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As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

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Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#361

Post by C1sc0cat »

mindcrime wrote: post #227
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

But it isn't "discriminating based on parental leave". It's "discriminating" based on experience. The reason why someone takes a year (or whatever) off isn't the issue. Does this feel unfair in some sense? Yeah. But would it be less unfair to artificially punish the person who didn't take time off? Questionable...

Its still indirect discrimination and is there really much difference between a woman with nine years and a man with ten.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#362

Post by halbritt »

leetcrew wrote: post #349
sundvor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It occurs to me that you're kind of equating a year of holidays with that of having a baby, which ensures the continuation of our species. In our (HN) case, that is putting a few more technologist offsprings into the mix for what that's worth. I can assure you looking after a baby the first year is not leisure time.

on the other hand, there are already quite a lot of us on this planet. not every single parent is doing a Good Deed by bringing yet another life into this world.

Many people have posited that a shrinking population will have a more deleterious effect than a booming one.

We’ll see in Japan in the next two decades. Europe is next.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#363

Post by sctb »

JimGuns wrote: post #222

I guess the alt.left and feminists are busy today flagging the opinions they dont like. Typical one sided liberal debates.

Since it really doesn't look like you're going to follow the guidelines, we've banned this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start using the site as intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#364

Post by dpark »

skybrian wrote: post #304
mindcrime wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it isn't "discriminating based on parental leave". It's "discriminating" based on experience. The reason why someone takes a year (or whatever) off isn't the issue. Does this feel unfair in some sense? Yeah. But would it be less unfair to artificially punish the person who didn't take time off? Questionable...

I guess there may be some situations where one year of experience more or less makes a big difference, but it doesn't seem like that big a deal? It would be like hiring someone one year younger.

If you're getting X% merit increases every year and miss one, it will look forever as if you're underpaid relative to your peers. So people who take a long parental leave will have a permanent "pay gap" unless either the company pro-actively bumps them up (pay for the absent time as if they were present) or the employee overachieves to catch up (in which case they still have a pay gap relative to their overachieving peers).

Of course, there's also ramp-down and ramp-up time on each side of the leave. I'd expect a leave of 12 months is probably closer to a total productivity loss of 18 month, which will drag pay down further if there's a reduction to a second merit increase. If you take years off, as many do, staying home until the kid enters kindergarten, then you're probably looking at a massive relative gap when you start back.

But yeah, taking a year for parental leave is not a death knell for most professionals' careers. It will realistically result in a long-term salary depression relative to peers, though.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#365

Post by gowld »

jaxtellerSoA wrote: post #310
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Have you ever wondered whether there's other human values - perhaps kinder and more loving values - than venal self-interest and capital accumulation? 2. The word 'choice' is not really apposite here, given that one sex, by the mere lottery of birth, carries the burden of pregnancy (and, culturally - with a similar determinacy - women are expected to rear their children in their early years).

> 2. The word 'choice' is not really apposite here, given that one sex, by the mere lottery of birth, carries the burden of pregnancy Welcome to life, it isn't equal, and never will be. Maybe we should stop trying to make the playing field level and just appreciate and celebrate the differences.

Why should celebrate some people being underpaid for their efforts?

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#366

Post by C1sc0cat »

jaxtellerSoA wrote: post #213
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. I can't imagine being able to discriminate based on parental leave

> Maybe I'm coming from a place of privilege but that point of view makes me incredibly sad. Why? It makes me sad that anyone would want to force business to take on risk that it wouldn't otherwise in the name of "equality". Choices have consequences, if you choose to stay out of work for a year to raise your child then you will be less employable.

You could argue that women are less like to die young from risky activities and should be preferred. I know a director level guy who had to agree to give up his sports bike as a condition of promotion to director level.

Even having less time off from sports activities - broken legs from five a side foot ball cost a surprising number of days off.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#367

Post by jaxtellerSoA »

onemoresoop wrote: post #319
jaxtellerSoA wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm coming from the same place, except I don't think it's privilege, I think it's wanting to build a world where anyone can take a year off for anything and not have that held against them if they later want to go work for someone. Do YOU want to have surgery from a surgeon that hasn't performed in year? Your idea is fine utopian, fluffy unicorn, ideology. But practically it just won't work. This doesn't have anyth…

But we don't want surgery from an overworked surgeon either.

I completely agree. In fact the whole residency thing in the medical profession, is an awful, awful, system.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#368

Post by davrosthedalek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #305
davrosthedalek wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you totally should be able to take off for a year. The same way you can elect not to go to university. Or look in the laser. You just have to live with the consequences. And in many, many professions, a year or so out of practice means that you are measurably worse. Maybe (but likely) worse than before you left, but almost certainly worse than you could be if you would have used that year to get better at what ev…

Are you still going to be worse after a month of work? Are companies that short-term-oriented?

Depends really on what work you are doing. Garbage collector, probably no. Helicopter pilot, probably yes.

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#369

Post by jeffdavis »

avar wrote: post #194
toxik wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still pay the opportunity cost, even if you are getting a monthly income. Why should I hire the person who was away for a solid year on parental leave over the guy who has been working diligently during that time? Forcing parents to have equal amounts of parental leave, as we do in Sweden (well, we incentivized it,) is a form of imposed equality of outcome. Equality of outcome is often said to be some disease of…

The alternative is equality of opportunity. If some people in society want to do some activity knowing they won't build job experience while doing so, let them, even if other people don't want to and become more employable as a result. That's freedom. Whether e.g. women on average tend to take more parental leave is only a small subset of those sorts of situations in society. I (a man) took a months-long parental lea…

Equality of opportunity is a complex topic that sounds good to everyone but also means different things to everyone. The reason is that opportunities are, themselves, often the result of earlier choices.

For instance, the opportunity for a desirable job may be the result of earlier experience attained, which may be the result of choices about how much time to spend on work versus family or other pursuits.

It gets even more complex when you take this back to the time of birth. Differences among parents represent a huge difference in opportunity for their children. But it's hard to imagine this changing dramatically: parents work very hard to give their children whatever kinds of benefits they possibly can -- social, financial, cultural, educational. If you could ever truly prevent parents from giving their children benefits that not all children have, it would remove almost all of the incentive for most kinds of success, and the consequences would be unimaginable (and probably dystopian).

Re: As women have more equal opportunity, the more their preferences differ from men

#370

Post by illumin8 »

dpark wrote: post #345
illumin8 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN moderators, you should check the biases of the mod brigade. I'm out of this conversation. Immediate downvotes because I don't agree with the toxic alt-right views that seem to dominate conversations like these. I'm done with this discussion; seems we can't have a meaningful one.

Boo for whining about downvotes and accusing everyone who doesn't agree with you of being alt-right. You're being intellectually dishonest here. You expect to be able to share your point of view without critical response but you insult others for expressing theirs.

You shouldn't express points of view through moderation. Replying to the comment is the appropriate way to express differing points of view.
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