In Norway mother and father each have 15 weeks paid leave from work after childbirth, e.i. 30 weeks total. If the father chooses not not use his paid leave it cannot normally be transferred to the mother.
Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
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Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#92I'm surprised this has had such a good reception. Hobbling men in the name of equality is just bizarre. It's mixture of "Hansel and Gretel" and "Harrison Bergeron". Instead of weights just fatten them up with sweets.
I didn't push a human being out from between my legs. Because of that I'm capable of working. I would like to be useful to my family. Working is one way I can do that.
If I work while my wife is on leave and the gender pay gap is worsened. I don't care. If my wife stays home to recover from her ordeal and the gender wage gap is worsened. She doesn't care.
The gender wage gap is so abstract and cynical at this point. It is beyond meaning. People aren't allow to live their lives the way they see fit because of some stupid number.
Shocking I know but there is no such thing as the "average woman". If her wage is different from the "average man" it has no bearing on the earnings of a specific woman with specific goals and habits.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#93It 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…
Everyone is talking about needing to control population, but according to current figures, the population will level our around 11b people around 2100. Check out www.gapminder.org for more info, but a lot of what people think about the world is wrong.
True that many people are misled about this, but
1. 11 billion may be too much.
2. This isn't uniform across the globe. Japan's population is shrinking due to a very low birth rate, and that may be a bad thing (loss of cultural and genetic diversity, for example). And this is the more relevant aspect given the context.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's a proposed change to how to run a company, it's not someone's rant about how someone didn't call them xer and how that person is a Nazi. Your opposition to even seeing this post because it includes gender seems like more of a culture war artifact than the post itself
As I said, we generally don't post company minutae unless there's a link to tech or startups. It's not opposition to seeing the post, it's opposition to the general trend of putting gender culture war articles otherwise disconnected to hacker news on the forum because gender activists chose to make SV a battleground.
It's not culture war to be bored of the culture war.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Narrowing the wage gap is not about the family. It’s about the wage gap. It’s about women getting less pay for the same work. It’s about women. Not the family. I’m not lecturing you. And I’m not a woman.
Except it’s been proven over and over that there is no wage gap: https://www.forbes.com/sites/karinagness/2016/04/12/dont-buy...
Lolz
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#96Let's stop discriminating against people who have a family or other things to do except work.
Start by enforcing 40 hour work week and make overtime paid 150%.
Employers prefer frugal workaholics with no obligations but these individuals impose externality on "normal people". We're rich enough, no need working above 8h/day.
I'd go all the way and make it illegal to provide work without compensation (internships, 80h work weeks etc). And I'd to try limit oversupply of labour by further limiting standard workweek below 40h.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#97Can 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.
Seriously? Half the articles on this site are about how to work less and/or improve your life. This is one of those.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#98This seems really heavy handed. In my experience what’s valuable for men is flexibility, not some set number of weeks you have 100% off. I (as a father) went back to work at Fivetran 4 weeks after my son was born, but at 20 hours a week. That allowed me to help my partner during the initial recovery, but also be the primary parent (with daycare) from ~4-9 months when she returned to traveling for work in consulting.…
I think the primary point of the article is that this flexible planning is not functioning as an equalizer in the workplace (Title: Want Equality? Make New Dads Stay Home...) and that it could, and should. To turn it into more direct phrasing; a woman has to take a significant chunk of time off during a pregnancy by virtue of the condition, and this has a net effect on her career. When a woman takes off for pregnancy…
My point basically boils down to this: making parental leave about something other than enabling parents to recover and take care of their kids is really kludgey, and probably would have made our experience of raising our son more difficult unless it was really, really long (like one year long).
The wage gap is a problem, but there is nothing that says we have to solve it (or that it can be solved) using this particular knob.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How does it push you towards having kids, it just gives you the option. Giving someone choices is not, in any way, some kind of force. The proposed change simply makes me and women both have the same cost to the employer up front. As it stands currently men are slightly cheaper due to the requirements of biology, and managers keep that in mind when comparing otherwise equal employees. It does not fix the difference b…
OK so I tax everybody enough to make indian food free for everybody.
Now I'm not forcing you to eat Indian food, technically. But if you hate curries you might feel a certain sense of injustice.
We're not cheaper due to the requirements of biology. (screaming) You don't have to have children. Even if you DO have children, and you're female, you DONT have to take extensive time off. I've known multiple successful women take almost no time off.
The injustice of paying for people who are already on average privileged (parents tend to be richer, etc etc) to be more privileged is far more greater than the imagined injustice of women being more likely to CHOOSE to have children then CHOOSE to take time off.
Re: Mandatory paternity leave would help close the wage gap
#100I've discussed this in the past. My company started offering 5 month paternity leave at the end of 2016. For a credit card company, this was huge. There had to have been a catch. I took the chance anyway, and got laid off. This isn't uncommon at the company either. I've heard of 3 females so far who also shared the same fate. All of thought it was illegal, but our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one se…
> our individual lawyers pretty much summed it up in one sentence: "Sure, it may be... but you have to prove it was solely due to taking leave, and it's not worth it."
Sounds like you need a group lawsuit. Firing one person - could be coincidence. Firing three? Starting to look like a pattern of punishment. The more people you can get on the lawsuit, the stronger your case.