So if you introduce mandatory and equal leave for both parents, not only do you get happier parents, but you also don't advantage men over women for their biology.
That's all there is to it really, pretty simple and already implemented in plenty of countries.
Paternity leave is an example of society taking biological differences and the reality of bringing a child into the world (that it asks a helluva lot more of the mother than the father) and making everything more equitable.
The purpose of my comment was not to say paternity leave doesn't make any sense. It was to say that the lack of it is not an example of sexism. It's an example of men and women being different and therefore the non-egalitarian default being different for men and women. That's not sexism.
It's more economically efficient (it takes time and effort to replace the work that was being done by someone, regardless of how employers are remunerating employees) to extend that person's leave than to arrange for two separate leaves for two separate jobs when there was no necessity for the second person to take time off in the first place.
It's emergent behavior based off efficiency and the harsh realities of childbirth (i.e. men and women have very different parts to play in childbirth). It's not sexism.
> It's more economically efficient [..] to extend that person's leave than to arrange for two separate leaves
This isn't about what's economically efficient, it's about what certain societies think is well spent money.
> It's not "structurally sexism", it's biology.
And it is sexism to ignore the effects to womens careers if this is not shared.
Paternal leave is a privilege, not a right.
Not doing everything you possibly can to make everyone equal when it comes to sex is not sexism.
So what?
> Not doing everything you possibly can to make everyone equal when it comes to sex is not sexism.
If something inherent in our society - having children - causes one gender to have unequal opportunity it's sexist to be against counter-measures due to some sort of bullshit "biology" argument.
You can be not sexist without supporting every possible measure to attempt to achieve a perfectly egalitarian society.
Biological differences are not artificial.
The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that any time I say "productivity" in the rest of this comment, I mean it in the sense of doing productive work for other people, e.g. employment.
As a side-effect of childbirth, women lose productive capacity. Men do not. This is not a societal choice, it is a physiological reality. It will continue to be true up until the moment women no longer need to carry a baby around in their wombs for 9 months in order to bring new humans into the world. Note I'm just talking about pre/perinatal here, not long-term child rearing.
Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave. I agree with you that this is probably[1] a good idea. But not wanting to overcompensate for actual biological differences is not sexism. This clearly doesn't fall into sexism because it doesn't apply to all women. It only applies to women that can + want to have children. The discrimination is not based on sex, it's based on a demonstrable loss in productivity that occurs naturally and by choice.
Again, this is very much unlike the disadvantage experienced by black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, which was not a result of natural processes but rather a result of completely arbitrary bigotry and absolutely not in any way, shape, or form brought on by a choice made by black Americans.
[1] I say probably here because obviously paternity leave only applies to men who are having / have had children, so you will continue to have a similar problem (discrimination based on a loss in productivity), except now the sides are not "women having children" vs. everyone else but rather "people having children" vs. everyone else (i.e. people that don't want children). As I said though, I agree and still think this is better than the completely natural version of events, where only the woman side of the equation loses productivity, because at the end of the day in situations like these it is both the woman and the man who are choosing to bring a child into the world. And even though it is a choice to do so, it is obviously the kind of choice which we need people to make otherwise society will cease to exist, which is why I am happy to compensate for the loss in productivity due to this choice. That being said, once test-tube babies are both easy (easier/safer than natural childbirth) and normalized, I probably won't be able to countenance advantaged maternity/paternity leave (at least before the "birth" of the baby), because then it will be an entirely optional choice and you would be effectively punishing people that choose to have babies in the test-tube fashion.
You're treating a biological difference (the actual birth) of a few weeks as a valid reason for a much larger societal disadvantage.
Finally, child rearing should not be seen as a "loss of productivity" but as unpaid work, since without it, as you also noted, we would cease to exist.
The biological part is a couple of weeks, child-rearing that parental leave is a part of is for at least 12 months until daycare can take over. Fathers can and should do that as well. So in the end the amount of time away from work should be the roughly equal. So once again, if this sums up to equal portions away from work, which there is no reason not to, is there a biological argument for lower wage etc for women?
Do you also think that pregnant women get their salary deducted for their supposed loss in "productivity"?
Please let me know why this statement isn't true:
> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.
> Please let me know why this statement isn't true:
>> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.
This can be answered quite simply with: that statement is in fact true. Not sure why you feel like I should answer such a question, as I haven't implied anything like that.
> Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave.
