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Comment by icarus127 | Hacker News Reader

As some people have pointed out this is a bit of a simplistic analysis, but I find it encouraging that Google is doing this. The state of Maternity leave in the U.S. is frankly appalling. My wife (a nurse) is currently pregnant and her Maternity 'leave' is 8 weeks. She is _required_ to burn all but one week of her vacation time as well as all her sick leave. After that it's unpaid and if she were to stay on her employer's insurance we would have to pay for it out of pocket for the remaining duration of the leave.

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.

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I actually like the way the U.S. does it. Citizens and companies shouldn't have to have their dollars used to pay other people to have and raise children.

That's somewhat naive in my opinion. Reducing maternity leave would lead to women leaving work rather than not having babies. So citizens and companies lose ultimately.

I prefer the approach of saving money to account for one parent being able to take extended time off from work/leaving their job for a period of time. Myself, I've saved money and could work from home.

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.

The thing is, you're viewing this from a moral rather than a business perspective. From a moral perspective, sure, people should plan ahead and not have children until they have the requisite resources with sustainable income.

From a business perspective, six months paid leave is worth it if you can avoid hiring and training a new employee.

It's interesting... On the one hand, I think it makes total sense, from a "treat your employees with respect and show them that you actually care about their welfare" perspective, to offer extended maternity leave and what-not. It's also probably good for retention and is probably a net win for the company (and therefore, the other employees) in the long run.

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."

Or you could think about it a different way. Maternity/paternity leave is a social service for a fellow (albeit new) citizen who is unable to care for itself--kind of like disability benefits. It's a way to level the playing field at the very beginning for this new little citizen, or it could be if the US offered a universal policy like Canada's.

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.

> Citizens and companies shouldn't have to have their dollars used to pay other people to have and raise children.

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.

I'm fine with people (be it men or women) taking extended unpaid leave to take care of their babies, as well as underlining the necessity for potential parents and individuals to save money ahead of time in order to have a child. That is reliant on personal responsibility rather than outsourcing that responsibility to corporations or the state.

Of course, the people most able to take unpaid time off or save for having a child are people that already have access to decent jobs or the ability to save more than they take in and spend. For many people, that is not realistic or is outright impossible. An appeal to personal responsibility is saying that we should ignore people that do not have the means or opportunity to save or prepare for having a child. It is basic human decency to not punish people for being human and wanting to have a family.

What Google's numbers determined is that they are already paying for it in attrition. Women don't stop having babies if you don't give them sufficient maternity leave - they leave.

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

Well, in the developed world we depend on people having children in order for our economy to be sustainable. This is not just for things such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, parents spend more money on their children (generally a lot more) than they receive in subsidies. In terms of GDP, it's a net win. That does not even include the benefits from avoiding the productivity loss (especially at the high end) that an economy experiences by putting serious obstacles in the way of half of its population when it comes to advancing their career.

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