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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

#271

Post by lliamander »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #230
lliamander wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's part of my point. If you need to use childcare services, then the cost of having children rises linearly with the number of children. If one parent stays home, then the costs grow logarithmically (I've heard anecdotally that after 4 kids, having more doesn't really require much additional effort because the older ones can be recruited to help with the younger ones).

But aside from cost, there's also the question of emotional investment. I suspect that couples aren't generally going to want to have more than one or two kids if they aren't going to have enough time to personally invest in each kid.

> 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?

That's a fair point, and I think it's worth looking at how that could be made a reality.

However, shorter work weeks imply that each hour of work has the same marginal utility for the worker. I don't have any citations at the moment, but I've heard that people who work more hours tend to be paid disproportionately more. That is, it may make more financial sense for a family if one parent works 40-50 hours than if both work 20-25 hours.

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

#272

Post by lhorie »

Mirioron wrote: post #257
lhorie wrote: post #244

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 Ignoring the fact that this kind of discrimination is flat out illegal, you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent. Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professio…

> you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent. But they are much less likely to take this parental leave. > Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special sno…

> But they are much less likely to take this parental leave

If you want to talk about likelihoods, consider that in most companies, the chance that an employee of any gender will leave for a random reason is much higher than someone of any gender taking parental leave. Trying to skirt the law to "optimize" for least parental leaves is kinda like sending a memo to your employees telling them to always run red lights and jaywalk to get to work faster. It's one of those "not even wrong" kinds of things.

> Most small businesses fail

This is a non sequitur. Businesses fail for all sorts of reasons. Your restaurant staff ghosting you, not enough clients, spending stupidly after raising money, etc. If your business fails due to a parental leave of all things, let me tell you, you were probably severely delusional about its viability to begin with.

> Aka your small business shuts its doors

I believe I mentioned a fitting example where this could not be farther from the truth (early education)

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

#273

Post by belorn »

bluecalm wrote: post #95
unavoidable wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly few people are actually trying to answer this question on this thread. The answer is straightforward: you either structure your organization so that there are enough overlapping responsibilities to account for parental leaves (e.g. good business practice of not making a fragile organization), or you hire a temporary employee explicitly on a 1 year "parental leave" contract. The labour market is quite goo…

It's surely doable in big organizations but small businesses it's an overwhelming cost even if the government pays the salary of the worker on a leave (the only way it can really work). Maybe the answer to that problem is that really important employees who make a lot of money shouldn't be hired as normal workers but as contractors. Something like: if you get 3x more average salary then you are important but you only…

In a small company the buck always ends with the owner. If the company fails if someone leaves then that is either a failure of the owners ability to manage different aspect of the work or poorly run company.

An employee can at any time get a medical condition that puts them out of action with month long recovery time. A car crash, a bike accident, or any other problem that results in surgery. Maybe they get serious sick. Its quite rare that people are perfect healthy and remains so for decades, so it doesn't make any sense to risk operating a company on that condition.

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

#274

Post by woodpanel »

p1esk wrote: post #239
woodpanel wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can relate to your logic, I wonder: Since men are increasingly considering taking maternity leave as well, wouldn't it be a good alternative to focus on people older than say 40? What would keep you from hiring them?

people older than say 40? What would keep you from hiring them? They are expensive :)

Is it really that?

I've come to think that it's rather the expectation that they are expensive. It is expected by employers as well as the old employees themselves, so if they would demand a lower than expected wage it would come across as fishy (did he serve time? an underachiever?).

Another thing might be that with experience comes less naiveness. As you become more resilient against corporate BS you become equally unformable (as in "Thanks, but no 'chakka' for me please").

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

#275

Post by lliamander »

pjc50 wrote: post #125
lliamander wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing? If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents.

> Yes, but is a birth rate above replacement a good thing or a bad thing?

Well, a birthrate below replacement can have a number of negative consequences, especially in a society like ours with the way we've setup social security.

> If it's determined to be a socially good thing, then society should pay for it, rather than try to badger women out of the workplace to reduce their options and make them parents.

