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Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

nytimes.com

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Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#51

Post by llukas »

chongli wrote: post #45
dmayle wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A woman doesn't have that possibility, so enabling that also encourages discrimination.

I'm aware of that. This is a case where one right is in conflict with another. There's no good answer. One group of people is going to lose and another is going to win. The disadvantage women have is that they can't hide a pregnancy forever. Men can go to extreme lengths to hide their relationships. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a man to have two families at the same time, each one hidden from the other, an…

Society doesn't need to and doesn't have any duty make this kind of arrangement easier to maintain.

Also multiple marriages are illegal in Western countries.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#52

Post by lsd5you »

CryoLogic wrote: post #46

Pregnant employees are undoubtably less of an investment for the company when you consider paid leave. In fact the company might actually lose money on you. This is a lot different than racial, sex, or age discrimination as a result of social bias or stereotypes. So it makes sense there is discrimination from companies and managers - especially competitive companies where the managers are paid based on their team per…

Then you'd just be discriminating against the youngish, the married and a bunch of other factors. I just think these kind of answers are the first logical steps in trying to address the problem. With more thought and experience people will arrive at the realisation that there may actually not be a good mechanism to socially engineer the desired outcome.

Devolving decision making to the business owners and managers, and to individual workers is what allows the system to work. Attempts to override and legislate decisions will fail with unintended consequences and ultimately make things worse in other ways. A complete solution would require totalitarian control, at which point you may as well just have central planning.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#53

Post by newfoundglory »

hotdog97 wrote: post #47
tinbad wrote: post #14

Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take seve…

How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy? I know the law doesn't care, but I care. There's a difference between informing your manager one month after you're hired that you're pregnant (been there, felt totally fooled - as the manager, that is) and will need to take time off quite soon, and doing it like a year or so later. The "always positive performance reviews" b…

What do you want people to do when they are job searching while pregnant? Are you just wishing you'd been told on her first day on the job?

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#54

Post by newfoundglory »

llukas wrote: post #51
chongli wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware of that. This is a case where one right is in conflict with another. There's no good answer. One group of people is going to lose and another is going to win. The disadvantage women have is that they can't hide a pregnancy forever. Men can go to extreme lengths to hide their relationships. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a man to have two families at the same time, each one hidden from the other, an…

Society doesn't need to and doesn't have any duty make this kind of arrangement easier to maintain. Also multiple marriages are illegal in Western countries.

Having a family without marrying is not illegal, though.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#55

Post by habosa »

This area is really tough. I feel terrible for women who experience this bias, but the solution is not nearly as obvious as with race/gender/age/religious/etc discrimination. In those cases the answer is: stop being biased.

Let's say you're a small company and you can really only afford to have Even if they both plan to have 2 kids in the next 4 years, it's a biological reality that it will take the woman away from work for longer. She has the 9 months of pregnancy where she may be tired or uncomfortable, then the actual delivery, then recovery, and then often a period of breast feeding. The man could be father of the century but there are certain burdens that fall on women because of their sex.

So while I'd like to force the startup to make the decision without considering this factor, is that always reasonable?

And before the downvotes come: I am really on the side of pregnant women here. I want them to get generous leave without any effect on their careers. But I am questioning if that is always possible.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#56

Post by tinbad »

hotdog97 wrote: post #47
tinbad wrote: post #14

Personally experienced it. Wife worked at Google, had always positive performance reviews. Come pregnancy time she informed her manager, 3 days later they put her on a performance improvement plan. It didn't take long for them to realize they were making a big mistake, risking an expensive lawsuit so they let it go and let her have her paid 12 month leave. After returning she got the choice to do the PIP or take seve…

How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy? I know the law doesn't care, but I care. There's a difference between informing your manager one month after you're hired that you're pregnant (been there, felt totally fooled - as the manager, that is) and will need to take time off quite soon, and doing it like a year or so later. The "always positive performance reviews" b…

a) 2 years, b) ~4 months in

And yeah, I would understand it better if she had just joined or it was a smaller company. We we're in extra shock because the company goes out of their way to publicly promote these benefits and the work-life balance blabla.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#57

Post by sattoshi »

lovich wrote: post #6
rednerrus wrote: post #2

One of the solutions to this is matching paternity leave. If I gave you the choice of two employees, one of whom would take 12 weeks of paid leave and one who would take 2 weeks of paid leave, which would you choose? If you offered both sexes 12 weeks of paid leave, you wouldn't have to make this decision.

You'd have to make it mandatory leave. The social pressure is still tilted towards women as care givers and men as providers so more men will end up not using the leave. If it becomes mandatory then it's just a baked in rising to every employee, _and_ will probably do better for society to have both parents get time with their children. I believe some European states solve this by having the state cover ~60% of your…

Thereby encouraging discrimination against people in committed relationships.

Perhaps increasing the scope of the worse hire will make discrimination impractical, but it is still going on while it's at roughly 50%.

You can somehow make companies unable to discriminate by relationship status, and that would push it into "age bracket" discrimation.

I believe the problem is more fundamental and a cultural solution is required.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#58

Post by hotdog97 »

newfoundglory wrote: post #53
hotdog97 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy? I know the law doesn't care, but I care. There's a difference between informing your manager one month after you're hired that you're pregnant (been there, felt totally fooled - as the manager, that is) and will need to take time off quite soon, and doing it like a year or so later. The "always positive performance reviews" b…

What do you want people to do when they are job searching while pregnant? Are you just wishing you'd been told on her first day on the job?

Let me answer this with a counter-question. If you're pregnant and somehow hiding it really well, do you think it makes sense for you to job-hunting six weeks before you're due to give birth?

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#59

Post by newfoundglory »

lsd5you wrote: post #52
CryoLogic wrote: post #46

Pregnant employees are undoubtably less of an investment for the company when you consider paid leave. In fact the company might actually lose money on you. This is a lot different than racial, sex, or age discrimination as a result of social bias or stereotypes. So it makes sense there is discrimination from companies and managers - especially competitive companies where the managers are paid based on their team per…

Then you'd just be discriminating against the youngish, the married and a bunch of other factors. I just think these kind of answers are the first logical steps in trying to address the problem. With more thought and experience people will arrive at the realisation that there may actually not be a good mechanism to socially engineer the desired outcome. Devolving decision making to the business owners and managers, a…

People already discriminate against young women based just on the risk they could get pregnant, doesn't seem like it'd be that bad to spread it across to young men as well.

Re: Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies

#60

Post by hotdog97 »

tinbad wrote: post #56
hotdog97 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many days/months/years between a) joining the company and b) informing of the pregnancy? I know the law doesn't care, but I care. There's a difference between informing your manager one month after you're hired that you're pregnant (been there, felt totally fooled - as the manager, that is) and will need to take time off quite soon, and doing it like a year or so later. The "always positive performance reviews" b…

a) 2 years, b) ~4 months in And yeah, I would understand it better if she had just joined or it was a smaller company. We we're in extra shock because the company goes out of their way to publicly promote these benefits and the work-life balance blabla.

Ok, gotcha. I'm also kind of shocked by that kind of behavior by Google. This goes against so much of their employer branding that they've spent so much on.

(Was it in Ad sales? - I guess I could see that unit being run in a more "rough" way - sales teams tend to be super macho.)

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