Google's formula to retain women: Longer maternity leave
lifeinc.today.com
lifeinc.today.com
And this isn't anything employers do; this is a governmental program. However, the first 6 months of leave are paid 70% regular salary, the rest is at 50%.
I think it's a great program, and I don't know that a lot of women have any issues returning to work after that time.
(I'm a Canuck living abroad.)
Considering the many massive deficiencies in Quebec, this is one of the brighter spots.
"Many massive deficiencies" is overly dramatic.
No, no it's not. Not in the slightest. I meant exactly that. If anything, it's less antagonistic then I how I usually describe Quebec, it's government and laws, and it's medical community. I usually associate them with child-abusers, and feel justified in doing so. Nor do I feel it's overly dramatic.
Simply put, if I knew years ago what I knew now, I would have left Quebec before having children.
My wife and I recently had our first child, who thankfully has no serious health issues and is a great sleeper. My wife's employer provides 3 months leave at half pay, but only after she uses her PTO accruals.
So that left us in a position where we would have to find quality, expensive infant care, while simultaneously dealing with taking FMLA time without pay for baby doctor's appointments or when daycare sends the child home due to illness or other issues. (My job unfortunately requires travel, so much of that burden falls on my wife.)
End result is that we ran the numbers and talked about what we really wanted, and it made sense for my wife to stop working.
PTO is your vacation/sick accruals. In most US companies, having a baby means that a mother will use all of her accrued sick and vacation time for maternity leave. The problem with that is that you come back to work with no time... But you need to take days or afternoons off to care for your infant. (pediatrician visits, kid is sick from daycare, etc)
FMLA is a federal law that requires most employers to allow you to take time off to deal with medical problems that you or your immediate family have. If you use all of the time, it is almost certainly unpaid.
Family Medical Leave Act
My wife and I had to face similar decisions when our first son was born.
I really applaud Google for doing this. I certainly understand that employers walk a thin line on giving benefits without employees simply taking advantage of the company. But a good maternity/paternity leave program really helps build loyalty to a company.
Management in the company I work for (and I've heard anecdotes about others) even encourage their employees to have children.
Some people abuse it but for the most part it makes people happy and, like most advanced western cultures, most families don't have more than a few kids.
How about meaningful work, not being evil, and being respected?
(And also, is there a possibility that reported reasons are not actual reasons?)
"We're having to worry about money. We never had to do that before." (Router wrangler, left in 2008. One of the earlier casualties of the great shrinking.)
The whole China thing. (The office there, not the Christmas/Aurora attacks.)
The real names thing. (G+)
Hostile environment / "My boss was a dick" (This one was in a news story linked from HN not too long ago... and happens to have been said by one of my friends).
Bozos, bozos, everywhere. Plus, the new focus on the relentless pursuit of evil, and more. (Me, covered in my writing: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ )
Tired of being stuck as a go-nowhere sysadmin job with no hope of upward mobility. (Bailed out to go back to school to learn web stuff.)
Acqi-non-hired. (They bought a company and then put one of their dev relations people in a one-year fixed term because they didn't like her approach to tech.)
Really bad manager. Incompetent, unable to have a meaningful conversation, goes in circles. (Wound up being PIPped. Probably would have quit anyway.)
Sorry, I can't come up with any more right now. But that should be a start.
Do women leave Google in disproportionately higher numbers?
This means I can't really answer your question about proportions with hard data. I can tell you that the ratio in engineering, and particularly in the kernel team / cluster management area (where I was at the end) was seriously lopsided just by looking at things. This meant when a woman did leave, it was pretty obvious.
I know this isn't much to go on, so I started digging around. Lucky for you, I found a short video I shot when there was some kind of release celebration in September 2009. I counted 25 people in my shot (so I'm not including myself), all standing around in front of what used to be my office. Of those 25 people, there was one woman. So, add me behind the camera, and that's 8%.
That's the best I can do for now. Hope that helps.
Men and women, not all that different.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/21/empires/
That talks about Collabra eating Netscape from within by destroying its culture. You might argue that Doubleclick has been steadily doing that to Google.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/20/screw/
There's the whole antitrust lawsuit about no-poach agreements among valley companies.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/04/19/leave/
There's the five year leave program evaporating.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/10/17/badging/
If your company starts doing this, worry.
Reports on wages and working conditions are fair game.
Plug: my 2011 posts are organized in meaningful categories in my book (link in profile). You might give it a shot if you prefer that arrangement.
Also, re acquired company "eating [acquirer] from within" and
"You might argue that Doubleclick has been steadily doing that to Google"
... that's pretty interesting. I remember thinking "weird cultural mismatch" when Google acquired Doubleclick. Could you expand on this?
As for Doubleclick, well, that one's harder to explain. It sure seems like the company ate something it couldn't handle. "Ugh, bad pie."
Fortunately I have good insurance but this seems incredibly bizarre to me. Nurse's are already overworked. Long story short, when I see a high profile company treating pregnant mothers better it only makes me happy.
But you can also see the viewpoint of single / childless people who feel like they're being punished for being single / childless. Sorta like the way non-smokers sometimes feel like smokers get more "free breaks" by virtue of the fact that they smoke.
That said, once we get Fogbeam Labs to the point where we have paid employees and have to worry about issues like maternity/paternity leave, etc., I'd like to do the same thing Google is going (or better). The question I'm chewing on right now is, should we do something different for the childless people. Call it a "mental health break" or something.
Bear with me, I'm just thinking out loud here, but can we assume that childbirth is fairly infrequent, and that a given employee isn't likely to use maternity/paternity leave more than once every couple of years? If so, how about a policy for employees that you can take a "mental health break" (MHB) of n months, every y years, unless you've taken maternity/paternity leave in that time?
Of course, that opens the door to someone taking MHB and then show up pregnant a year and a half later, and wind up taking both...
Hmmm... like I said, just thinking out loud here. But it seems like there ought to be some way to construct a mechanism where the people without kids don't feel like "people who have kids get extra special treatment."
Those children you are paying other people to have and raise? Just think of them as the future tax base for the Social Security benefits you will be collecting one day.
As for my own mom, even though I live in a country where she could take a long maternity leave, she opted to go back to work after a very short time.
From a business perspective, six months paid leave is worth it if you can avoid hiring and training a new employee.
Except that society as a whole DOES already pay for this indirectly. Not providing decent support for people having babies effectively forces people to either have the family they want or keep working. Given that women disproportionately are expected to be the primary caregiver for children, this is a big pressure to keep women out of the work force.
In terms of morality, it is really unethical to punish people for living their lives and exercising their basic biology.
By increasing from 3 months at 50% pay to 5 months, their attrition post-maternity leave dropped by 50%. That sounds like a low cost to reduce the amount of new hiring and training they need to do
Add in the fact that many companies are understaffed to cut expenses, that there can be resentment from coworkers when a mother goes maternity leave. You might get some blowback from the non-parents and singles in the office when you expect them to cover for you with no incentives, not even a thank you. Try working in a office with deadlines and critical projects when 40% of staff are expecting...
Handling long absences is an everyday task just if you handle vacations properly - a month paid vacation means that of an unit of 12 employees at any time at least one is off, so every company has worked out how to handle replacements and task switching properly (i.e., delegate tasks to someone who has time) - and if you handle a month off, then you can handle 6 or 12 months off.