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

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

#461

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #149

roenxi wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are, obviously, completely correct on the point that you raise. However, I am sold on those sort of laws on the basis that employers are discriminating on irrelevant dimensions, like race and gender. An employee expecting, or indeed planning , to take a X months leave Y months after joining, with X > Y, isn't an irrelevant dimension. Especially if parental leave is paid, but I don't know if that is how the US han…

While we're at it, why shouldn't any prospective employee with a health condition that might require extensive time off be required to disclose that? And, since people aren't often the best judge of their health conditions and the impositions they'll make on future employers, perhaps it'd be better if we all just disclosed our complete medical records along with our job applications.

It points to the state sponsored solution. If a single employer is supposed to carry the burden then they will obviously want to hire young healthy men above anyone else.

Fortunately this is exactly how it's implemented in most European countries: if the employee is not working the employer doesn't pay. The (usually state run) insurer does.

Requiring businesses to pay for someone taking time to care of their children is patently stupid and unjust and there is fully justified pushback against such laws.

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

#462

Post by edanm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

ejstronge wrote: post #428

edanm wrote: post #343

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. That's not completely correct when you factor in breastfeeding. Nowadays we do have the ability to ove…

I think you're continuing to add variables that disfavor women - but it's feasible to grant breaks so that women can feed their children in the middle of the day. This feels like a problem of will, and maybe male chauvinism, not biology.

I didn't say it isn't. I'm just pointing out the fact that it's not an analgous situation between men and women.

This is not even mentioning the fact of the pregnancy itself, which ranges from no biggie, to several months of severely reduced capability. My wife basically couldn't function (as in curled up in bed) for almost two months during her pregnancy.

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

#463

Post by bluecalm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

shados wrote: post #458

slipjack wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that unlike things like race discrimination, when all other things are equal, there IS a real difference, no matter how small, in term of risk (and in practice, it's really not that small). I worked at a large company where most employees were women in the 20-35 yo rangeny for a while on HR project and saw some of the data. It was not pretty. As a society though, we shouldn't let that be ground for discr…

Mandatory leave for both parents is a terrible idea. There are a lot of people who prefer traditional model where one parent works and the other takes care of children and home. Why would you force those people to loie according to some relatively modern untested family model?

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

#464

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

jonathanoliver wrote: post #423

I have a few honest and open questions as a US-based small business with a handful of women who have recently had children or who are pregnant. Do you guys have any advice for how to balance the impact to the results that we receive from those having children prior to vs after pregnancy and/or having children? Example: One individual is a phenomenal front-end website engineer. Her input has been critical in helping u…

The tips and tricks that I can give you as a former employer (and present employer as well but not on the same scale) is that you're just going to have to suck it up. Yep, that's right. The burden you perceive is people no longer performing above normal, this is normal. So you're going to have to learn how to deal with that, be loyal to your employees and then when things in their lives are more manageable again they will pay you back in spades, or, alternatively you could see the past as them having built up credit.

Every employer is in this boat, except for the ones that do illegal stuff. So take it as a fact of life that not every employee is able to give you 100% 100% of the time.

If you want to extract the last bit of something you might want to go into the lemon juice business, people aren't lemons and it is perfectly normal for them to occasionally have periods of lower productivity, and for some those periods can last quite long. I've been there myself - even as the employer - and it is always a great feeling to see the rest of the company around you pick up the slack and to know that things will end well.

On another note, it sounds as though you have very little in terms of redundancy built into your company, you may want to look at that in some more detail, it may be that you are one disease or a car-accident away from a real problem.

Thank you for trying to do the right thing, I hope some experience and a few more years will show you these things are not nearly as hard to deal with as they seem to be right now, there is a certain size company (> 10 and < 40 or so) where these problems can hit harder because there are enough people that synchronous events can happen but not enough of them to take up the slack.

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

#465

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

ggg9990 wrote: post #280

Yes, when I’m looking to promote someone to manage a team, I look for the person who is going to be absent starting in six months and for an indeterminate amount of time, and needs their job preserved for them when they come back.

At a guess you're a male and one without children.

One day you may look at this through different eyes. If you are scared of promoting women because they might get pregnant or will take their maternity leave then you probably shouldn't be a manager to begin with, and hopefully you are not and will never be an employer.

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

#466

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 7:00 PM UTC

skizm wrote: post #144

Thought experiment: a scrappy startup is struggling to stay profitable, they literally (and not figuratively) can't afford their developers leaving for extended amounts of time and they are very upfront about this in interviews. Are they legally allowed to discriminate against candidates that are pregnant or expressed a desire to have children in the near future since it has the potential to kill their business if th…

Not so scrappy by the rest of that description.

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

#467

Post by tomp » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 7:04 PM UTC

jschwartzi wrote: post #449

tomp wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poster…

I’m actually thinking the other way round. If you want to change the society, you first need to know the (biological) truth instead of denying it.

If we’re talking about salaried employees, clearly people who cannot work as many hours (pregnant women) will be less valuable than people who can work more (everybody else). You won’t change this reality by legislating that employers shouldn’t be realistic. On the other hand, you might nudge reality (i.e. make pregnant women worth comparatively more to employers) by e.g. awarding companies that hire pregnant women (i.e. a direct monetary payoff to offset the implicit loss of a less productive worker). But noone is talking about such solutions because they’re too busy lying with straight faces for their own political benefit.

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

#468

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 7:20 PM UTC

existencebox wrote: post #142

tptacek wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife interviewed at Google and was asked how she'd be able to meet the requirements of the job while taking care of young children; the discrimination persists even after pregnancy.

There's something that has always nagged at me in these discussions, and I've always been somewhat afraid to bring it up lest I misconstrue, but I want to try and figure this out. What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against…

You seem to assume being a parent (as an employee) is all downside and no upside (for the company). Let me suggest this unstated assumption is not accurate. You learn a lot when you have a family that you aren't likely to learn any other way.

My ex was a really smart guy, but not much of a people person. He once told me that most of what he knew about being a good manager he learned from being married to me. Otherwise, he would be good at the technical parts of his job, but he wouldn't be any good at dealing with people.

Part of what I knew about dealing with people came from being a full time parent. I'm also much more of a people person than he was, but potential gets developed by practice and real world experience. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.

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

#469

Post by dgacmu » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 7:40 PM UTC

doktrin wrote: post #368

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…

Interesting. I'm genuinely surprised that a company like Google with both massive financial resources and who actively court a progressive public image would be so shortsighted as to start systematically discriminating against pregnant women.

Google isn't that shortsighted. The behavior described in that comment is both disgusting and horribly against policy. (I work there part-time; I get most of the "don't be stupid in this way" training.)

But I'm not surprised that in a company of > 70k people, there are some who either shouldn't be involved in hiring, or desperately need more clue. The real question is if on a per-capita basis, Google's managing to make it better over time.

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

#470

Post by marssaxman » Sat, Jun 16, 2018, 7:55 PM UTC

banku_brougham wrote: post #204

existencebox wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something that has always nagged at me in these discussions, and I've always been somewhat afraid to bring it up lest I misconstrue, but I want to try and figure this out. What's a state of affairs we can reach such that people don't become preemptively discriminatory for lack of being able to examine factors that would impact workplace performance? We agree, societally, that we shouldn't discriminate against…

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