fair amount of ugly politics which goes along with this as well, with the same people who encouraged you to take time off also trying to disassemble your team for parts while you are out.
Because of that, I like the idea of taking paternity leave just like maternity leave (it's not the same, no baby was trying to extract my blood sugar).
It balances the inequalities of having children to be more fair between parents, but highlights the inequalities of being a parent (vs not having kids).
That's at least the case in NZ - and if you are on tech salary you'll be loosing like 90% of your income.
If I remember right, in Denmark you can't split the days and so men has a much more equal parental leave compared to Sweden.
Note*: in NZ, the partner is allowed 2 week unpaid if you are in your current job for more than 12 months, 1 week if you are in your job between 6 and 12, and 0 if you just join a new company. And it does not matter if you have been paying taxes and working several years before that. Silly system really.
At the same time, I WFH the full time so I was there for almost everything and my kid started to have full nights straight away so it was not that bad :).
And on top of that, your value of your annual also depreciates ("You work only half a year full salary, so your annual leave is now 1/2 its origina value")...
It is easy to see why this kind of thing can have affect on your carreer development. Especially when people who have kids and take timeoff tend to have multiple kids and thus multple paternity leaves. If you take 10 months off work your carreer development drags behind 10 months and everytime you change your employer unless you can trade up your title you will be resetting whatever progress you've made towards the next job title (you might catch up faster to the same point you were in at the new job, but the progress still gets reset).
I don't think there is anything that can be done about this. This is how human brains work. Think about our ancestors. Someone goes away for long time and comes back. We might be glad that they are back, but they've missed out from the struggles and successes of that time, so we are less likely to promote them to the next leader of our group than someone who has been there while they were absent.
In my experience teams are usually continually hiring, so the person on secondment can often go straight into a permanent role on the team when the parent returns.
This phrasing of these statistics makes no sense. If the employer offers a small amount of leave, and then people take a small amount of leave, and are worried that if they want to take more it will be harmful for their career, all of these statistics go together. The article is phrasing it as if instead 90% of employers do offer 12+ weeks of leave.
I've taken SPL twice, and while people not knowing about it might be a problem, the real issue is that it is insanely complicated. I have a PhD and still struggled to understand the forms you have to fill in. I imagine most people would just give up.
The article also doesn't consider that there are definitely genetic factors that make women more interested in babies. I have experienced none of the supposed shaming or career effects, but I still don't want to do paternity leave for more than a few months.
I am well against parental leave being paid out with public money, which also mean by my taxes. The reasons are that I don't care about other people's kids; it is unfair to those who don't have children; it's a game very well exploitable, and exploited, I see it around a lot; it forces a whole lot of additional work to the employer and oftentimes to other employees.
Or, you think not having public money involved would also fix the result?
Not clear what the public money part has to do with your observations
Isn't this kind of one of government's fundamental roles?
I don't care about the road 2000 miles away from me in front of some random guy's house. He doesn't care about the road in front of my house. Neither of us will ever drive on the other's road. And both roads get built.
I'm not sure how you can possibly support "education" if you don't support "having kids" in the first place - do you only mean college?
And claiming that health care doesn't involve subsidizing dozens of bad personal choices is obviously absurd: why should your taxes pay for someone else's smoking habit, or choice to engage in a dangerous career like "cab driver"?
Let the parents pay for them, not me.
This can also be said about schools.
Most people agree that children are a very important part of our society and future. If that isn't worth being supported by public money, I honestly don't know what else could be.
Health care, education, police, infrastructure...
> Most people agree that children are a very important part of our society and future.
I'd say some. At the end of the line there will always be someone that will pop out some nonetheless, so why wait spend public money on it? Humanity is on an upward trend and is going to reproduce anyway. It has been like this for millennia, even before money existed.
Maternal leave is not to "pop out" more children, but to give them the care and upbringing they need.
Having children is not a personal lifestyle choice, it's a basic human needs. Otherwise we won't exist.
You are contradicting yourself.
So if there are no children, you will have to work until you die (unless all work can be done by AI at some point in the future).
And I told in the parent post that this ends up in a downvote bath anyway so downvote if you don't agree and move on.
Luckily, didn't feel any of those issues article lists there. Nor from others, nor myself. CEO said something along the lines: of course we like when people work, but your decision. As almost everyone was almost work from home, some even didn't notice :)
Unless you take an equal amount of time off —ie the partner takes more time than the mother— the partner's career will progress more in that time, earning more money by the time they come back to work. This means it less likely that the partner will take equal time off next time, skewing the amounts even further.
