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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

#391

Post by bryanlarsen »

scarejunba wrote: post #351
bryanlarsen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's doing something illegal but I think it's rational. The woman can do everything the man can, but the man won't take paternity in practice. He can also convince a man wanting to leave with money or opportunities but he can't convince a woman giving birth. It's kinda super skeevy, but I'm not seeing the inconsistency.

Men switch jobs at higher rates than women do, so it's easy to argue that the OP is taking more risks by hiring exclusively men.

And women at home doing childcare don't become inaccessible the way that men working for a competitor are. They're much more likely to answer if you ask them a question. In my personal experience anyways.

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

#392

Post by sangnoir »

Mirioron wrote: post #249
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…

> 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) Sure, but once one person takes parental leave you're back to being fragile on this one aspect. > The labour market is quite good, and there is no shortage of qualified individuals for almost all…

> Sure, but once one person takes parental leave you're back to being fragile on this one aspect.

That's the point! I'm not sure if you're arguing for not taking any action against fragility (since it's going to happen) or arguing for infinite redundancy - there's plenty of room between those 2 extremes. Your argument sounds a lot like "Sure, but once you lose a disk in your array / a node in your HA cluster, you're back to being fragile"

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

#393

Post by xorcist »

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…

Not sure if the question is meant seriously. There is no shortage of countries in the developing world having all kinds of parental leave, and plenty of information how that is structured.

> bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year?

Yes, that's bascially how things are done. Either a temp hire or, more commonly for specialised roles perhaps, a consultant. There's a whole job market for doing these one year stints.

Of course, you can't force people into parental leave. Some doesn't take any at all. Some take as much as they can. It may very well be the case that specialists and business leaders take less time off than others, but it's not a general trend, especially not with the working class which is perhaps the opposite of what one might expect.

> Is the person entitled to their old job back?

Generally yes, but these things are hard to enforce.

> Do you fire the new person or the old one?

Not really since replacements are hired for a specific time period.

> if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day?

Then you have a problem but usually you know about it half a year before it's too late.

> things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage?

There are plenty of data available on this. Comparing data from different countries is problematic, but countries with more social insurance tend to also have more women in leading positions. This is probably due to confounding effects of course but should be indicative that if the above effect exists it is comparably small.

> the women already did half the corporation's work for them.

I didn't quite understand this part.

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

#394

Post by tathougies »

perfmode wrote: post #338
tathougies wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started from a conclusion (that one year parental leave is a good thing) and then argued it leads to a number of outcomes which I deem unsatisfactory. Thus, I reject the initial conclusion. This is a form of argument by contradiction, or reductio ad absurdum. Part of it, is actually assuming the conclusion and then showing that it contradicts itself or leads to other unsavoriness. One criticism of reductio ad absur…

Using Latin terms doesn’t change the fact that your argument is intellectually dishonest. Name a single, unqualified societal benefit to a one year leave.

> Using Latin terms

Reductio ad absurdum is an English phrase. Derived from Latin certainly, but it does not require understanding Latin (a language which I do not speak) to comprehend.

> Name a single, unqualified societal benefit to a one year leave.

You are demanding I argue against my argument as evidence for my own argument? That seems to me the height of intellectual dishonesty.

A single unqualified social benefit is that people like me would be able to take many years off work, which I think would just be grand, because I'm rather lazy and other people paying for tathougies to play with babies sounds great! Is that a social benefit?

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

#395

Post by tathougies »

e12e wrote: post #369
tathougies wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would we want both of us to work full-time (rather than as a form of passion) if one of us is capable of supporting the family and buying appropriate life insurance? That seems to be working for the wrong reasons.

Assuming the surplus is socialized via taxes, one would want a high degree of work force participation,to pay for schools, health care, infrastructure etc.

Sure the government and society would want a high degree of work force participation, but I would I want to participate?

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

#396

Post by tathougies »

danans wrote: post #243
tathougies wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why anyone in his/her self-interest would not. If I could take all the time in the world to play with babies and be paid my current salary to do it, that's honestly my dream life.

