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Comment by CogitoCogito | Hacker News Reader

Your original post asked how to make it so that women's career doesn't take a hit. The answer is obvious: make it so that the likelihood of men and women going on parental leave is roughly the same. It's totally doable. It would require some changes, but it's totally doable. If your concern is cost specifically, we could always _remove_ parental leave from women and allocate it to men instead. So this could even be done on a financial cost-neutral basis.

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.

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The following is just an idea, but it would be prudent to consider all possible solutions to this problem before making widespread changes to labor law in this country [USA]…

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.

> 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.

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.)

Some European countries "solved" this by having the child leave as a shared pool which the parents can split between themselves as they wish but it still doesn't solve the fact that women have a greater hit on their careers and income due to the baby-making capabilities of their bodies.

That's not "solved". They would have actually solved it if parents _couldn't_ split it as they wish. It should be allocated 50-50 (or at least reasonably close). If a mom or dad doesn't want to take their time off, they should lose that portion. This would balance the incentives and actually have a chance of evening things out over time.

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