"don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?" --> "Don't hire people during their most economically productive ages."

Not an economically viable strategy for any company looking to stay in business more than a year or two.

Surely whether it's "their most economically productive age" would depend heavily on how many children they have and how much parental leave they are allowed.

We know that people in most developed countries aren't even hitting replacement rate, so I don't think that 6 months of leave is going to break the bank.

In my experience, employees who are bad employees and blame it on time commitment to their children have usually been bad employees to begin with. I have a child, spend upwards of 4 hours a day with them on average, and work at a FAANG, while hitting promotion tracks more quickly than my colleagues without children. I know a bunch of people doing the same.

Ah, so "don't hire people who are planning to have multiple children at the peak of their potential economic productivity"?

> Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?

Not for a good company. I've had several employees go on maternity and paternity leave. I've given them respect, and time, and money, in order to make this time of their lives as unstressful as possible.

I've done it because it's the right thing, but these people remember being treated well. They've come back to work and done very well. They feel safer knowing that their day job explicitly supports their families.

The time someone needs off work to care for a new family is a drop in the bucket compared with a whole career, or even a few good years spent at one company. Optimize for the humans, and for the long term.

So you had good people that you wanted to get back? Great. A lot of us employ people who are just average and cannot afford to pay them multiple thousands while they are on leave, paying someone else to cover them, and then they could always decide to leave anyway.

If you can't afford an employee going on paternity/maternity leave, you have an unsustainable business.

Or you have a small business. Not every company is a 10,000 headcount multinational. Over 90% of small business employ fewer than 20 people and small businesses make up 30% of the economy.

Realistically, 1 person missing from a small business can mean 10% of their workforce is gone - and due to the size of the company they may not have people to cover the missing staff.

If small businesses in general can't afford an employee going on [mp]aternity leave, that seems like an argument for socializing the cost.

You don't need to have 10,000 people working for you to be able to afford to hire cover for when people going on parental leave.

10 people or 10,000 people, if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick / vacation, you don't have a sustainable business.

> if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick, you don't have a sustainable business

You've never run a startup or small business. At the beginning margins can be razor thin, and unplanned or extended leave can have a huge impact.

There's plenty of small business owners who are perfectly capable of managing the risk of losing staff for whatever reason without it sinking the company. Many business run at a big loss when starting up, never mind razor thin margins. The ones that survive manage their investors, debts, cashflow and staff risk properly.

If you run a business on the assumption that you're going to have all your current employees working for you continuously for the foreseeable future, you're going to have a bad time.

Parental leave shouldn't be unplanned though, there should be several months of notice surely

The company doesn't pay employees while they are on leave, social security (or some equivalent) does.

It would at least least disperse the risk from "don't hire women of a certain age" to "don't hire people of a certain age" which I think is a win on the margin.

* Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?*

No. The only real way to avoid this is to just not hire folks who can birth or father children. You'd be mostly safe hiring folks over 45 (Though men over 45 would be more risky than women). This probably isn't a good strategy for an employer.

Marriage doesn't lend itself to children: Having sex does. Having a stable relationship does. Adoption does. On the other hand, lots of married folks don't have children, on purpose or by circumstance. There is no real way to sort folks out.