Yahoo is now giving eight weeks of paternity leave
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Let’s not forget that 8 weeks of paternity leave is still way below what the law provides in other countries, on average. Have a look at this graph: http://childrenschances.org/global-maps/parents-and-children...
Paid leave from work for mothers of infants: Canada 50 weeks, Mexico 12 weeks, USA zero.
Paid leave from work for fathers of infants: Canada 35 weeks, Cuba 40 weeks, USA zero.
In several European countries, fathers get 3 years paid leave – that’s 20 times more than what Yahoo is offering.
In countries that have provisions for maternal and paternal paid leave, companies have adapted to it and they remain competitive.
That line of thinking would put pretty much every startup that's ever been through YC or shown up on HN out of business.
This is yet another example of why, no matter how hard they try with things like tax incentives and other policies, when other countries make claims like "_____ is the new Silicon Valley of Europe", I know it really isn't. You can lament the price in some aspects of quality of life, but it's hard to argue with the results of US policies on entrepreneurism, particularly things like "at-will employment" in California.
In the US, it’s prohibitively expensive to become an entrepeneur.
* Decent health insurance, if you get accepted, will be your biggest expense per month. There’s no government healthcare to speak of.
* To start your business, you have to save up or build your product while being employed elsewhere (or freelancing) – the government sure isn’t going to help you out.
* And then there’s all your student loans which you have to pay off, whereas in other countries you could’ve gotten it subsidized.
There’s no equivalent to Silicon Valley in Europe, and I doubt there will be, but it’s not because of US policies on entrepeneurism.
I've paid for my own insurance for years now. There was previously really very little in the way of you getting accepted, and now with new policies you have to be accepted. As a healthy male in my 20s and now early 30s, I got good coverage for $100-150 a month.
> To start your business, you have to save up or build your product while being employed elsewhere (or freelancing) – the government sure isn’t going to help you out.
I'm not aware of government programs that pay you to just come up with ideas in other countries, can you enlighten me on what you're referring to?
> And then there’s all your student loans which you have to pay off, whereas in other countries you could’ve gotten it subsidized
That certainly depends on your personal choices. If you went to a private, liberal arts school, then yes you probably have quite large loans. But if you were having to take out loans for college, you could also go to a state school in the state in which you have residence, and then your tuition fees are quite low. You still may have loans to deal with, but they are certainly not insurmountable (a few years of working would help you make quite a dent and give you some valuable experience which you could apply towards your future business ideas)
Which is why you got accepted and pay very little. Whether you have ‘good coverage’ is relative, I doubt it is as good as most European healthcare coverage. Also: if, G-d forbid, you get ill, insurance companies in the US can refuse to pay because of ‘pre-existing conditions’.
“I'm not aware of government programs that pay you to just come up with ideas in other countries”
Many countries have government programs that provide free training, business coaching, and a stipend to get your business up and running.
“you could also go to a state school in the state in which you have residence”
Which would still be more expensive than it costs most European students in their countries, and they probably get a better education. There are some good state schools like Berkeley, UCLA, Georgia Tech, and Penn State – but they don’t have space to place every student of their state, it’s only relevant for a few. Whereas in European countries, you can always find a state university to go to.
2) There are definitely similar programs for helping you get training to run your business and monetary incentives for new business owners here (mostly in the form of tax credits and the like). Admittedly, they aren't as well publicized as they could be.
3) The quantity of foreign students coming to the US for undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate studies (and then returning home to do good with those skills) probably makes the point about the quality of that education available here than I could. Not that higher education in other countries is poor, but that it is significantly better than that in the US is questionable at best.
My main point is, the idea that the US is prohibitively expensive to be an entrepreneur is laughable. The sheer volume of new businesses started here every day proves that.
> The quantity of foreign students coming to the US [...] makes the point about the quality of that education available here than I could.
I was talking about European students in particular. And yes, a lot of European students study abroad, but largely because of the experience, not because they believe the education will be better. Also, many of those students don’t end up in American state universities. For instance, I went to Northwestern University – not exactly one of economical choices you were referring to.
> Not that higher education in other countries is poor, but that it is significantly better than that in the US is questionable at best.
Many of the European state sponsored schools are listed on the common rankings of universities. Most of the US universities ranked high are not state colleges. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Unive...
Also the money is only part of the problem; if you have 5 people in a company, every one of them is a key, integral part of that company. Having one away for 7 months would be disastrous.
Contingency planning is a big part of running a company, and the question what happens if one of my employees doesn't show up for work tomorrow, really should be a question you can answer
http://www.budapestagent.com/hungarian-mothers-longest-paid-...
I.e. you don't receive your full salary for the period, but your employer is basically required to give you back your position after 3 years, if you chose to take that long (most people will take only 2 or so). With multiple children, you could actually stay at home for quite a long time.
From the link in the earlier article: Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Slovakia, and Finland offer 3 years. Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Sweden, Estonia, and Russia offer 1 year.
> More likely is that you'll see the father taking 2-5 months and the mother 7-10 months.
I wasn’t talking about what people choose to do, I was talking about what they are entitled to by law.
> I also believe the money comes from the state, not that the company has to pay during that time.
That is different in each country, but even in the countries where the money comes from the state, the employer will have paid for it in social insurance fees.