> I don't see why anyone in his/her self-interest would not. If I could take all the time in the world to play with babies and be paid my current salary to do it, that's honestly my dream life. Because your dream life is not everyone else's dream life. There are a lot of good reasons people want to work. Many people actually enjoy practicing their skill, and want to get back to it when they can. Any such policy would…

> Because your dream life is not everyone else's dream life. There are a lot of good reasons people want to work. Many people actually enjoy practicing their skill, and want to get back to it when they can.

Certainly, but the number of times the leave is taken was not the issue at hand. The commenter said you don't have to take the full leave. However, empirical data in countries and societies that do have long parental leaves show that most people take the full leave. So while not everyone's dream life involves taking out the full term of parental leave, it is most people's.

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

#397

Post by tathougies »

danans wrote: post #234
tathougies wrote: post #27

I am against one-year parental leaves. My wife and I want ten children. That means ten years off work? How can a company manage? What if I were a less moral man and got two women pregnant a year? I mean, it's not that difficult. Even for faithful men, we plan on trying again (last baby born in December) in a few months. Is it really fair to ask my company to pay for my sex life? More worryingly, what kind of incentiv…

> I am against one-year parental leaves. My wife and I want ten children. That means ten years off work? You are an outlier in terms of how many children you want. This sort of benefit is intended to help with people who have the median number of children (1.9 in the US today) [1]. The way to deal with outlying cases like yours is to rapidly phase out the benefit as you move far above the median, so you only get the…

A phase out benefit makes a lot of sense if the reasoning behind parental leave is that the government wants to encourage a certain number of children. That is almost never the stated reasoning behind these kinds of laws. Usually, the justification is 'family-friendliness' or for the benefit of the child. In that case, there is no justification for a phase out. If the justification is 'family friendliness', then a phase out for certain kinds of families seems rather unfriendly. If the justification is the benefit to the parent-child relationship, which is shown to reduce certain societal ills , then it's not clear why only the eldest children ought to benefit while leaving the younger children to suffer a host of social issues, like susceptibility to crime, teen pregnancy rates, etc.

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

#398

Post by scarejunba »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #391
scarejunba wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's doing something illegal but I think it's rational. The woman can do everything the man can, but the man won't take paternity in practice. He can also convince a man wanting to leave with money or opportunities but he can't convince a woman giving birth. It's kinda super skeevy, but I'm not seeing the inconsistency.

Men switch jobs at higher rates than women do, so it's easy to argue that the OP is taking more risks by hiring exclusively men. And women at home doing childcare don't become inaccessible the way that men working for a competitor are. They're much more likely to answer if you ask them a question. In my personal experience anyways.

Haha, okay, I’m easy to convince because I really haven’t thought about the problem and I could never see myself needing to reason it out since it’s just illegal and therefore overridden by the objective to ensure my company doesn’t get sued into oblivion.

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

#399

Post by perfmode »

tathougies wrote: post #394
perfmode wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Latin terms doesn’t change the fact that your argument is intellectually dishonest. Name a single, unqualified societal benefit to a one year leave.

> Using Latin terms Reductio ad absurdum is an English phrase. Derived from Latin certainly, but it does not require understanding Latin (a language which I do not speak) to comprehend. > Name a single, unqualified societal benefit to a one year leave. You are demanding I argue against my argument as evidence for my own argument? That seems to me the height of intellectual dishonesty. A single unqualified social bene…

> Intellectual honesty is an applied method of problem solving, characterized by an unbiased, honest attitude, which can be demonstrated in a number of different ways:

> One's personal faith does not interfere with the pursuit of truth;

> Relevant facts and information are not purposefully omitted even when such things may contradict one's hypothesis;

> Facts are presented in an unbiased manner, and not twisted to give misleading impressions or to support one view over another;

> References, or earlier work, are acknowledged where possible, and plagiarism is avoided.

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

#400

Post by danans »

souprock wrote: post #321
danans wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want to work, and do other things that work avails to them, including provide better experiences and lifestyle for the smaller number of children in their household. Even in the 1960s in the US, when the working class had much more economic security, and it was easier to financially support children than today, the median number of children per family was still https://www.statista.com/statistics/718084/averag…

I think "better experiences" should include the value of siblings. There is always somebody to play with. You form a team against bullies. Being able to attend classes together or share dorm rooms is great. Even later in life, there will be family to share life with.

3 kids would be able to provide each other plenty of sibling value.
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