Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Paternal leave is a privilege, not a right. So what? > Not doing everything you possibly can to make everyone equal when it comes to sex is not sexism. If something inherent in our society - having children - causes one gender to have unequal opportunity it's sexist to be against counter-measures due to some sort of bullshit "biology" argument.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree. You can be not sexist without supporting every possible measure to attempt to achieve a perfectly egalitarian society.
French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
461–470 of 485 posts
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's more a matter of culture. Any wealthy industrialised country can easily afford this. The difference is in how much value they attach to family, child care and parenthood. For all its talk about "family values", the US doesn't seem to care much about families; it's one of the few countries in the world without paid maternity leave (the others are Papua New Guinea, Lesotho and Swaziland), and it has the highes…
>It's not a matter of money, it's a matter of culture. Any wealthy country can afford this. ???
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree. You can be not sexist without supporting every possible measure to attempt to achieve a perfectly egalitarian society.
All those non-racists that were not supporting the civil rights movement.
Biological differences are not artificial.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your results are the same, your optimisation goals seem to differ. Does it matter?
The results aren't the same though. If you want maximum total income and you'll take a percentage cut of one of two salaries, you'll take the cut for the lower salary. If you optimize for maximum income per hours worked, you'd take the cut on the higher salary.
This option gives you neither.
Rather, I have a colleague who took paternal leave with their partner and afterwards switched to part-time for a bit.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
All those non-racists that were not supporting the civil rights movement.
The difference here being that the civil rights movement was needed to overcome an artificial injustice. Biological differences are not artificial.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
The new "asian" Swedes are.
I take the point, but there is a lot of evidence that birth rates decline as safety increases (this includes financial safety). Here is one study (of many): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337068662_Declined_... Even in the UK (from where I come) it's only first generation migrants that have many children, the second generation seems to fall in line with the society. From my anecdotal experience.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference here being that the civil rights movement was needed to overcome an artificial injustice. Biological differences are not artificial.
Yet again, there's nothing biological that mandates that women should be disadvantaged due to having children. It's artificial and modern Scandinavia proves it.
The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that any time I say "productivity" in the rest of this comment, I mean it in the sense of doing productive work for other people, e.g. employment.
As a side-effect of childbirth, women lose productive capacity. Men do not. This is not a societal choice, it is a physiological reality. It will continue to be true up until the moment women no longer need to carry a baby around in their wombs for 9 months in order to bring new humans into the world. Note I'm just talking about pre/perinatal here, not long-term child rearing.
Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave. I agree with you that this is probably[1] a good idea. But not wanting to overcompensate for actual biological differences is not sexism. This clearly doesn't fall into sexism because it doesn't apply to all women. It only applies to women that can + want to have children. The discrimination is not based on sex, it's based on a demonstrable loss in productivity that occurs naturally and by choice.
Again, this is very much unlike the disadvantage experienced by black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, which was not a result of natural processes but rather a result of completely arbitrary bigotry and absolutely not in any way, shape, or form brought on by a choice made by black Americans.
[1] I say probably here because obviously paternity leave only applies to men who are having / have had children, so you will continue to have a similar problem (discrimination based on a loss in productivity), except now the sides are not "women having children" vs. everyone else but rather "people having children" vs. everyone else (i.e. people that don't want children). As I said though, I agree and still think this is better than the completely natural version of events, where only the woman side of the equation loses productivity, because at the end of the day in situations like these it is both the woman and the man who are choosing to bring a child into the world. And even though it is a choice to do so, it is obviously the kind of choice which we need people to make otherwise society will cease to exist, which is why I am happy to compensate for the loss in productivity due to this choice. That being said, once test-tube babies are both easy (easier/safer than natural childbirth) and normalized, I probably won't be able to countenance advantaged maternity/paternity leave (at least before the "birth" of the baby), because then it will be an entirely optional choice and you would be effectively punishing people that choose to have babies in the test-tube fashion.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet again, there's nothing biological that mandates that women should be disadvantaged due to having children. It's artificial and modern Scandinavia proves it.
Huh? Biology absolutely does mandate that. Unless wires have been completely crossed here, when you say "women should not be disadvantaged", you are presumably talking about employment / work. The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that an…
You're treating a biological difference (the actual birth) of a few weeks as a valid reason for a much larger societal disadvantage.
Finally, child rearing should not be seen as a "loss of productivity" but as unpaid work, since without it, as you also noted, we would cease to exist.
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Biology absolutely does mandate that. Unless wires have been completely crossed here, when you say "women should not be disadvantaged", you are presumably talking about employment / work. The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that an…
It's artificial due to society treating child rearing as womens work. That's a social construct. In Scandinavia it's seen as an event handled by _both_ parents, equally. So both parents are expected to be just as absent from work as the other. This results in women not being singled out as a more "risky" employee over men. This is the default. That history has been cruel to women is no reason to treat what you descri…
Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's artificial due to society treating child rearing as womens work. That's a social construct. In Scandinavia it's seen as an event handled by _both_ parents, equally. So both parents are expected to be just as absent from work as the other. This results in women not being singled out as a more "risky" employee over men. This is the default. That history has been cruel to women is no reason to treat what you descri…
Please re-read all of my comments with the fresh understanding (though it really shouldn't be as this was obvious from context and even explicitly stated) that I'm not talking about child-rearing. I'm talking about the pre/perinatal period when I am talking about a loss in productivity that women face by necessity due to biological reality.
The biological part is a couple of weeks, child-rearing that parental leave is a part of is for at least 12 months until daycare can take over. Fathers can and should do that as well. So in the end the amount of time away from work should be the roughly equal. So once again, if this sums up to equal portions away from work, which there is no reason not to, is there a biological argument for lower wage etc for women?
Do you also think that pregnant women get their salary deducted for their supposed loss in "productivity"?
Please let me know why this statement isn't true:
> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.