The selection of data sources for the World Policy Analysis Center was based on the approach outlined below. Preference was given to primary sources (e.g. constitutions or laws as specified in country’s legislation). If these were not available we obtained information from secondary sources (e.g. referral to a law or policy in a different text). Secondary sources were reviewed in cases where the information from primary sources was unclear or lacking, or to complement this information (with priority given to sources that were comparable across multiple countries). Documents were reviewed in their original language or as translated into one of the UN’s official languages.
If you have better data, I’d love to see it.
When you are on paternity leave you get paid 80 % of your salary, but at most about 950 SEK ($147) per day. You can more or less divvy up the 390 days you get how you want between mother and father.
Assuming parental leave of 1 year, this amortizes over a working life of 45 years to a little over 2% (while some people will not work or will not work for all 45 years of their lives between 20 and 65, a corresponding fraction will not take parental leave; in fact, if the lower income parent takes parental leave, it's generally less).
This pays off because we know that the first two years are absolutely crucial for the development of a child; parental leave pays off in the form of more productive adults and lower criminality. It is well worth the investment even from a purely actuarial perspective and if you disregard the moral component.
I also suspect that the tax structure is set up to make this possible - i.e. I don't think it's individual companies that pay for the leave (this would kill many small companies), but rather the government uses part of the income tax to reimburse companies with employees on this type of leave. I'd love some confirmation / addition info from anyone who actually knows how it works.
“In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it is standard that mothers stay at home for 3 years after a child's birth, which may extend with additional children. Mothers can decide to take 2, 3 or 4 years of maternity leave. It is also possible for the fathers to take the leave instead of the mothers but it is not common.”
Anyways, you’re missing the point. In the US, no parental leave is mandated whatsoever, which is why an employer offering 2 months is apparently a reason to rejoice. Few developed countries offer so little.
People say this like it is a bad thing (and like it is true).
First and foremost, the FMLA guarantees 12 weeks leave (unpaid) for qualified workers (men & women). From there, it is up to the states and different employers to offer benefits to gain a competitive advantage.
Some states mandate paid leave, plus other benefits, others are expanding this. Some companies offer additional paid leave, plus other benefits. To determine an American's parental leave benefits, you have to add the benefits from the federal government, the state government and the employer. For example, if I had a child tomorrow, I'd get 4 weeks leave paid in full plus I have the option of additional leave at 66% of my salary, and even more unpaid.
Overall, it is true that benefits seem better in other countries, but saying that there is no parental leave mandated in the US is disingenuous and completely ignores the fact that it is handled in other ways.
When people are talking about you, most of the times, it means they care about what you do. For the longest time nobody cared about what yahoo did, Marissa is bringing back yahoo to the conversation again.
Something that was sorely missing with yahoo for a long time.
Edit This is also not groundbreaking or even new. The PR team is trying to spin the shitty telecommuting change of policy with an improved maternity/paternity leave. Not that an improvement is a bad thing itself.
I do hope you realize that building software takes time, particularly across a large co. like Yahoo. The policy changes are immediate effects which help formulate the company culture; the long term results are the products that will show up in the coming months and years.
Everyone I talked to legitimately thought that Marissa is bringing some much needed change to the company as far as I could tell, and I spoke to mostly software engineers, not PR people. Obviously opinions probably vary across the company and it's fairly large though.
The one "negative" thing she's done since coming on board is cut remote working, and I'm not convinced that was really so bad. Yahoo needed fix some internal stuff about the culture, and it would be hard to do that when your talented people are spread out all over the place. I agree that the management fluff needs a serious trimming there, so hopefully by bringing all the engineering talent in house, and theoretically trimming management, they can adjust the culture to be more engineering focused, which is what everyone wants.
My intuition is that this gap follows socio-economic lines (i.e. lower-class poor fathers are less present, while higher-class wealthier fathers can either afford to take unpaid leave, or land a job with policies like this) but I don't have any data to back that up.
> Not surprisingly, single mothers with dependent children have the highest rate of poverty across all demographic groups (Olson & Banyard, 1993). Approximately 60 percent of U.S. children living in mother-only families are impoverished, compared with only 11 percent of two-parent families.
http://www3.uakron.edu/schulze/401/readings/singleparfam.htm
Some math from that will partly answer my question (only partly because there is likely a causal relationship where being a single parent increases your chances of falling into poverty, so we can't say how much of this is "poor people end up as single parents" and how much is "single parents end up poor"
Poverty | Not Poverty
Single 16% | 11%
Not Single 8% | 65%
I really appreciate it being equal because then both men & women on my team are absent for the same amount of time (and there's no stigma about taking all of it)
* to employees, countries provide parental or paternity leave, that this is through a mandate on the employer is an implementation detail
* a number of countries pay (either in part or in full) for leaves through their social security system, the employer involvement (aside from "normal" social charges and not having the employee during the leave) may well be nil
In a different branch of yahoo under some conditions, it was possible for any new parent to extend parental leave (stay away from work but take a salary cut during that time). There was also work hour arrangment or going down to half time for up to one year and half if wanted.
I am curious about how the new policy affects various cases (the new mother can't take care of the baby for e.g.). Or if t is really phrased in 'mother' and 'father' terms, and not in more specific terms accomodating for different combinations.