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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

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Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#221

Post by wvenable »

bluecalm wrote: post #208
dwild wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying that you have a higher chance that a young woman will carry a baby than having a young man change for a better paying offer? I'm one of theses young one out of college and I can tell you, based around me, your stats are clearly wrong ;). Most don't care about babies, but they all certainly care about getting more interesting jobs. I'm Canadian too.

If someone leaves I can find a replacement and hope they don't leave. If a women has a baby then I will either need to hire a temp which is more difficult than to hire for full time position or suddenly have 2 positions open (I need to have that when my first employee comes back). For a small few people company having 2 positions open instead of one is often unreasonable cost.

I had to hire a temp for a one year maternity leave replacement. It wasn't particularly difficult and the person I hired didn't want a longer contract and she is great. In fact, I kept her on as-needed contract basis after. She will be helping me smooth other the transition of another employee who just left for a better paying job.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#222

Post by dragonwriter »

bluecalm wrote: post #219
dragonwriter wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, lawsuit or my children not being able to afford college. I don't think you've researched the costs of the kind of lawsuit at issue for your business if you think that it's less than you'd lose by having the employee in the position take a year off on job-protected leave.

I am not in US, in my country lawyers don't carry a big stick. In US on the other hand I wouldn't need to be sexist as I don't have to promise parental leaves so that would make things easier. Small businesses don't have to offer that till they are big enough so it makes sense for them.

> In US on the other hand I wouldn't need to be sexist as I don't have to promise parental leaves

The US does, indeed, have mandatory job-protected parental leave. It's much shorter (even in the more generous states) than many European countries and in many cases (i.e., federally, though some states differ) unpaid-only, but it's still a thing.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#223

Post by bryanlarsen »

bluecalm wrote: post #154
wvenable wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost. Anybody can leave at any time for any reason. I had much worse luck young male developers out of school and them leaving after a few months than with a developer leaving on maternity leave and coming back.

Yeah, but you need to play the odds. If decision A means 5% chance you can't pay for a good college for your kid and decision B means 2% chance of being in that position which one do you choose? If I run 100+ people firm then the cost is small enough that I can eat it for making the world a better and fairer place and I also get benefits of more inclusive work place. If I run a small 2 people business I will weigh ev…

A woman will give you five or six months warning before going on mat leave. You'd be lucky to get two weeks out of a young man jumping ship.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#224

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

cheesymuffin wrote: post #206
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he's the sort of guy that would work the system no matter what - he could be an argument against sick days or flexible hours as well. There will always be people like that, but if the societal good outweighs the few bad apples, I'd argue that's a plus in general.

Yeah, it's really unfortunate when someone cares more about raising well-adjusted kids than the Company.

That's true. Not only is one person being bad not a strong argument for not endorsing something, but this person could be actually doing good for his family - caring for his kids or something, and just not sharing the information.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#225

Post by Dylan16807 »

celticninja wrote: post #199
bluecalm wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. The laws are set in a way that I am either sexist or put my children well being below someone's else. The incentives are there to be sexists maybe let's think how to set them right.

You are wondering how you put your children through a private (paid for) school, whilst the employee might be wondering about feeding and accomodating theirs. Your children's well being is at a much higher level than those of your employees I am sure. How do you propose to make it right? You already flout the existing laws, it's not like you would voluntarily enact something. So your proposition is to what? Get rid o…

We could always make leave mandatory for both parents.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#226

Post by tathougies »

freefal wrote: post #103
Aloha wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You dont need to take the whole year.

Yes, but the fact that he could creates a strong incentive for the company to identify such people and not hire them in the first place.

I mean, yeah. If this were the policy mandated by the state, I certainly wouldn't hire me.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#227

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dwild wrote: post #179
bluecalm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but you need to play the odds. If decision A means 5% chance you can't pay for a good college for your kid and decision B means 2% chance of being in that position which one do you choose? If I run 100+ people firm then the cost is small enough that I can eat it for making the world a better and fairer place and I also get benefits of more inclusive work place. If I run a small 2 people business I will weigh ev…

So you are saying that you have a higher chance that a young woman will carry a baby than having a young man change for a better paying offer? I'm one of theses young one out of college and I can tell you, based around me, your stats are clearly wrong ;). Most don't care about babies, but they all certainly care about getting more interesting jobs. I'm Canadian too.

>a higher chance that a young woman will carry a baby than having a young man change for a better paying offer? //

Well surely the woman has all the possibilities the man has (eg changing to a better offer), plus they have the possibility of maternity, logically speaking. I'm considering maternity as a separate issue to child-rearing FWIW.

Quantitatively maternity probably dwarfs the male majority issues (for leaving the work force) such as suicide.

>Most don't care about babies, //

The proportion of humans who don't have basic biological urges associated with reproduction is approximately zero. A more telling statistic is probably "Of those born in 1971, 18 per cent were childless in 2016, when they turned 45." [1]. In the same article the average number of children a woman has by her 30th year is 1.0 in the UK.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/24/proportion-women...

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#228

Post by 7952 »

bluecalm wrote: post #154
wvenable wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I am looking for 3rd programmer in my 2 person small company I will not risk hiring a young woman as getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost. Anybody can leave at any time for any reason. I had much worse luck young male developers out of school and them leaving after a few months than with a developer leaving on maternity leave and coming back.

Yeah, but you need to play the odds. If decision A means 5% chance you can't pay for a good college for your kid and decision B means 2% chance of being in that position which one do you choose? If I run 100+ people firm then the cost is small enough that I can eat it for making the world a better and fairer place and I also get benefits of more inclusive work place. If I run a small 2 people business I will weigh ev…

Surely in this situation you have already decided that the women of childbearing age is the best candidate for the job. You are turning that candidate down and selecting someone you don't like as much. That is a compromise as well. Although to be fair you could have two equally good candidates.

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#229

Post by c22 »

bluecalm wrote: post #105
xutopia wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hire interims or share responsibilities between other members of the team. It happens all the time and we rarely find an issue with this. If any company is run in such a way that bus-factor means the company can't thrive with one person gone you're simply doing it wrong.

>>We hire interims or share responsibilities between other members of the team. It happens all the time and we rarely find an issue with this. Sounds nice but in practice it means people who don't have children or have less children do more work. As someone who doesn't want to have children I wouldn't want to work for a place where I am expected to do more work when others get pregnant. There is real cost even if gov…

If the government is covering the leave and you're not hiring a replacement then why are the remaining workers getting "the same pay" for the extra work?

Re: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves

#230

Post by Dylan16807 »

lliamander wrote: post #76
simonsarris wrote: post #11

> [heading] How do they manage in Canada? > In Canada, companies have had no option but to make 52-week parental leaves work, when requested, since 2000. The question Canadian companies ask isn’t “Can we do it?” but “How do we do it?” Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question. If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, w…

There's also something unsettling about "here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!" feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation's work for them. There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic.

> There's the rub, can you (at a population level) have a birth rate at or above replacement if both parents are expected to find employment outside of the home? I don't think that's realistic.

That's far more of a child care issue than a parental leave issue. If both parents take a year of leave each for three children that's not even close to a tenth of their working life.

And we are expecting far too many hours to be worked per household. But there's no reason a reduction in working hours has to imply a stay at home parent. What if both parents worked 3 days a week, or 2 days a week?

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