>a higher chance that a young woman will carry a baby than having a young man change for a better paying offer? //

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...

If someone leaves I can find a replacement and hope they don't leave. If a women has a baby then I will either need to hire a temp which is more difficult than to hire for full time position or suddenly have 2 positions open (I need to have that when my first employee comes back). For a small few people company having 2 positions open instead of one is often unreasonable cost.

> I will either need to hire a temp which is more difficult than to hire for full time position

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.

I had to hire a temp for a one year maternity leave replacement. It wasn't particularly difficult and the person I hired didn't want a longer contract and she is great. In fact, I kept her on as-needed contract basis after. She will be helping me smooth other the transition of another employee who just left for a better paying job.

If, in a year, you don't have room to grow your staff by 1, haven't you already failed?

Canada also has paternity leave; and parents can split the leave in any number of different ways as long as it adds up to a year. And yes, men do take advantage of that benefit as well.