Iterate this loop a few times and you open up a real gulf in take-home pay. So much so that it becomes an unignorable factor in decisions about childcare and schooling that can end up with mothers taking years out of full-time employment.
All because their partner worked more the first time.
And that's all running on the unrealistic assumption that women don't get [illegally] passed over for promotion just because they have a functioning uterus. Why would you promote Janet over Jim if it's likely that she's going to take 6-18 months off to start a family, and maybe never return? That can upset the scales well before a baby enters the scene.
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On a personal note, we have two children and I've long earned less than their mother so we're lucky that we don't have to consider this stuff in these terms. She's taken time off and while it's hurt her against her colleagues, our balance is much fairer than many relationships. And I feel privileged to have had such significant input to my children's education and upbringing.
- Antifragility: it’s the same case as with sabbaticals. Nobody should be irreplaceable, and forcing the company to be without kohl’s decision-makers for extended periods reduces the bus count factor. I had to put a lot of work to make the system more robust and documented so it won’t break in my absence.
- The inevitable parental leave forced me to delegate much more than I would be otherwise comfortable with. After all - my team would stay without me for a long time so I had to make sure I’m not a blocker.
- When you’re an individual contributor seeing your "superior" postpone or cut short the parental leave or a sabbatical sends a clear signal that you shouldn’t be taking one either. I was thinking of cutting my parental leave short to for example four months, but that would send a signal that that’s not important. I don’t wanna set an example of a bullshit hustle culture.
- The imminent parental leave made me focus on high leverage long-term important work vs short-term day-to-day business. That focus has actually been a force multiplier for everything I did. When you have unbounded time due to Parkinson’s law the stuff you have to do will fill it up. If you have limited time to do something you will be much more productive. If you need something done, ask a busy person.
- I also don’t want to contribute to the world where the freaking work is more important than a child.
Despite all those great reasons I still had some reservations before taking before six months off. I had a nagging feeling on the back of my head that I may be should cut this a little short, despite EVERYBODY (including my lead, HR, and CEO in the DMs) convincing me to take as much as I need, so I see how hard of a decision can it be for somebody less supported. I am two weeks in and I am very happy that they took the whole time. I've written about my plans for this time here: https://piszek.com/2021/07/10/parental-leave/
When you have to take months off at a time for each kid, then parents are encouraged to have fewer so as not to be that guy (or gal) at work who's just having babies.
As someone who wants lots of kids, taking off a year for each one is just unfeasible, and would lead me to never working.
It's no wonder the birth rate is declining.
Mother's and father's are different. We do men a huge disservice by telling them they're going to be super needed at home for months.
Barring exceptional circumstances, most men will need to be home for a few weeks at most.
I think much more plausible is the reverse: having fewer kids makes long parental leave ideal. If you’re only going to have one or two kids, you’d prefer to take time off and invest in nurturing them. This isn’t possible if you’ve had four or five, since you won’t have the time.
And that’s before we even begin analyzing the squishy factors of norms and expectations. All of our preferences are subtly changed by the society in which we live. If you live in a country with low fertility rates, having only one child seems more normal than it might in a region with medium to high fertility. These trends have a tendency to become self reinforcing, as well as drive social programs too. If the norm is that most women will have a single child, society can afford to invest more in that child than they could if she was going to have six on average.
Frankly, longer paternal leave strikes me as more of a result rather than a cause of lower fertility rates.
Paternity leave is optional.
For example, according to https://anewlifeinnorway.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/norwegian-..., in Norway, fathers must take 14 weeks off. That means if a man wants 8 kids, then that's almost 112 weeks off... or two years! That's ridiculous, and only serves to decrease wages of familial breadwinners than to actually help families.
This will just result in a society where only those without kids are the richest, and normal families suffer.
It’s kind of funny that your core argument is that parental leave makes parents poorer, when the exact opposite appears to be true in the cases you decry. The state is back stopping the cost of parental leave in the countries you cited, which actually makes this an indirect transfer of money from the state to parents, not the other way around. Those without children are helping to pay for a benefit that only parents will reap, which is the exact opposite of what you propose.
Also, read your sources more carefully, the link you provided is very much pro the polices you’re decrying.
My claim is that the time it forces parents to leave work negatively impacts their career. Sure, you can get paid your same wage, but you miss out on promotion opportunities, new ventures launched by the company, valuable professional development, networking, etc. Sorry if that wasn't obvious.
