Specifically because people understand this is why we need to accommodate people who have children. If having children starts really setting you back because it's not accommodated in the slightest, all the ambitious, driven, and responsible people will decide that they can't afford to have children. If it gets bad enough, it becomes so common that the fertility rate of your entire country falls down.

The other reason is a business oriented one: a very large portion of the population intends to have children. It would be rather strange to exclude them all from your employment pool.

> Can't we rephrase that as, someone who has a matter in their life they need to spend hours a day taking care of will have less hours for other things?

Now a question for you. Would you want to live in a world where the only way to survive was to dedicate 100% of your life to your job? No relationships, no hobbies, no time for things like exercise. Just your job.

I did read once that humans basically evolved to handle childcare as a society. Apparently villages used to raise all the kids together. So I am probably arguing against biology here.

I'm still not sure assuming that people with kids have less time left over is discrimination, but I am probably projecting my own lack of desire to have kids onto the separate issue of how society should be run.

On that, you are right. It's incredibly frustrating for many trying to raise a family in Western-style living arrangements being so separate from their extended families and community. Child-raising is most efficient when done by a group: alone, it's exhausting and challenging and it's bad for the economy in the long term:

http://www.historyfuturenow.com/wp/why-the-nuclear-family-ne...

Even if you don't care about the emotional aspect, there are many impacts on society caused by the very recent rise of the Nuclear Family.

Pointing at historical norms is generally a poor way to argue for what's right.

People are giving you these answers about the importance of children, etc, etc, etc. They're right, but I don't think that's the reason companies accommodate people with children. IMO, it's pretty rare to see policies that are truly based on altruism.. there's usually at least some financial/economic basis for those policies.

This is simple really... if you don't accommodate them (something that costs little), they will go somewhere else that does. So you're left with a smaller pool of employees.

Some of those that you've lost, may be very good, but they will go work somewhere else where they get what they value. So to attract those people, you can try offering more money (likely more than what child-accommodating policies would cost).

Either way, you've reduced the employee pool, and increased wages to compensate. That's not a good situation for any company to be in (unless the cost of such policies costs more... which is unlikely).

Edit: also consider that the older a person is, the more likely they are to have children. So if you didn't accommodate them, your employee pool would be filled with younger, less experienced people (ie: 18-30). That's also generally not a good thing for a company.

Well, the kids who are babies today will be providing that for you--even if you don't have kids yourself. That's one reason childrearing gets special treatment in policy.

Another more practical reason is that quite a lot of people have kids, and so families make up a large block of votes in our democracy.

But why does it fall on companies to create an "environment" that treats people with kids the same way when in fact their circumstances are different?

During the YC/Thiel thing, I saw someone cite "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Companies have to help out because they're part of society. In exchange they get to do things like limit their liability and collectively enter into contracts.

Silicon Valley startups are apparently so powerful that they will fundamentally disrupt and reshape society, but also so fragile that having some women with kids on staff will cause total mission failure.

hyperbole

In the US. It doesn't. The Federal Government mandates every eligible employee gets 12 weeks leave to deal with certain "family" related issues:

* Taking are of yourself, your spouse, your parent, a new child

In countries like Sweden, the government mandates that parents can take up to 480 days paid leave per child.

As others have posted, for tech companies, they are doing it to remain competitive. More recently, companies like MSFT, Netflix, Facebook have started to offer paid paternity leave, as employee incentives.

Put it this way, if my company did not make concessions for parents, we would leave and find jobs else where. That would make the jobs of all employees that are left that much harder, and in all likelihood, cause the company to fail.

> "I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children, or was likely to have them soon", as an example of a morally outrageous statement. But surely people with small kids are more preoccupied?

Is there evidence that startups with female co-founders with small children fail more, less, or about average? What if that family had a nanny (like I do), or the spouse was planning on staying at home? There are women who have small children, work full time, and attend night school. If they can do that, then certainly they can start a company.

Personally, with a young baby, I much prefer the stability and predictability of an established company, to that of being a co-founder, or very early employee of a startup.

One large multinational company that I know of actually gave people bonuses for having kids, growing a multi-generational loyal employee base.

So I think one aspect of accommodating kids is the same. Not a moral thing so much as a way of attracting workers.