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.