No equality for working women in any country in the world, study reveals
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Here's my 2c, as someone who got generous paternity leave with 2 of my kids and 0 paternity leave with one of them, now watching many peers have their kids too. Here's 1 neat trick to help the whole situation a LOT:MANDATORY 1 year parental leave for the mother and father. it must be mandatory for both genders, or women will be pressured to take less and men will be pressured (or tempted) to take less or none (whereas women are of course physically forced to take at least some).
Employers will whinge and cry about this because of productivity or something like that. I regret to inform them that whether they like it or not, any parent of a less-than-one-year-old is going to be pretty un-useful at work during that first year. I know I was. Waking up 2-3 times per night, every single night, for a year is a real great way to get very little done that isn't programmed into your lizard brain's firmware.
Childless adults will complain it's unfair. They should not - these children are who is going to pay for their social security and who will generate the capital gains to fund their IRA/401k retirement. They're just getting to skip out on the work of raising them.
We also need a lot of work in society to encourage fathers to be present and actually share the weight of child-rearing. Too much still falls to women all too often. But that's of course a lot harder to fix with policy. Mandatory parental leave is comparatively easy.
The middle class should vote for it, but they won't because the men can simply be absent fathers by being "career-focused", and our ultra-conservative midpoint will still mostly frame this as making taxpayers pay for poor black parents to not work, which is a double-whammy to racists - more nonwhite babies _and_ the parents can be "welfare queens".
And obviously corporations won't like anything that implies their workers aren't just robotic cogs who are society's problem outside of the ages of 18 and 40.
You do not need to make it mandatory for it to become effective. Look at countries like sweden who have rolled such systems out. Both parents get paid parental leave (around 9 months per parent, per kid I think). The 9 months cannot be shared between the parents. So if the father does not take the months he loses them. From my experience working in Sweden people take those. Men take those months off and it is socially accepted and expected that you take them.
This statement is just untrue. 1 year of no productivity? That is a ridiculous claim.
Instead of excluding this necessary labor and forcing homemakers and carers into dependence, document it, if that's the issue. The same is true when children care for elderly parents and grandparents, or the disabled, or any of the hundred other scenarios that occur that we don't see.
Otherwise, what, every spouse and partner should register themself as a business and invoice their household? How perfectly transactional would that be.
"I love that what we share, to the limit that our long term interests intersect with sound fiscal and economic practice, my love. Please don't forget to bill me at the after hours rate for asking you to move my laundry over."
Point being there is nothing magical about women that would solve all our problems. I would much rather see a balanced workforce than trying for creating this pure homogeneous workforce.