IMO this unintended consequence isn’t often discussed. IIRC it’s also an issue in France, where because it’s nearly impossible to fire someone, you’ll basically never hire full time employees if you can avoid it, especially if they’re young and unproven.

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 positions (CFO, specialists included).

I heavily disagree here. There are plenty of jobs that basically work because of the unique set of skills that a person brings to the table. It might be possible to manage with other people filling in, but it's often not the same.

>There is a tacit understanding that you might have to pick up the slack a bit for someone else, but one day you might need the same in return - borrowing against the future is another way to think about it.

Except for the people that won't get this benefit, because they won't or can't have kids.

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"

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. If I am hiring a cleaning lady or social media specialist then I won't have problems because I will easily find the replacement on the market and they can be productive from day one. If you think it's immoral, think again. I have responsibilities towards my family to provide for them. I won't take risk which can ruin my source of income for the sake of someone's children. What is immoral is forcing employers to cover that risk.

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 professionals to interns still in school, I find it extremely hard to imagine a small business that is such a special snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost". I could get interns to be productive in a day or two. In many fields of work, such as early education, there are standardized accreditations so an employer can basically just pick and choose from a pool of qualified individuals who will be ready-to-work on day 1.

As the other poster said, standard fare in parental leaves is to hire a contractor for a 1 year contract. By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual. A more realistic scenario is your business grew by some amount that now allows you to hire the temp person full time.

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 snowflake that "getting a new employee to the stage where they contribute value is a huge cost".

Well, everyone else doesn't get to always run wildly successful small businesses. Most small businesses fail. I imagine that if you yank out a significant portion of their workforce that they'll be even more likely to fail.

>By the end of the year, worst case is your business grew 0%, you get your full-time employee back and it's business as usual.

Aka your small business shuts its doors, because the market has moved on and you couldn't keep up. Half the businesses fail within the first 5 years. Only a third of businesses survive 10 years.

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)

>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.

Let's take an extreme case: a 1 person business. If I, the business owner, take parental leave then my business is pretty much guaranteed to fail. The rate gets lower the more employees and capital you have, because you can mitigate the risk, but many businesses are susceptible to this risk, because they simply don't have the resources to mitigate it. That doesn't really tell you much about the viability of the business. It says much more about the resources the business had available. Not everyone is born with a silver spoon in their mouth.

That's exactly the point: none of the serious risk factors are strongly correlated with gender. (And you're forgetting the argument that young men are slightly more likely to be able to find another competitive job than young women because people like you are more willing to hire them, therefore men are at slightly higher risk of leaving.)

If you want to construct an argument in the service of the conclusion "I don't want to hire young women" you certainly can, but please admit that's what you're doing.

Let's be honest, anyone can come up with ridiculous hypothetical situations where "obviously" parental leave is the only evil in the world and must be banished. But at the end of the day, they're just that: hypotheticals with no basis in reality. I've seen businesses succeed and fail and I've seen parental leaves in these businesses. Parental leaves are simply not as deciding of a factor as one might like to fantasize, and anyone who wants to argue against them might want to look at the silver spoons in their own mouths before casting stones at others.

Typically you get like 3-6 months notice on a parental leave, so you've got plenty of time to find a contractor/consultant, compared to the standard 2 week notice from the much more likely scenario of your expert quitting for greener pastures. If you have such high risk riding on a single employee, you're probably the one to blame: why aren't _you_ (or an equity partner) the expert? Do you not have anything else whatsoever that could be done in the meantime if core development halted/slowed for 6 months? Do you realize an ffmpeg expert can earn twice as much just about anywhere other than your yet-to-be-profitable startup and gets recruiter spam from big tech companies on linkedin every month? Can you even afford benefits and severance for a full time employee in the first place? etc.

Blaming a hypothetical business failure on a parental leave is really just finding a scapegoat for one's inability to take responsibility for their own failings.

Being in a tech hotspot is irrelevant. I've worked remotely for people in Boulder with a coworker living in Vermont. Again, if you want to run a high tech business from rural Wisconsin with no remote workers, that's on you, and has nothing to do with parental leaves.

I don't know anything about ffmpeg and I am confident I can not only learn it but train someone in it in two months. Bad employers hire people for their current skills, and are caught unprepared when people leave for any reason (including realizing they're a bad employer). Good employers hire people with the expectation of training them and letting them grow into new roles. Bad employers rely on the brains of individuals. Good employers document their processes, enforce knowledge-sharing procedures (code reviews and runbooks and support rotations, in tech), and otherwise proactively mitigate business risk.

Imagine you had that same company and your expert was hit by a bus and instantly killed. Don't run your business with a single point of failure.