For what it's worth, it was my father that was the stay-at-home parent for my childhood. Certainly I wouldn't want to force women to stay at home, but I've known a number who would at least like the option.

How we pay for it is a valid question, but aside from the purely monetary aspect, there's question of emotional investment. Parents are generally only going to have as many kids as they feel they (collectively) have enough time for.

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

#276

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

That’s what you have managers for. The real question is why is the person in charge still employed if a critical business process depends on a single person.

I worked for a place where the CFO was diagnosed with cancer and was out for nearly 6 months. You know what happened? The Comptroller was appointed interim CFO and the CFO resumed his duties on his return.

All of these what ifs reflect a profound missing of the point. Instead of babies, think about injuries or extended jury duty or whatever. Any institution, whether a corporation, government agency or school, needs to be able to function independent of the individual employees.

If the magic mechanic or money lady is that critical, you already have a much more serious internal controls problem.

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

#277

Post by Mirioron »

Certhas wrote: post #250
bluecalm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's surely doable in big organizations but small businesses it's an overwhelming cost even if the government pays the salary of the worker on a leave (the only way it can really work). Maybe the answer to that problem is that really important employees who make a lot of money shouldn't be hired as normal workers but as contractors. Something like: if you get 3x more average salary then you are important but you only…

Wow. Just wow. So, in many European countries, fathers and mothers have a right to substantial amounts of parental leave. Like a year or more. In all of these places small businesses exist. In Sweden, with very extensive parental leave [1], there is a large number of start ups. So obviously, empirically, you must be missing something. Generally speaking, if your employees care about your business (and getting their j…

According to the 2018 SBA fact sheet about Sweden by the EU commission [1] Sweden does employ fewer people in small and micro businesses than are employed on average in the entirety of the EU. Small and micro businesses in Sweden employ 46.6% of the workforce, while in EU-28 the percentage is 49.4%. If you add medium businesses to it you get 65.5% for Sweden and 66.4% for EU-28. You can also find some interesting measurements about entrepreneurship in Sweden compared to the EU average int he report.

I'm not saying this specific thing is the reason why Sweden's small businesses employ fewer people, but you can't just ignore this either.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/32581/attachments/28... (PDF)

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

#278

Post by Spooky23 »

Mirioron wrote: post #257
lhorie wrote: post #244

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 Ignoring the fact that this kind of discrimination is flat out illegal, you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent. Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professio…

> you are forgetting to consider that the Canadian policy allows males to take parental leave as well, so the excuse for the discrimination isn't even logically consistent. But they are much less likely to take this parental leave. > Personally, having lead teams of people ranging from experienced professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special sno…

Of course they are less likely to go on leave — they work for a guy who doesn’t hire women in non-disposable roles, because his family will starve if a female professional gets pregnant.

Presumably the female custodians and admins just get purged.

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

#279

Post by p1esk »

woodpanel wrote: post #274
p1esk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people older than say 40? What would keep you from hiring them? They are expensive :)

Is it really that? I've come to think that it's rather the expectation that they are expensive. It is expected by employers as well as the old employees themselves, so if they would demand a lower than expected wage it would come across as fishy (did he serve time? an underachiever?). Another thing might be that with experience comes less naiveness. As you become more resilient against corporate BS you become equally…

Have you hired many 40+ year olds who are both good and cheap?

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

#280

Post by acid__ »

CloudNetworking wrote: post #144
WorldMaker wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you make the same tough decision and avoid hiring members of the US National Guard, or the Army/Navy/Air Force Reserve, as well, simply because they may be called away for a year or so to serve their country and similarly expect their job to be there when they return? (This is not a facetious question. I think that these are comparable and at least equably honorable. Parental leave is a form of serving your countr…

Or humans. Does he hire humans? humans can and do fall sick from time to time. Ew.

Maybe he recognizes that different humans have different probabilities of being suddenly unable to work for extended periods of time, and is able to weigh various factors (rationally or not, fairly or not) instead of being a 100% all-or-nothing strawman.
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