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Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

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Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#71

Post by zimablue »

gumby wrote: post #52
zimablue wrote: post #45

Can we stop linking and upvoting these article on HN, I've seen several in the last few months. I don't see a clear link to hacker culture, if anything it's less relevant to developers as we often have some form of flexible working already. The link I can see is that it's part of the gender culture war that has somehow become focussed on SV.

> I don't see a clear link to hacker culture It's good advice for how to run my company.

But it's not about that, it's about a proposed law. Anything to do with how to run companies isn't hacker culture, we don't spam posts about the best offshore tax arrangements and the advantages of different board structures. Company stuff is mostly to do with startups and this practise is both less relevant to and less favoured by startups.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#72

Post by michaelt »

alkonaut wrote: post #13

Don’t enforce it. Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded. Next make part of the parental leave shared between parents be allocated to the father. Now if they don’t use it they will lose a benefit they already paid taxes for. The last and most important step is to keep this system in place for a generation or more, after which any parent not doing a fair chunk of the parental leave will be considere…

  Just start with making it tax funded, not employer funded.
I guess it'd be good for small businesses, but I'm not sure how I'd feel about paying $40,000,000 a year to Larry Ellison while he was on parental leave.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#73

Post by zimablue »

gaius wrote: post #41

There should be a system that every n years you get a 6-month paid sabbatical that can be used for any purpose - studying, traveling, having a kid, anything. Because consider two women, one who wants kids and one who doesn’t. Why should woman 2 be disadvantaged? Isn’t that the exact opposite of equality?

That's actually a pretty clever idea, nice.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#74

Post by SamReidHughes »

malvosenior wrote: post #69
TangoTrotFox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important tangent. There's a very significant nuance to birthrates you're not considering when it comes to reducing birthrates. Most of everybody knows birth rates in the developed world are decreasing, compared to the developing world. But what many do not know is that this sort of pattern holds true even within developed nations themselves. For instance in the US people who earn Think about what this means. The…

I don’t see how increasing the birth rate of people making over $200k per year leads to a better tomorrow (not that such an idealistic notion even exists). You’d be increasing the number of mega consumers, international flights, mc mansions... What you really seem to be saying is you’d like people who aren’t like you to stop reproducing and people who are like you to reproduce more.

Watching the beginning of Idiocracy might make the problem clear.

https://youtu.be/YwZ0ZUy7P3E

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#75

Post by zimablue »

gumby wrote: post #59
fjsolwmv wrote: post #6

Why do we want equality if it means pushing women away from the motherhood they choose?

Indeed, this is precisely why this is such a good idea! It doesn't push anyone towards or away from having kids.

It pushes you towards having kids because you're effectively already paying for them. It wouldn't be enough to completely change someone who was very opposed to it but it's by no means neutral. The proposal the guy made in a different post of just enforcing sabbaticals is neutral.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#76

Post by malvosenior »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #74
malvosenior wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how increasing the birth rate of people making over $200k per year leads to a better tomorrow (not that such an idealistic notion even exists). You’d be increasing the number of mega consumers, international flights, mc mansions... What you really seem to be saying is you’d like people who aren’t like you to stop reproducing and people who are like you to reproduce more.

Watching the beginning of Idiocracy might make the problem clear. https://youtu.be/YwZ0ZUy7P3E

That’s a fictional movie.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#77

Post by smallnamespace »

gumby wrote: post #42
brighteyes wrote: post #17

It would have been a more interesting article had it also went into the downsides of this approach. One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers, further decreasing the birth rate which is already quite low in many advanced economies. Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact, further d…

> One specific concern is that mandatory paternity leave may discourage men from becoming fathers... > Another is that if taking paternity leave impacts men's careers, then in many cases both parents will suffer such an impact... As the article states: how are these factors different for men than for women?

But it disproportionately affects those who choose to have children. This doesn't eliminate an imbalance, it would simply shift some of the burden around.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#78

Post by zimablue »

rayiner wrote: post #61
zimablue wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that it forces people who don't want children to pay for other people's children, at a time when we should be trying to reduce the population and not increase it. Having children is not a public service, it's closer to pollution and I object so much to subsidising it.

I’m okay with not subsidizing having kids if kids in the future don’t have to pay social security, dividends, etc., for people who didn’t have kids.

This is a choice we made in how we structure our governments though that doesn't make much sense on it's own.

We could easily have a system where each generation pays for its OWN social security, you just let the government screw you by spending the current account on wars.

Population is a much bigger question than a specific, stupid government fiscal policy.

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#79

Post by damagednoob »

matt4077 wrote: post #38
damagednoob wrote: post #33

I'm in favour of a set amount of parental leave that can be shared between spouses in whatever ratio they choose. I don't understand how depriving families of choices is going to be a good thing. Example: You and your husband would like to breastfeed your baby for the first 6 months but you are unable to express? Too bad, your husband has to take paternity leave and you will have to go back to work. From my experienc…

> From my experience, there is a connection between mother and child from birth That's not "experience", it's just the 1950's dogma on the role of men and women dressed up in think-of-the-children. And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence, or men could choose a period after weaning for their leave.

I'm not thinking-of-the-children, I'm thinking-of-my-children. I don't care how other parents choose to allocate their parental leave. If they want it to be more equitable, then more power to them. And it's not dogma it's just a biological fact that men can't breastfeed and thus women spend more time with the child. There is a snowball effect to this that makes the connection stronger which seems to be pretty self-evident.

> And even then: nutritional benefits of breastfeeding don't require the mother's presence

Did you understand the point about not being able to express? If the mother can't express (which many find too painful or just can't) how are the nutritional benefits of breastfeeding supposed to be delivered to the child?

Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap

#80

Post by zimablue »

adimitrov wrote: post #64
zimablue wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside is that it forces people who don't want children to pay for other people's children, at a time when we should be trying to reduce the population and not increase it. Having children is not a public service, it's closer to pollution and I object so much to subsidising it.

That's very short sighted. Population doesn't permeate the ether like a perfect gas, and we're not all indistinct like the molecules of such a gas. Whether the current global population levels are unsustainable is up for debate. What is not up for debate, and is already apparent in Western nations as well as other booming economies such as China and Japan are the severe implications of demographic change and the disr…

It's only "economic sense" in a VERY narrow viewpoint where you assume that you're going to disallow immigration AND assume that your social security system is offset by a generation AND assume that economic measures like GDP/etc are important. I'd change those three before pushing the "increase population" button.

Japan had low growth and higher happiness for a couple of decades now.

Even taking all that, economically useful != right. It's economically useful to burn the forests and raise the oceans but it's not right.

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