How is that different than that person getting hired by Google half way through? Other than the fact that with parental leave you generally get 4-6 month warning that it's coming and with someone change jobs you might not even get 4-6 weeks. Also at least in my experience people on parental leave will answer the phone/email if its important.

Presumably the female custodians and admins just get purged.

We had our first child at 32. (I took 5 months off as a director level manager when my wife went back to work.) When is a woman deemed safely in old maid status and ok to hire?

When I was in this position as a principal, our biggest threat was good junior tech staff being snatched up by big companies or being lured into a government gig with a great pension plan.

I get the risk/concern, but the Mad Men era attitude projects risk. As a guy, it would give me pause about working for the firm. On top of everything else, you’re missing out on fantastic talent.

Most small companies do not actually worry about growth, they worry about staying in business and small things matter.

That's one thing that I think is missing in many argument about business policy. Many times someone says, with this policy passed, my business will be less productive and might even fail. And we're too scared to say out loud that that's a good thing.

Markets works best when there is accurate and open communication of information, and it's generally very difficult to know how a prospective employer really approaches technical debt (or the equivalent for other disciplines) and business risk. I want to work for the company that's willing to confront past mistakes and not drowning in them, and, if possible, the company that made fewer past mistakes in the first place. This company is also more likely to be successful at delivering the very benefits for which society recognizes companies at all (producing goods and services, creating reliable jobs, advancing the state of knowledge, etc.). So, all other things being equal, it's in society's interest for me to find this company accurately, and with a limited labor pool it is almost certainly in society's interest for there to just be one competent company tackling a problem than two companies, one of which is incompetent.

1. The failure is greater and more impactful if it can't be held off forever. It's a lot better for society for fifty people to be laid off than a thousand. (It's probably better for those fifty people, too: their friends are less likely to be laid off and can provide immediate support, there are probably more open jobs, there's only fifty people competing for them and not a thousand, there's less loss of confidence in the industry, etc.) So failing fast is important. Ideally, you'd fail fast enough that the incompetent founding team loses their jobs and nobody else does.

2. There's usually a limited market / mind share for businesses, and it is hard for new businesses to get traction. The demand for, say, fast food within a given town is fairly fixed - advertising can make more or fewer people interested in it, but certainly there won't ever be more demand than three meals per day per person, and probably it will never get even close to that. So there's a limited labor market for fast food makers in that town. If there's an incompetent company employing a hundred people, and we prop up those jobs, we're likely preventing a more competent company from starting which could hire those same people and provide them with stabler and possibly higher-paying jobs. Worse, if the incompetent company is insolvent because they made bad pricing decisions, that company is probably out-competing other companies with more stable financial situations and preventing them from gaining traction.

So, if you don't want thousands of people to be laid off, it's good for incompetent businesses to fail as quickly as possible.

(The TSA and the military are government organizations, not companies, so the analysis is pretty different. Providing jobs to people for the sake of providing jobs is not a bad thing for government to do; providing that money without making them work is an even better thing for government to do.)

So if you are in SV and have 1 essential developer then prepare for him to leave he/ she would do it sooner then later.

(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 country by investing in the foundations of the future of your country.)

MAGIC

And yet, there they are ... still having small businesses, and consulting shops, and all manner of people continuing operations in the face of such start conditions ;)

edit: Holy crap, I hadn't even finished reading your comment

> 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.

wat ... this is just ... this is a terrible thought process and ideology.

The answer to this in my opinion is a job-market with less job-security regulation (so that "getting new workers up to speed" will be the norm not the exception for companies) coupled with a tighter social security net (maternity leave paid for by the government) and of course a right-to-return (although, if "getting up to speed" is the norm, it might not be needed anyways).

This is precisely one of the cultural obstacles to correct. Dropping in a 1 year policy without substantial organizational preparation and planning is -- surprise -- doomed to fail. Like every single other aspect of organizational planning.

The problem in the US is we simply do not value these kinds of things. We value individuality foremost and I believe its among the top reasons parental leave is incomprehensible to many people.

At some point, as a society we set a minimum bar on what kind of successful businesses we want to employ people. What that minimum bar is can be debated, but "more businesses will fail" is not exactly a straightforward indicator of the value of a regulation.

Plus, certain types of labor laws, particularly those around leave, only apply to businesses above a certain size.

Uh... that's not valuing the individual (or individuality, the ability to make choices freely for one's self). The lack of paid parental leave adds an outside a government mandated influence to the decision of whether to have children or not.

