Is anyone aware of how the courts have interpreted things like this (if at all)?
> "Under the new policy, mothers can take 16 weeks of paid leave with benefits, and fathers can take up to eight weeks"
Would that not be considered discriminatory?
> "Under the new policy, mothers can take 16 weeks of paid leave with benefits, and fathers can take up to eight weeks"
Would that not be considered discriminatory?
Also, lets say that you're a child adopted by a homosexual married couple and you only get 8 weeks. How is that fair to the adopted child versus 16 weeks for a birthed child?
Equality means treating people equally--including men and children.
For example, 16 weeks for a woman who adopts vs. 8 for a man who does exactly the same thing is just discriminatory.
Some recognition of the differences in experience and particularly in consequences are called for, I think. Because they exist.
The simplest way of removing this "hidden tax" on hiring women is to make the tax the same for men.
A proper policy would give equal maternal/paternal time off for both parents for either birth or adoption, and also have some sort of paid medical leave program in place for complicated pregnancies (and of course, all other medical problems).
Since a few years back there's a bonus for parents who split the leave equally, but it's going to take generations until everyone does it. (All of my peers do it, but they're university educated upper middle class that can afford it)
Anecdotally, lots of women in Italy have "difficult pregnancies" because the incentives are there for it. They're happy to have extra time off, and doctors, when in doubt, are not going to choose the riskier option.
Childbirth is not an injury. Childbirth is literally essential for society. Whatever extra profit that can be squeezed out of a new dad is meaningless next to the importance of equality and assistance to the new mother. Somehow I think our GDP will be ok.
All things aren't equal in this case. Child birth can be incredibly taxing on a woman's body. Some women would need more time to recover.
Now there is an equal metric regardless of the sex. Happy?
As others have stated, it would only be discriminatory if it was based on gender, but it's not - it's based on whether or not you had the physical toll of childbirth, as evident in the adoption v. birth difference for women.
It would be interesting to hear what the leave would be for a lesbian couple with one of the women giving birth. I would think 16/8 like a heterosexual couple, but that could get dicey depending on how the rule is worded.
So it would appear that such a claim is implicitly identifying a gender by excluding all of the other gender.
A larger point could be made that it's somewhat pointless to speculate about whether a policy is sexist when we're hearing a brief summary from a secondary source. A large aspect of this is how the policy is actually worded and carried out in practice.
The extra 8 was paid for by the company's short term disability insurance policy, for a total of 16 weeks. Childbirth was deemed sufficient to trigger short term disability.
I imagine that's what happened here.
Men could probably sue for employment discrimination in some jobs such as child care providers. But would anyone care?
Pay and benefits are enforced to be the same. In some states, car insurance companies are not even allowed to give different rates for men vs. women even though statistically women are less risky to insure.