Comment by hendrix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hendrix | Hacker News Reader

It does not matter what women want if the government is going to helpfully step in and make it impossible to function. Consider the federal law in regards to descrimination of women:

[i]Sex Discrimination

Title VII's broad prohibitions against sex discrimination specifically cover:

    Sexual Harassment - This includes practices ranging from direct requests for sexual favors to workplace conditions that create a hostile environment for persons of either gender, including same sex harassment. (The "hostile environment" standard also applies to harassment on the bases of race, color, national origin, religion, age, and disability.)
    Pregnancy Based Discrimination - Pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions must be treated in the same way as other temporary illnesses or conditions.[/i]

Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event? WTF that might work at wal-mart or a retail-bank or even possibly a law firm, but that will not work at a startup where you have to give it 100% for >8hrs/day. What will actually happen is that the woman will be passed over for a man who has none of the associated liabilities. Then the VCs and unhappy bloggers will be scratching their heads as to why there are so few women in startups. Some of those VCs will also seek out women founders in some sort of PC guilt trip. http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html

What needs to happen to fix this and ensure equality for women who do not want children is to get rid of the workplace discrimination laws regarding women. Then you can have a woman sign a contract that she will not have babies for x amount of time. Otherwise we will just have the current under-the-radar discrimination.

> Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event

Read the next section after the part you quoted - since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, those prohibitions (against pregnancy based discrimination) apply to both men and women.

Sure, but still...

One thing we have to face here is that having kids is different for men and women. Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't. Maybe we should treat this as something to be supported instead of a problem to be solved? Maybe women who want to do these things should be encouraged to do what they want (or not do them if they don't want).

But for many women, having kids is a much more life-changing experience than it is for most men.

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't.

Is there data or research to support this statement that women want to take more time off and (by implication) men don't want to (or want to less)?

I don't have kids, but looking among my friends, both the mothers and fathers want to spend as much time as possible with their kids. While the fathers often went back to work before the mothers, it wasn't because they wanted to, it was more about the cultural pressure for them to be the bread winners and not about them "wanting" to care for their kids less than the mothers.

I don't have hard data. All I know is that I have known more than one women who quit her job after being told she couldn't take a year off following childbirth and never known a man to do the same. I have also known far more women to take unpaid timeoff than men, and to cut back on work following having kids.

Interestingly the data presented in the TC article is stuff that's been true for over ten years: unmarried women without kids earn more than similarly experienced unmarried men without kids. This then reverses particularly after a married woman has kids.

edit: I can't respond to your response, so I'll post it here

> have known more than one women who quit her job after being told she couldn't take a year off following childbirth and never known a man to do the same. I have also known far more women to take unpaid timeoff than men, and to cut back on work following having kids.

Sure, I know plenty of women who have done the same, but it's never been that they wanted to do so more than men, it's that the cultural expectations ("father has to be the breadwinner") meant that the fathers felt they had to keep working, while it's more cultural acceptable for the women to stay home. IOW, all of the young fathers I know would gladly quit their jobs and stay at home if money wasn't a problem (and in the case of one friend who's wife is a surgeon, that's exactly what he did).

I think one has to wait for a while before replying at that depth. Obviously it is impossible to adequately measure subjective things like how badly someone wants something except as a function of what that individual is willing to give up to get it. Women are more likely to sacrifice career for spending time with infant children, so we can conclude that they prefer as a group on average the latter more than the former, at least when compared with men. I don't know of a better epistemological way to measure this.

I think you have a fairly complicated set of balancing acts that happen in corporate America which make this necessary. The big one is that maternity/paternity leave has to be as short as possible to reduce disruption to the business, and it has to be fair so the same policies have to apply to men as to women (otherwise you have a big discrimination mess on your hands, bigger than we have now).

So what this means in effect is that the system demands that one parent makes a sacrifice. As we all know how financially strapped middle-income families are (esp. after the rise of the two income family, see Elizabeth Warren's excellent book "The Two Income Trap"), this means one has to go back to work soon. For biological reasons,* this fundamentally favors the man (who will then be favored when it comes time to assess promotions).

* When I worked at Microsoft, you got 1 month paid leave and up to two months unpaid. One month is probably not enough to get really adjusted to life as a new parent, especially for the mother who is going through hormonal changes as well as sleep cycle changes, may be breastfeeding, etc. So after that, the dad goes back to work and the mom stays home for at least a few more weeks.

However, even this cannot explain the willingness to quit so one can take a year or two off work. That's separate.

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't.

I'm going to shoot proper discussion methods in the heart and counter your unsupported claim with an anecdote: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden....