Unless... you're talking about the individual rights of the corporation to not have to pay parental leave, through some twisted extension of citizen's united. As a society it benefits us to encourage people to have children, so making the process even more difficult is a bit silly.

I've been thinking that it might be an interesting experiment to apply some of the restrictions that we have only to corporations, but allow more leeway to individuals. So e.g. if you're a sole proprietor, you can arbitrarily discriminate in employment or service (it's your personal freedom of association), but if you register as an LLC, then that comes with the usual strings attached (since an artificial entity doesn't have proper personhood and any rights associated with that).

I suspect most businesses, even small, would still be LLCs.

My parental leave entitlement has been the same since my first job after graduation at 22.

You have made about 23 comments in this discussion, many regarding "your country", but you haven't stated it once. You've then generalised across all of the EU based on the one country.

I have to disagree: If a cultural obstacle at all, to me it's rather labeling civilizational accomplishments like ownership or property rights as a "cultural obstacle".

> We value individuality foremost and I believe its among the top reasons parental leave is incomprehensible to many people

While I can't speak for the US, in Germany we have a pretty generous m/p/x-aterinty leave system. But still only a few fathers take advantage of it. Certainly it's not because of culture (it's not the 1950s anymore). It might be just the plain truth that it is deeper ingrained in us.

Another big factor is the high increase of bachelor degrees. 40% of our high-school students [1] go to college [2], of which 3 out of 4 finish. By the time they finish they are in their mid-twenties and depending on what they've studied [3] will add another two years for a masters degree. In effect you'll get women who enter the job market 10 years later than their mothers did. So when the biological clock ticks louder they are often faced with a dilemma: Either less kids than originally wished for, or give up your first career years in exchange for fitting as much child-bearing in them as possible.

Again, I don't see how individualism is at the epicenter here. Instead I'd take a good look at lack of intelligent regulation (nudging), medicine and misguided education policy.

[1] & [2] since educational systems are complex to translate, I just went with the most aproximate US counterpart

[3] mostly because the job prospects in a given field are non-existent with 'just' a bachelor's degree

It’s precisely because of culture. “Plain truth” is a bit of a sham.

I work for a 15-person company and we had a developer take a year off. We hired a temp developer who left when the other dev came back.

Not sure why this is hard to understand?

I respect people who want to run very small businesses, but we can't realistically make policy for them if we want to guarantee some basic welfare and labour protection.

Small businesses are often so unprofitable, have so little savings, and are so exposed to risk (as in this pregnancy case), that you realistically need to scrap so much protection just to accommodate them.

So the answer to the question of how to combine very small business and paternal leave is quite simple, you really can't. It's a policy that favours middle-sized and large businesses who generate more profit, suffer less from a few workers dropping out, and can organise these benefits.

And why not do so for them specifically? If you still have protections apply to larger companies, then it becomes a matter of choice for employees to choose small or large. But if you apply to everybody, and it kills small businesses, you're strictly worse off - if you can't land a job at one of those larger places, you're outright unemployed.

And also there's a big ethical question here if you create an excemption for small business, because you create a two class workforce where parents in small companies lack what is arguably a very fundamental right.

So I guess it is a complicated issue, but on the specific matter on paternal leave I would argue that a universal protection at the cost of small business activity is preferable. Every parents should have the same rights when it comes to child care.

The way I see this, the fundamental right here is to have paid parental leave in general, not a right to have it at any particular workplace specifically. Thus, so long as those who need it can get a job that offers it, I don't see any pragmatic reason to require all businesses to do so. So long as it's clear in advance - so people who e.g. don't plan on having children can go seek employment with small businesses. It's not an insignificant part of the population, so why remove an option for them?

There is incentive to re-hire anyway if you have open positions as you get someone already familiar with the work. Forcing employers to do so is a problem for smaller companies having many non-duplicated positions though.

My friend is a lawyer and works for a small, but somewhat successful canadian firm (which I will not name for obvious reasons).

His boss had hired 4 women in a row.

3 of them went on maternity leave within a short amount of time. 2 out of 3 didn't even bother coming back. The other one came back and quit shortly after.

All the files got dumped on my friend and the boss had to hire 3 new lawyers, had them all go through training and learning the logistics of how the office runs (first as a temp, and then once again as full time employees).

So basically a total of 6 staff rotation within a years time.

Needless to say this was a major nightmare.

My friend told me his boss rather let slip that he will think twice before bringing women onboard..

I was obviously shocked to hear these as I myself am strongly against discrimination but I can't help but to at least sympathise with his boss to a certain degree.

So, OTOH, is a sex discrimination lawsuit, especially when you are blatantly guilty.

Also, most Western jurisdictions with paid or even unpaid but job-protected parental leave policies apply them without limitation by gender.