My view on family leave was shifted by my first paternity leave, in which I happily took my state's fully funded paternity leave and realized... it was a waste of time and money. Don't get me wrong... I enjoyed it, but it was pretty obvious to me that I missed out on a lot of valuable time at my company and when new teams were started for new initiatives, the company was obviously going to choose people present at the company available to start the new work to lead the teams. No ones going to put the guy on paternity leave in charge of a team with a deliverable in a few months. And yet, when you get back to work, there's no guarantee there's going to be a similar business opportunity.
Thus it seems to me that the best way to move ahead in your career is to be 'in the game'.
Imagine this... Imagine if fathers had to withdraw all their investments for 14 weeks when they had a baby. In return, the government would guarantee preservation of their capital vis a vis inflation. Would we be surprised that they had less yield at the end of their life than childless men? of course not.
Professional life is similar. Time in the market is the biggest determinant of how high you'll get on the career ladder.
> How exactly does paid leave decrease the wage of familial bread winners?
By impacting the biggest determinant of wage growth -- promotions and experience.
> And how in the world is paying parents to spend time with their children making normal families “suffer”?
Because as the system plays out, and more and more parents take time off, the only people left are the single people or the childless, who have more access to professional development, more experience than the similar aged father/mother and thus get promoted more easily.
To me it seems like you are wedded to the idea of long paid paternity leave because it feels good. I mean... I agree, it sounds great. But I think the negative effects are too much, and very obvious if we're honest with ourselves and if more men honestly assessed the utility of their paternity leave.
Now before I proceed, please note I am completely in favor of paid family leave, especially for parental leave. I think it's a shame we don't have a paid family leave system throughout the country. My only disagreement is on the length of time.
With a new baby, it's nice for dad to be around to get used to the new dynamic, to get the newborn baby cuddles out of the way, and to spend time with older children who may be stressed by the arrival of a new sibling, but that's a few weeks (I'd say 4 weeks on average, maybe 6 for the first) plus some early days, not a few months (unless there are extenuating circumstances). Moreover, dad honestly shouldn't be taking care of kids all day. Dad (and mom too, but this article is about paternity leave) is in the prime of his career. Money is necessary to raise children, and dad's utility making money is almost always greater than the utility he provides at home.
I think a more reasonable solution to paternity leave is some weeks off followed by the ability to take early days to spend a little extra time with family. The months-long policies some countries mandate seem excessive to me. Or alternatively, instead of paying dad to stay home and do nothing, pay grandparents and family caretakers instead. Paternity leave should be 'transferrable', so if dad decides to go back early, the money that would have been paid to him is paid to grandma and grandpa (or aunt and uncle or cousin or whatever) instead.
American families are incredibly atomized (same is true of most western societies). This necessitates parental leave, when in reality, most men probably don't need very much paternity leave if they knew mom was supported at home. For me and my wife, I will take a relatively short paternity leave (4 weeks) with our next baby. My mom and dad and my mother and father-in-law will take care of our other children and help my wife with the baby while she's home. It's nice to see both my father and father-in-law who both worked very hard to provide for my wife and I get to spend time just taking care of their grandchildren, instead of having to focus on work. For me, being in a different stage of life, I recognize my work and income is the biggest utility I have to my family.
When I am an old man and my children have grandchildren (God willing), I will take care of them as well. My father spends almost every day with my children, playing with them, talking to them, and taking them around town. That's great. Kids love their granddads, and granddad -- who is retired -- best serves his family by helping his children with their families. I am happy to see my dad take this leading role with my kids because he is making up for time he didn't get to spend with us.
Honestly, I find the idea that mom and dad have to look after baby all day and night absolutely baffling. For my brother and I, we were raised mostly by our grandparents and aunts day-to-day. Both my mother and father took very short paternity/maternity leaves. Both worked. Grandparents and family took care of us as much as possible. We were shuffled around a lot. This was fine. I don't feel like I missed out at all. In contrast, I feel like my peers missed out. Some of my friends only really have a relationship with parents. They have little contact with extended family, whereas I am always talking to my grandparents (when they were alive at least) and my aunts.
I'm pretty market-oriented when it comes to public policy, but frankly, family ought to work like a communist dictatorship. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. My ability is in work, and I don't need the same amount of rest my wife does after birth. She'll be well supported by our family. My children will grow up surrounded by their entire family, not just mom and dad, as it ought to be.
what means this here? sterility?
I do understand push and how it’s beneficial to woman and to children, but in my opinion the whole idea ignores men, how they feel about it and how men function in society in general.
On paper everything looks great: Mother gets an opportunity to get back to her career, children gets some bonding time with father that might benefit for years to come and father gets insight in the life of the child and caring for his family. Reality, however, for many men is different.