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc

And when they do, you can make objective evaluations of their performance, not pay them for days they don't work, etc.

If your employees are working reasonable hours, and you're applying leave and vacation policies uniformly, you'll get in no legal trouble. If not, your company has problems beyond sexism.

So...

By that matter requiring that all employees (male/female) only take no more than 2 months off after having a child, and that all vacations occur in regemented times, and that if you can make it through this for say 15 years, you get added benefits is not sexist right?

At some point one thinks of the quote by Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

I'm honestly not sure what any of that means. I'm guessing you misunderstand "uniform application of policy" to mean "rigid application of a rigid policy", but with the way you've written, I can't even be sure of that.

I am saying that there is a difference between what's a facially non-discriminatory policy that clearly discriminates and what's a truly non-discriminatory policy.

BTW, from discussions I have had with young women trying to decide whether to go down the tenure track in academia in the sciences, I would say that academia has a system which is very discriminatory in its effects.

Or you could sue the startups? Also have maternity leave for mothers and fathers like in other countries?

While I'd love to look at the world with rosy colored glasses I think this is simply unrealistic. While the parent post wasn't worded all that well (sorry). Its just a fact that it isn't realistic to expect a startup or even an early stage company to go without a critical member for several months, regardless of the cause of the absence. Male, Female, Trans-gender, pregnancy, bar fight, rehab, base jumping, whatever. The cause doesn't really matter, the effect is extremely destructive to the company and I feel it's reasonable to expect those in critical positions to protect themselves against such absences. Just to be clear, not singling out women here, there are many things everyone can do to avoid issues that could result in such an absence.

I find it ironic that you would say this about a type of business that is usually praised for it's ability to be flexible with work hours, granted that the employees finish what they are expected to finish.

This obviously varies with position to position, but flexibility shouldn't be thrown out of a window because it might be an inconvenience. It's important to treat your employees well!

There is a large difference between flexible work and under going a life changing event during the development of the business.

Given a situation where you were picking between two individuals for a co-founder or other critical role, equally qualified, one telling you they are free and clear, no outstanding obligations for the foreseeable future and the other saying "well, there is a good chance I'll be heavily engaged in an outside issue for a couple months next summer", which would you choose? Disregard all gender / cause for the issue.

Also I have met men who have been willing to shift paternity time off for a few weeks to accommodate business schedules. Obviously that's not possible for women.

I totally agree, picking someone as a cofounder that will be taking leave for their newborn baby is insane, but I had 'lower' positions in mind when I was talking about flexibility.

1. Risk is a normal part of doing business, especially more so for a startup, and it is logical for a business owner to want to reduce risk. As you say, there are many sources of risks to employees that have a direct effect on the business.

2. The division in this discussion seems to stem around how best to manage the risk of project impact caused by losing a critical team member owing to pregnancy event.

3. Extreme positions:

a. The risk to the business is little different from any other unplanned risk that the business needs to deal with anyway, and to assume otherwise is to be sexist; i.e. there may be women out there for whom pregnancy does not impact their work any more than an illness, and assuming that all women are equally likely to fall pregnant and handle pregnancy in the same way is discriminatory.

b. An ethical/strategic position whereby the additional risk is accepted because the benefits gained in terms of equity makes the risk acceptable.

c. Pregnancy is a flat-out optional potential risk to the business and since a business owner wants to reduce risk then it's logical to avoid employing women.

4. IMO this is all a matter of opinion and has everything to do with one's appetite for risk, one's risk exposure (capital & risk management) and one's principles. The same person given two different startups could come to different conclusions depending on these variables, for instance.

Given this, I really don't see the point of this discussion as it is pretty much subjective and depends entirely on the startup in question and the owners invested therein.

> Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event?

No, you have to actually evaluate their performance, instead of making assumptions about it based on family status. Try evaluating things and making decisions objectively, instead of with your personal prejudices.

I fail to understand how the absence of work for a few months is a prejudice. I mean, if a company needs to hire a person for a certain critical role in the next months, how is a person that cannot work during that period of time going to do the job? Honestly, that's just pathetic. If anything there should be laws to protect women's jobs in pregnancy situations. Pretending that it's a non issue will only make room for discrimination under the radar.

> I mean, if a company needs to hire a person for a certain critical role in the next months, how is a person that cannot work during that period of time going to do the job?

I think you're making unwarranted assumptions. Specifically, you haven't read the family leave statutes. Employers don't really have any obligations under them until an employee has worked for a year, and small employers are generally exempt.

well, that depends on where you live.

Honestly, I thought that everyone was replaceable in today's world...

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