And these days, youth is not essentially to being a parent (even a natural parent, but parental leave policies usually apply to adoptive parents as well.)

Yeah, lawsuit or my children not being able to afford college. Oh the choices... I think I am taking the lawsuit, especially that it will be very hard to prove anything with just one employee.

>>Also, most Western jurisdictions with paid or even unpaid but job-protected parental leave policies apply them without limitation by gender.

Maybe in theory, if you looks at statistics of what actually happens in most European countries you will see that women take much longer leaves and often several months medicals during pregnancy as well. I mean I live in one and my male friends usually take at most several days while women usually take close to a year if you count medical leave during pregnancy. I know exactly one couple who split the leave equally. It worked for them but it's definitely not usually happens.

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.

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.

I don't think he (or she!) is saying that the consequence is low, just that the risk of suffering that consequence is low enough to outweigh it.

Which means I don't have high confidence in the risk assessment in the first place, but thankfully it's not my business :)

Does your employee Ski? Because ACL tears are damn common, and medical leave for an ACL tear is up to 3 months.

[1] (which if you're really not in the US should be free anyway)

As long as your real life identity isn't linkable to this comment, that is.

Run your business better. If an employee leaving—something that can already happen at any time due to causes outwith your control—means your children can’t go to college, then your chances of failure are already sky high.

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.

You imagine a level of control that you simply don't have.

Conversely, there is a net benefit to society that simply cannot be ignored. It's life.

Except that he probably cannot (for example) ask the applicant if they are likely to have kids or use the leave policy in the near future. That would be judging them on an individual basis, but in many jurisdictions it's prohibited.

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.

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...

We're still talking about programmers, right? Because it is way easier to hire a part-time contract programmer, than it is to hire a full-time programmer. If anything, the best devs are often already freelancing/consulting anyway, and would prefer you hire them this way.

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.

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.

Umm, all other moral and ethical considerations aside, this approach fails spectacularly when the young man takes paternity leave instead :-D

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 job back after the leave) they will not take decisions that destroy this business. Some laws will also vary depending on company size, though parental leave is just such an obvious fundamental need and right that I am not aware of a country where it does.

You might not think of yourself as immoral, but your post is definitely sexist, and I find the viewpoint you take towards your potential employers deeply unethical. Because people like you sometimes end up with power we need democratic states to fight back and keep a sense of perspective.

[1] "New parents in Sweden are entitled to 480 days of leave at 80% of their normal pay. That’s on top of the 18 weeks reserved just for mothers, after which the parents can split up the time however they choose. Swedish dads also get 90 paid paternity days reserved just for them. Out of these 480 days, 60 must be taken by the father or else all are lost. This leave can be taken by the month, week, day or even by the hour."

So fathers are forced to take more paternal leave in Sweden than mothers get in the US.

https://www.dailyscandinavian.com/parental-leave-working-sca...

I just want incentives to be aligned in a way that it doesn't make sense to make sexist decisions when hiring and it doesn't encourage women to postpone motherhood because of how benefits are set.

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)

In Sweden parents get 480 in total together, of which 390 are at 80% (capped at 989 SEK = 138 USD / day), and 90 days are at a minimum level (180 SEK = 25 USD). Out of the 480 days, 90 are reserved to each parent (used to be 60 before 2016) and the non-pregnant parent (usually a father) gets extra 10 days at the birth.

Men can get parental leave in European countries, so in this case your strategy is not working.

Depends on the country. In mine women get much more time and men usually take none or just a few weeks at most. I think that's the case in most countries.

The employer doesn't pay you a dime. First twelve months you get approx. 60% of your current income from the government (BTW the same coverage people get when unemployed). You can expand those twelve months into 24, halving the amount of what you're paid. You can also apply for additional support (e.g. there's a fixed amount per kid you'll get until it reaches adulthood).

From the feedback I've gotten so far 3 years sounds bizarre to most people outside of Germany. It certainly sounds like something guaranteeing a manifestation of gender-pay-gap. But it is in my experience actually the women here, who mostly want those 3 years. And equally bizarre: how shocked many are to hear how fast mothers return to their jobs in say France or Switzerland.

Germany 1.41

France 1.98

Luxembourg 1.78

Denmark 1.74

Netherlands 1.66

Switzerland 1.44

Austria 1.38

Poland 1.27

Birth rates drop as prosperity increases and people feel less need to have children (some rejecting children entirely), and Germany is one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

Other than that you're right.

One thing I keep hearing that actually worked better in Eastern Germany were the government funded expenses to make sure, women stayed financially independent from the father (and family), if need be (as indicated by the fact that Eastern German women that experienced the GDR are usually immune to today's extreme forms of feminism).

