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Comment by parineum | Hacker News Reader

I had a conversation with my cousin a bit ago talking about the gender pay gap being a bit misleading because of the .7/1 ratio not taking into account previous experience and hours worked. To the extent that sexism is the cause of that gap, it's actually a good business decision to not rely on young women for leadership roles due to the realities of biology.

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.

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Then what about the gap that will now emerge between men who have kids and have been forced to take leave, and the people who have not had kids? Is that a gap that doesn't matter simply because it doesn't show up in gendered statistics but is instead hidden?

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?

The children probably benefit from having their parents around.

Then the parents can take leave if they think this is true. That's separate from forcing men to take leave in order to reduce inequality.

The gap isn't from the actual leave, the gap is from the threat of future leave.

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.

We're are already handicapping white males with "positive discrimination" (which has to be the worst oxymoron ever written in any law).

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.

In men's case, you're talking several months over a lifetime.

Childless people will still get sick, depressed, burned out, they'll quit... They're not robots. How much more productive will they be, 1%?

From a Darwinian perspective, those who do not have any offspring are complete failures. Dead ends in the gene pool. Don't worry about it: in just a few generations the problem will take care of itself.

Bulldogs that could breath properly were dead ends in the gene pool. One should be careful with what is selected for in the "Darwinian perspective".

Make leave mandatory even for people who don't have children, or you're selecting for childless people of either gender. Sometime between 20 and 40 you have to take half a year off.

Taking time off to grow newborn is not same as taking time off in Bali

Nah, the idea is not that it's the leave that sets any single woman's career back, it's that the expectation of the leave being taken by women causes them to not be hired/promoted/... before having children that the OP is concerned with if I understood them correctly. If suddenly all parents were to take leave, regardless of gender, then discriminating young people by gender would no longer make economical sense.

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.

The pay gap is a political tool, it doesn't have any scientific basis. There are way too many variables to account for. There are studies finding women below 30s earn more then men in the same age bracket. I still don't think there is a pay gap in any direction, every case is individual.

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.

The pay gap is grossly exaggerated and misrepresented as a political tool but it's not made up. The numbers are meaningful if you understand the context.

i didn't enjoy staying at home with my first son either. i just didn't know what to do with him. i didn't have any role models. it got better when the kids got older...

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.

This.

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.

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