Pregnancy Discrimination Is Rampant Inside America’s Biggest Companies • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by ryanobjc » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #357

ryanobjc wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you do when you have high risk scenarios that are semi-rare but semi-predictable, combined with a high loss when they happen? It's called insurance. That's the private/"market" based solution to privatizing and sharing risk across a pool. Given it's kind of an impossible thing to fake, there isn't much risk of false claims.

insurance doesn't work when the event is controllable (like pregnancy) and happens regularly to everyone. Imagine an insurance company offering to sell to a business a plan for each employee, which covers their salary while they take leave. The premium of this plan must be lower than their total cost in salary while they are on leave, since if it was higher, the business can just pay the salary! Therefore, the insura…

You’ve just also proven health insurance doesn’t work!

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

#442

Post by slipjack » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

habosa wrote: post #55

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 w…

One major issue in this scenario: you don’t know who wants/can/will have kids. Discriminating against women because they have a uterus and might get pregnant and might have a problematic pregnancy and might carry to term and might give birth and might take parental leave is incredibly short-sighted - even in your scenario you’ve just missed out on 4+ years of work because you’re worried about a few (potential) months.

Beyond that, while (cis) women have the necessary equipment to have kids, we’re not the only ones with bodies that can get sick. Penalizing all women for one particular way of (potentially) disrupting work is incredibly unfair, and ignores that men also can need leaves of absence.

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

#443

Post by arkades » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #209

lhorie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can only afford 10 people, you can usually also get by with 9. Even a healthy male full-time employee is a much bigger commitment financially to a company than just the salary number (i.e. you need to pay payroll taxes, insurance, benefits, equipment, recruiter fees, etc) If you're going to be stretched thin financially after hiring a single new person, you probably shouldn't be hiring.

Here's an equally logical statement: If you only have 10 fingers, you can usually also get by with 9. Even a healthy finger consumes a non-trivial amount of oxygen from your blood and has a nail that must be trimmed so it's not a big deal if you accidentally chop one of them off. If the loss of a finger would endanger your livelihood, you probably shouldn't be in that profession in the first place.

> If the loss of a finger would endanger your livelihood, you probably shouldn't be in that profession in the first place.

If losing that finger is a common and reasonable expectation in your society, yes.

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

#444

Post by lovich » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #217

rocqua wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an alternative. We could amortize the costs of maternity leave over the entire working population. This way we get the desired outcome (companies have no financial disincentive to hire women) without creating weird forced life-decisions. That is, I'd propose we let some government pay the maternity leave, and finance it from income tax.

No incentive is probably an overstatement, but there would certainly be less incentive. Every employer would pay the average cost of paid parental leave, regardless of who they employed. That would reduce discrimination against those likely to use parental leave. Though, I would probably fund it via a payroll tax so it could remain employer-paid. I don't think it makes any difference to the economics whether you tax…

You'd still have the costs of training or reallocating another employee to fill the persons role, and that risk would be higher in women if our society doesn't change its norms about whose the caregiver and whose the provider.

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

#445

Post by lovich » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:46 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #25

lovich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You'd have to make it mandatory leave. How do you accomplish that without violating the right to privacy? If a man keeps coming into work and his partner is pregnant, nobody has to know.

Don't think that you could, or that you'd want to. There's multiple groups here with conflicting interests and not everyone is going to get everything they want. Does a subset of men's desire to privacy trump both women's right to equality and the child's right to get care from its parents?

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

#446

Post by lovich » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #405

lovich wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You give men twelve weeks of paid leave after their wife gives birth, most of them are going to take it.

Hence the 'mandatory' party of mandatory leave. You have a kid, you have to take 12 weeks off or whatever number would be agreed on

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

#447

Post by lovich » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

to_bpr wrote: post #103

partiallypro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could simply make it mandatory time off. But either way, he has a point. A company doesn't want to risk hiring someone that might miss a huge swath of time, for any reason. Not in every job but in many jobs, an employee isn't just an employee, they are an investment. If it was mandatory for both sexes though, it would level the playing field.

>You could simply make it mandatory time off. Then I won't notify the company when I've had a child. Simple as. Don't consider going down the road of "you must declare what is happening in your private life to your private employer" as someone else did either, without at least considering what an absolute breach of privacy that would involve.

We've already decided as a society, in the US at least, that your right to privacy from your company concerning the existence of your children does not exist. The government is willing and able to inform your employer to garnish your wages when it comes to child support payments. They also know if you take dependents on your tax forms.

There are arguments to be made that this right _should_ exist, but since it doesn't currently its not a reason to stop mandatory leave

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

#448

Post by bitcoinisqueen » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

I know many cases where small employers were left paying 100k's after taking on a woman for a position, and just a few months later 'she got pregnant'.

- employer had to fork over 12 months of pay

- employer had to disrupt their business and hire another person

The employer struggled to eek out their own profit to feed their own family and meet their obligations.

This is a common scam that some women will get a job, with the intention of juicing the parental leave AND then we they are supposed to return to work.... they instead quit.

This scam has cost my friends a lot of money and suffering because these women are predators and care not of others, but getting something for themselves.

And they scream "mah discrimination".

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

#449

Post by jschwartzi » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #136

jschwartzi wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually isn't a biological reality that the woman is away from work for longer. What's actually happening is that the man isn't expected to be away as long as the woman, so he doesn't take as much leave. It's a form of discrimination to make it the woman's problem because she's the one laid up in the hospital. Just because women are bearing the physical burden of the pregnancy, it doesn't mean it's solely their b…

How can you say this with a straight face?! It's a fact that (some) women need to stay off work (bed-ridden before birth, in hospital after birth). It's also a fact that men don't need to. Obviously, men don't need to work and women don't need to take care of the kids (above and beyond what's biologically required of them), but (1) on average, outcomes will be influenced by underlying biological reality, and (2) it's…

The only reason you're looking at it as a biological reality is that you're looking for ways for pregnancy to be disadvantageous in our society as our social customs and mores are today. You're assuming that the social structures and mores can't change.

The reason it's not a biological disadvantage in my mind is because society doesn't have to be structured to disadvantage people because of that biology. Other posters have made the point that if men simply took the same time off as women do then that would weaken discrimination against pregnant women. And others have suggested social insurance for companies who have to fill temporary vacancies due to childbirth. So again, we've structured our society so that pregnancy is a disadvantage and it doesn't have to be.

The disconnect is that you keep saying how things are and we keep telling you that things don't have to be this way.

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

#450

Post by lovich » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

rahimnathwani wrote: post #431

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…

I'm not doubting what happened in your wife's situation, but it strikes me as strange that this would happen at a company where both men and women are given longer parental / bonding leave than is required by US law (and, in China, more than is required by Chinese law). The obvious reason why the company would offer this, is because it helps with employee recruitment, retention and productivity over the long term. An…

That helps the company in general, but on individual teams the incentives are different and the manager may have decided it was worth it for him to try and kill this behavior or just get the employee gone now so that he could get in queue for getting a replacement ASAP.