One thing in particular was that in the GDR day-nursery coverage was at 80%, in cities at 100% and they were completely free (except for the food). FR was higher than in Western Germany during the whole time GDR existed.

Note: This is not an endorsement of high government spending or communism. The US trumps all of Europe with their FR while having assumably a far looser social security net [1]. In GDR there also wasn't much choice for where to put your kids and the methods of caring for them were certainly blind to trends like "montessori" etc.

I guess, much of FR is due to economic predictability and less to the height of income you predict.

[1] For now, since US FR is declining, against the trend in Europe. Also of interest: How much of that rate (US or EU) is inflated by migrants?

The law does not discriminate by the parent gender, so if the man decides to stay at home with the child is fine.

Including in the part of “Europe” south of Canada and north of Mexico; federally, it's up to 12 weeks of job-protected unpaid leave under FMLA, but some states have more and/or paid leave.

Excluding half the population from that search will absolutely ensure that you don't get unlucky hiring a man who, develop schizophrenia (symptoms occur typically in younger males), runs off with your IP, decides he doesn't want to stick the long hours, his wife/girlfriend has a child and he wants a more stable position, can't stand your attitude, or all the other reasons that make people, male and female leave small companies run by people who make bad decisions. In the grand scheme of things that can go horribly wrong for startup companies, female pregnancy is actually the least of your worries.

They are expensive :)

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").

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.

IANAL but my understanding is this is very illegal in the US. Personally I think this is also terrible reasoning; there are many un-gendered life events that people will go on leave for.

If you’re involved in hiring decisions in pretty much any western country you’ve just opened yourself to potential lawsuits.

Not everyone wants or will have children.

It is unfortunate that we have, as a collection of societies, largely forgotten that the fictitious entity that is your company exists at and only at the sufferance of the society that decides it's a good idea to let it exist--and that we-the-society can demand that you play ball with the society that grants you your charter.

"Many that live, deserve death. Some that die, deserve life. Can you give that to them?"

I guess the question for small business owners to help answer: what laws would make this work? Gender-neutral parental leave seems to be the best (least-worst?) option that governments have been able to implement so far.

You've just created far more financial risk for your company by doing this.

It's flat out illegal, and if you're caught doing this the punishment will probably bankrupt your company.

Further, it's disgusting and any small business owner that does this deserves to have their business destroyed.

For one thing, the harsh reactions keep the people you're regulating from even being able to let you know how hard it is on them.

You should be less quick to make assumptions.

I am the owner of a small business with a handful of employees. I am the that bears the cost of such policies.

>She is openly racist and sexist so good riddance

> I think it's very reasonable to be against Islam because of its stance on gay rights, women rights

And here you are being sexist and ignoring the right of women to not be discriminated against because of their gender.

How do you reconcile these positions inside your own head?

And being sexist when hiring is saying they're a worse employee and don't deserve the same rights.

I understand.

Your admission of sexism leads me to believe that your family consists of male children. If you had a daughter perhaps you would realise that "not giving a job to a young woman because she may decide to get pregnant" is pretty much the worst reason to refuse someone employment, regardless of the law, you are happy to discriminate against a person just because of their genitalia. That's a sad state of affairs for you, your company and your family.

It doesn't really work that well. Young women face blatant discrimination in hiring and small employers and sadly it's for good reasons as here a lot of women go on medical 2months into pregnancy and then take the full leave.

>>. If you had a daughter perhaps you would realise that "not giving a job to a young woman because she may decide to get pregnant" is pretty much the worst reason to refuse someone employment, regardless of the law, you are happy to discriminate against a person just because of their genitalia. That's a sad state of affairs for you, your company and your family.

I hear your moral outrage but I put well-being of my family first. I prefer to be sexists if my children don't need to worry about food and good school than being gender neutral and worrying about how I am going to pay for a good school or for the treatment if they get sick.

It's because they have a much stronger safety net. If your children get sick or if they need to go to college, it is significantly cheaper and less stressful.

It's a shame that your thoughts seem to be mirred in sexism though since you fear women having kids and ruining your business by taking time off.

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 of maternity/paternity leave laws entirely? Make it fair by not letting anyone have parental leave?

Obviously. But doing this imposes costs on the organization. Those costs scale (possibly non-linearly) with length of leave. The question we have to ask is, what is the amount of time off that balances the interests of the company, the economy, and the parents optimally? The Gates foundation is saying 1 year does not strike a good balance for them, because the organizational costs are simply too high. That's what being said here.

I guess...