Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

If only women take parental leave, then employer attitudes will, consciously or not, consider parental leave an extra 'cost' attached to hiring women. Sweden found that this remained true even when the parental leave was explicitly made available for both parents to take. Among other reasons, making some parental leave only available for fathers is intended to further encourage fathers to take leave, until in theory people think of parental leave as a gender-neutral option.

https://freepolicybriefs.org/2024/02/05/fathers-parental-lea...).

As much as I dislike nudges and trying to fix things via tax policy. We should let the IRS beat the snot out of companies where married men don't take enough parental leave.

IRS should beat companies where they don't take it or don't offer it?

Eh, no. The company has its nose up my life enough already.

In the US at least, parental leave and other care obligations is what creates the gender wage gap [1] [2] [3]. Ergo, women being the gender to shoulder the care burden in Sweden, even with generous leave, still incurs an equality penalty. Interestingly, in Spain, when parental leave for men was made equal to women, men's desire for children declined [4]. The data also shows men desire children more than women in the US [5] and Finland [6].

Hot take thesis is that women still incur most of the cost of children, even in the most progressive socioeconomic systems. They know it, and it is a material contributing factor in the fertility rate decline. They obtain equality by opting out of reproduction, eliminating opportunity cost and other expensive penalties reproduction incurs. The cost of children is simply too damn high.

Bonus comment from PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi:

On Monday, PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival about her work-life balance. “The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict,” she observed. Just as women are reaching middle management, kids need the most parenting and attention. Then when women move up the corporate ladder, they must turn their attention to aging parents. “We’re screwed. We cannot have it all.” [7]

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/is-parental-leave-to-blame-for-th...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2013/12/20/the-link-...

[3] https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-child...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/among-you...

[6] https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...

[7] https://time.com/2954893/pepsico-ceo-women-cant-have-it-all/

I mean, children are just really expensive with no financial benefit no matter how you cut it, regardless of who the parent is.

It used to be that children would look after you in your old age, or would contribute to the family relatively young, etc etc, or in a single-income household with a stay at home parent incurred no material cost to the family beyond a mouth to feed.

Nowadays, in a dual-income household, children cost an income to look after or daycare until they are old enough to look after themselves. Financially speaking, there's no benefit (not that children are a financial decision, but certainly the financial logic today is worse than many times in the past)

> children are just really expensive with no financial benefit

This is how screwed up our society is. It should be "work is so badly organised that it gets in the way of doing the important things in life".

To some, children are not important, and that is okay. Those who do want children should of course have a robust support system and accommodations made available, but those who don’t should be equally empowered to not have them. Unwanted children are an enormous source of suffering in the aggregate.

> Hot take thesis is that women still incur most of the cost of children, even in the most progressive socioeconomic systems.

This shouldn't be even remotely controversial, considering the fact that men don't get pregnant. The cost to employers doesn't start with parental leaves - it starts with pregnancy, which involves medical checkups, and an early health leave, and at least in some countries[0], making the future mother effectively unfireable for the duration. In some countries (again, [0]) this can, and often is, chained to keep employment going for multiple years over multiple pregnancies, without the employee showing up even once[1].

I'm not criticizing the women or families here in any way, only pointing out that a strong incentive for gender discrimination in hiring and (perception of) wage gap comes from the employers accounting for the above. Women in child-rearing age are seen as higher-risk employees, and businesses naturally want to mitigate the risk.

With that in mind, your statements that women "obtain equality by opting out of reproduction, eliminating opportunity cost and other expensive penalties reproduction incurs", and that "it is a material contributing factor in the fertility rate decline", pretty much follow directly.

People aren't stupid. Companies want to mitigate risks. Couples planning to start a family consider whether they can afford it in the first place. Costs of living are rising in the west, which can't possibly not impact fertility rates.

[0] - My home country, Poland, being one.

[1] - The primary benefit isn't financial, but avoiding having a hole in your CV. Done properly, it looks indistinguishable from just working the entire time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com