Often men's only friends are at work. Taking paternity leave not only detaches father from his friends but also creates a gap in father's group. If they have problem to whom they will come? Absent-at-work father will slowly get pushed out of the social group only because groups naturally seek opportunity to fill the void. Men aren't good at expressing emotions and everyone agrees that on paper paternity leave looks good. So what happens is that "oh yeah, relationship naturally deteriorated, and Tom really helped us with this project" but in reality it didn't and Tom hadn't. It's social dynamic that changed. Father knows what's up, his workgroup know what's up and yet no one will say "You know what, we missed you, you didn't even call us, so we were angry and decided Tom is our new friend and screw you". Yet while men don't really talk about emotions they can feel social dynamics and so it takes usually 1 or 2 fathers in workgroup and observation how social dynamics change around them after they come back. It's not ostracism, it's just when you're leaving your group for couple of months you cannot expect that they'll welcome you back even if you decided to leave them for a very sound reason.
Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child. They don't get the same hormones woman and because of that experience of caring for the child is by default vastly different[*]. Men's bodies don't help them preserve the specie by releasing a number of happiness hormones as mothers body do. For men it's quite often the chore without positive feedback. And of course no one will ever complain about it as strong men are responsible and caring so it's not right thing to do, but I have yet to hear a man in my circle who will describe it as magical experience [1]. We live in an age where some fathers already took paternity leave and their children are teenagers and not adults and even those parents don't speak out outside of the "parenting improvement circles".
There are of course, many other factors, like the concept of breadwinner, strength of the partner relation etc., etc., but all of that combined makes me not believing it will ever take off on the big scale.
Anecdotal note: I spent 18 months taking care of my child during day while their mother worked and then for 1 year I was working in the evenings.
[1]: As with social dynamics there are always some outliers, response spectrums, variables and knobs so if that's you (and I do believe that HN hosts quite a lot of outliers on various topics) please take that into consideration :-)
Yeah well, it's hard to make friends outside of work if you spent practically all your time there. It's exactly the same for women with 40+ hour work weeks.
Soon enough you'll find you've got a whole bunch of other parents to talk to, as you try to stop your child from eating all the sand in the sandbox at your local park.
Later still when you take your child to pre-school, daycare, or similar, you'll also find more parents to hang around with. Especially if your child/children wants to play with particular kids in the evening/weekend.
TLDR; Even if you're a workaholic and all your friends were previously from work, parenting will give you a lot of new friends.
I think the main thing to make it work is just to have a society that values people being able to spend time with their children. If it is a normal everyday part of life where society supports it (for example financially) it works great.
> Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child.
Two things that I've never seen or heard of in my environment or in general, and things that seem deep into stereotype territory.
> As with social dynamics there are always some outliers
And sometimes, you are one of them!
When given a real choice, men are eager to and capable of caring for their small ones. Even from the first month.
Any amount of rehashing, thinking-really-hard-about and mashing preconceptions and stereotypes together in new and interesting ways to form an opinion on how well this would work, is moot. It already works.
While a small percentage of mothers can not relate well to their kids and prefer to get back to work asap, the reality is that most mothers prefer to spend time with their kids.
Who should get to spend time with the kids? The person who spent 10 seconds injecting their semen into the womb, or the person who toiled for 9 months letting the child grow in their womb, often risking their life to do so? In many cases, the discussion does not even make sense. It is even more ridiculous when feminist men pride themselves for taking "the burden" off their wives. All they did is take away their natural privilege.
This also becomes even less surprising if one looks outside of the academic box and realizes that most people don't have exiting creative jobs where they change the world, but mostly mundane stuff like being supermarket cashiers, or, at best, nurses - which is a nice job, but should women really leave their kids so that the can change the diapers of strangers instead?
Feminism want us to believe that taking care of kids is a burden that men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work. And huge parts of society have swallowed it.
Here in Europe, many governments think they have to force men to take paternity leave, to further equality. They think men don't want to spend time with their kids because of role models or whatsoever.
The reality is probably in most cases that the the issue is mostly financial. Even with paid paternity leave, there usually is less money on the table than with full time work, specially since women tend to choose less well paid careers (another privilege - they don't have to provide for the family, so they can afford to trade income for convenience and social status).
I think it is great if fathers can take paternity leave and recommend everybody to try to do it. but there are actual real world issues preventing it, not just memes ("societal expectations").
At this stage the bond between them both is so thick, that they are basically inseparable. As man you basically spend a whole year to catch up.
