A great example of why not just maternity leave (per the link) but parental leave broadly is a good idea. And why both parents need to take it. Otherwise it will be used by some as an excuse to discriminate against birth parents.

Of course there are many other benefits to both parents taking leave, including that studies have shown that non birth parents who take leave tend to be more involved in parenting long term. Also, it’s hugely rewarding emotionally!

> And why both parents need to take it

I think this is key to addressing discrimination (simply making discrimination illegal is insufficient because discrimination is so difficult to prove); however, getting both genders to take it in roughly equal proportion is probably nearly as difficult, at least apart from mandatory leave, which would be authoritarian and awful.

EDIT: Genuinely curious: why the downvotes? Do people not believe that taking leave in equal proportions is necessary to combat discrimination? Or do they think that it is easy to make people do this ethically? Surely no one thinks we should force people to take leave against their will?

You don’t support forcing men to take paternity leave. Many people do. That’s why you’re being downvoted.

People support _forcing_ parents to take {ma,pa}ternity leave? I am skeptical, as this is a position I have never ever heard of before.

As a parent, I can see why one could advocate for equal (+generous) paid parental leave (disclaimer: I support that idea), but I've never heard (nor would I understand) the idea that one should be forced to _take_ such leave.

In Sweden, neither parent is forced to take paternal leave, but they both get 90 days of paid paternal leave each (at 80% of their usual salary) that they either use or lose. The remaining 210 days of paid parental leave can be split between them however they like.

That's 210 calender days, not "work" days, so the compensation comes to 80% if you use the leave 7 days per week. Since daycare don't normally accept children under the age of 1 here, it's pretty common to try to strech the leave by taking 5 days a week, so the compensation is more like 60% of normal pay if you do that.

If you’ve just given birth do you want women like Sheryl Sandberg to be allowed, who take three days or a week off and then are back at the office? Or do you want everyone to compete on a more level playing field, where everyone must take three months off? Because those for whom family comes second to work will get promoted faster anyway but if you let them work even more the advantages just compound.

For an example of the Harrison Bergeron attitude see

https://twitter.com/hoovergreen/status/1258070856745529344?s...

https://twitter.com/r_rusha/status/1258496895824957440?s=21

https://twitter.com/extendedhuckel/status/125806546195191808...

https://twitter.com/kmpjones/status/1258214473757794305?s=21

I want people to be free to make the tradeoffs that they prefer. If someone wants to choose family over work, they should be free to do so (that doesn't mean that they should get the same rewards as the person who prioritizes work over family). Similarly, those who prioritize family over work should be free to do so.

It is an awful injustice to restrict someone's individual freedoms on the basis of their gender (and no, it's no consolation that it's in service of some arbitrary desire to prevent differences in distributions for some trait between the genders).

this works both ways. if a couple is expecting a child but can't afford to take time off for childbirth, is it freedom or justice?

I don’t understand. Optional parental leave would allow both parents to take work off. We’re debating whether or not parents (specifically fathers) should be forced against their will to take time off in order to satisfy an arbitrary desire to unify the distributions of work experience between men and women. In this debate, there is no dichotomy between freedom and justice; taking away one’s individual rights in the basis of gender is injustice—it’s neither freedom nor justice.

if it's optional, employers can and will make the median worked not take it - again, i know people who were told that they better not take the optional leave or it'll make further business difficult.

This is false, and we know it's false because in every country with optional maternity leave, more than 50% of women take their leave. Even in the US which lacks legal requirements for employers to offer paid maternity leave, over 70% of women took maternity leave--presumably the remaining 30% is largely a subset of the 33% of women who were not offered paid maternity leave. That you know people who were pressured into foregoing their leave is anecdotal.

[0]: https://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa11/hstat/hsrmh/downloads/pdf/233m...

Somewhat off topic, but yikes, is this what using Twitter is like? Letting anyone from a global audience see your posts seems optimized towards fight picking.

> And why both parents need to take it.

Sweden does that to a degree. Since 2016 both parents get 90 days each (it was 60 days each before then) that they either use or lose, and the remaining 210 days can be split between the parents however they like.

As of 2018, it seems like men used 29.3% of the of the parental leave days so it's not equal in terms of use yet.

I should note that the pay is 80% (up to a maximum) of your normal pay. So from a financial standpoint, it makes sense for the parent with the lower income to use the parental leave days.

what if this biases employers against hiring procreative couples?

Asking about plans to have a family or relationship status is already illegal in the US, isn't it?

The United States is also a country famous for its lax enforcement of labor laws.

Sure, but there are pretty reliable proxies, such as age.

The chance of employers stopping hiring from the 20-35 year old age group is... slim.

might bring about reverse ageism and balance things a bit

then I think we should ask them where they think their next batch of interns comes from

Visa's ofcourse

Which is why maternity leave without similar paternity leave is a bad idea.

But apparently whoever wrote this article didn't think things through that far.

I'm all for paid paternity leave, but I've also heard that it does relatively little because men are much less likely to use it, and when they use it they use less of it.

Some countries have had good results from making it mandatory.

I am not aware of any country that has mandatory paternity leave. Do you have an example of this?

I wonder if the grandparent meant "non-transferable" -- some countrirs have a shared pot (and then women often take all the pot), other countries enforce some amount of the pot to each parent. You do not have to take it as the man, but you lose it if you don't.

Are there countries that force people to take leave with their children?

Yes it happens. But why punish 100% of potential beneficiaries for what maybe 1-5% of them might do. Just include the cost of abuse in the projections and deal with it. That's how every system works. Every system gets abused.

One example: credit cards - there's plenty of fraud there, but we somehow manage to deal with it and make the system work regardless.

There is no abuse involved. You employ a young woman, and in a year she gives birth and is out for a year or two. Nothing wrong with that, and many businesses with large employee turnover won’t care, but other businesses, especially small ones, which require significant training for company-specific processes, or which have small pool of candidates, will be very unhappy about the fact that now they have to find and train a temporary replacement.

We already have a very similar situation with respect to hiring military reservists. It seems like we could use that data to see if there's really a big enough problem to worry about.

Anecdotally, I've never met someone in the reserves who had a hard time finding a job.

Do the military reservists have to disclose to potential employers that they are reservists? How often the reservists actually called for service? This is an interesting point, and I'm asking because I have no clue about the realities the military reservists face.

There's no requirement to disclose during an interview, but most people I know depended on their time in the reserves/active duty pretty heavily on their resume, so I'd guess it was pretty rare for an employer to not know or at least suspect.

Also they have have leave to train for 2 weeks per year, so the employer would need to know at some point.

As for chances of being deployed, in the last decade it was probably a good bit higher than the chance that a reproductive age woman gets pregnant for a given time period.

They can also end up deployed for longer than most countries paid maternity leave lasts.

And I take it that when they are deployed, their employers are in some way required to guarantee them employment when they return?

That is correct.

> But why punish 100% of potential beneficiaries for what maybe 1-5% of them might do.

Because employers, at least in the USA, believe they have a right to nearly of their employees' time on or off the clock, and a right to exert some control over their employees' personal lives and even political choices. Enjoyment of this control is part of why people become employers or managers.

Exactly.. really hate the attitude of "oh well someone might abuse it so let's just screw everyone instead"

A useful equalizer is to give paternal leave as well.

Not surprising that a woman of childbearing age turns up pregnant is it?

What is the barbaric alternative?

Personal Responsibility... That is barbaric these days