So even with enough money and leeway from my employer to take parental leave there are still issues why childcare is mainly the part of the mothers. I guess most of the feminists don't have children. Oh and try to have two children. Guess what: it does not scale well! And it takes more than two persons to even raise one child. I would encourage you all to try it yourself. It is really rewarding to be a parent and also so exhausting - even with all the privileges in the world.
My wife never really learned that, she'd give him boobs and he'd feed/sleep. That worked perfectly for the first six-ten months, and then it didn't.
I'd never had those to fall back on, and was always the one who took over when he was being "difficult". Then again I was also the one that pushed him in his pram for a walk around the block at 2AM, in sub-zero temperatures, to help him fall back to sleep. They were hell on my sleeping patterns, but also some of the best early memories I have. Talking and singing as the snow fell .. magical.
Sometimes when I returned my wife told me she couldn't sleep cause she missed him. I guess they just where very close. Sometimes I envied that - now that he is bigger we have a lot father- son activities, so that makes up for that.
Men and women are just different parents and I believe kids need both parts or even more. Grandparents and aunts and cousins, friends and teachers. The kids are always happier in a crowd that just with one parent or even both parents. Nowadays everyone threats parenting as a two person job but everyone will agree the saying that it takes a village to raise a child...
Breastfeeding is another example of why it is more "natural" for mothers to stay home than fathers, though.
No, the feminist position is that childcare is an activity that does not have to be done exclusively by the mother. And so there should be equal and generous time off available for both partners regardless of sex (or if a same-sex relationship, relation to child).
Of course there are biological considerations too. The mother having the opportunity to breastfeed, in particular. So the schedule of leave may be organized around optimizing for this as well.
Or do they believe going off to work and "have a career" (never mind the aforementioned supermarket cashiers) is the better part, that men unfairly claim for themselves?
I have never seen feminists to call on mothers to give fathers more time with children, to tbh.
It is not about men being able to take care of children. Nobody sane doubts that.
No, feminism (except perhaps some weird subcategory of bourgeois feminism) does not want you to believe work is fun. And most feminism places the blame here on institutional patriarchy (which binds both men and women with restrictive gender roles, harming both) not men pushing restrictive gender roles on women.
You do seem to describe a common right-wing caricature of feminism, though.
Men in the relationship are typically seen as the "arm" of the patriarchy.
It is true that in this case it would benefit men if they were granted more time with their children (at the expense of the mothers and the family finances). But that is more accidental.
Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women, with regard to that subject, if you believe you know feminism so much better.
Instead of arbitrarily deciding the reason is “feminism” and then trying to invent attributes of feminism that make that make sense, tou could probably do the minimal research it would take to find the actual reasons cited by any one of the governments in adopting the rule. I feel safe in the assumption that it is “men unfairly push to women while they go off to have fun at work” in precisely zero of them.
> Show me a "proper feminist" article arguing for the benefit of men, rather against the exploitation of women
Uh, okay: “Yet, the proportion of men who take more than a few days off work when their child is born is tiny.
Most cite fears of being discriminated against professionally, missing out on pay rises and promotions, being marginalised or even mocked as reasons for not taking time off. Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender” [0]
[0] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210712-paternity-leav... (yes, the article we’re already discussing in this thread.)
But you don't actually know the reasons?
"yes, the article we’re already discussing in this thread."
Is that a feminist article? What makes it so?
"Academics consider these concerns to be the effect of deeply ingrained and highly damaging stereotypes around gender"
As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege). It is not "just" societal constructs, it is the negotiation position of the wombs.
I know the reasons that have been cited for some policies aimed at encouraging men to take more maternity leave, including the workplace expectations/social pressure one cited in this article , which has been cited prominently around the Swedish policy with 90-days for each partner that is non-transferable plus a large pool that can be used by either partner. I haven't cataloged every argument cited for every policy of this type in every country. If you can find one that supports your characterization, you are welcome to present it.
> As expected, they don't dare to mention the real reasons (female privilege)
So now you are not only arguing that “feminist want us to believe X” without any evidence of feminists suggesting that, you also have added a hidden motive with similarly no evidence.
Your unsupported ideological fantasy is getting more elaborate, but not any more supported.
However, there is no point in arguing. I don't know what kind of feminist literature you encounter. Maybe you just choose to read it with pink tinted glasses, or you only see the moderate ones. You get to choose your own view of the world, of course.
By the same logic, women in Saudia Arabia have the "privilege" of not being allowed to drive a car.
Was your comment serious? Do you truly believe women in the west are so oppressed that they can't freely choose their careers?