You call men caring for the child as artificial. But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's, or do you actually think that women usually start to work again after just a couple of weeks on average?
What I noticed is the time out for having children doesn't really interrupt a woman's working career that much. Not to mention women typically work up till the 7 to 8th month of pregnancy. So what gone for six months, two years? Out of 40-45 years of working? That's a couple of percent.
But boy does the system punish them for it.
Yes, this is true. Neither the actual mother nor the actual father is required to care for the baby after delivery. Believe it or not, this is how adoption works. That is one half of the point I've been making this whole time.
But now, if you go back and read my original comment, you will see the bit about how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences. This has nothing to do with sex/sexism and "believing women should stay home and raise the kids" and everything to do with the fact that this is just the reality of replacing someone with actual responsibility. If you've never been responsible for replacing someone who quit/took leave, then this might not be obvious to you, but it takes much more time and effort to replace two people for T/2 amount of time (each) than it does to replace one person for T amount of time. Hopefully you can see how this then relates to maternity/paternity leave.
And that is the second half of the point I've been making since my original comment.
So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?
> how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences
So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard.
This is blatantly sexist also. "Well, it's easier to just extend one, and whoops, this just happens to always be the mother". The result of this strange rationalization is of course a deep skew to mothers being home and bearing the brunt of the negative effects of it.
This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable. How could you think that that is of even remotely proportional importance to the negative effects of always extending the mother's leave?
> So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?
It's still there. The question is "why is the default to give women maternity leave and not have like equal maternity and paternity leave or something?". You (and GC) are claiming this is rooted in sexism. I am claiming it is rooted in biology. Making decisions based on actual physiological differences between the sexes is not sexism. Not letting women participate in men's boxing because they'll get destroyed is not sexism, it is recognizing that there are literal biological/physiological differences between the sexes.
> So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard...
What argument? My only argument is that this is not sexist. In order for something to be sexist, you need to be discriminating based on sex. Discriminating based on time lost is not sexism. "Small" differences have outsized effects when compounded across millions of people. Sure, if you take a single instance of this and look at it it doesn't seem like much. Unfortuntately though, we're talking about society-wide effects here. We're talking about why a society as a whole has adopted certain norms, not why an individual manager might do something. And honestly you're underestimating how much of a pain it can be to temporarily (that's how leave works) replace a valuable team member. You can't just actually replace them because they'll be coming back eventually. Do you hire and train up a new person only to fire them after the leave? Or keep them on when the other returns, so now you have two people when previously you only needed one? Or do you try your best to foist their work onto existing team members even though hopefully the entire reason that employee existed in the first place was because their work could not be easily handled by others. It's not easy.
> This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable
Well, yes, exactly? Replacing two different people in two different workplaces with different managers is more of a hassle than if it was one manager and one team replacing two people. Thanks for helping make my point for me.
If you perpetuate, support, or defend a system that knowingly creates an unequal outcome depending on the persons sex, you're a sexist. This isn't something that's undetermined, it's a fact. We know that if there's only leave for the mother, the mother is disadvantaged in the work place.
To take it really slow:
* Two people get a child, mother and father.
* The mother needs a couple of weeks after child birth to recuperate.
* The mother can take additional leave beyond that, the father can't take any leave at all.
* Whoops! Who's gonna work and who's gonna take care of the child now?!
This is a sexist system since it blatantly throws the responsibility of child-rearing on to the mother. Not granting fathers parental leave REQUIRES mothers to do it. And the only way this is accepted and seen as a default is because of traditional, sexist, gender roles where the mother is assumed to do the child-rearing.
The whole "it's more administration!" argument is just so pathetic that I won't bother commenting on it any more. Not even the most right-wing nut here in Sweden would try to argue that the administrative overhead is a significant problem. You also just skipped the actual point in my last paragraph - the question about proportionality.
Practically no women ever will make it through the entirety of a pregnancy without needing (not choosing) to take some time off work if she works a full-time job. Even if this is just a single day of delivery.
Generally though, it's much more than a single day that needs to be taken off. In contrast, at no point in a woman's pregnancy does the father need to take time off.
There is nothing sexist about this. It is more efficient to extend one person's required time off than it is to give two separate people time off. An extended maternity leave generally means that one company needs to find one replacement or otherwise shuffle work. Maternity + paternity leave means you need to do that, 2x.
I fully support longer paternity leaves because I do think it is important for having equality in the workplace. But the idea that it's society that is sexist in this regard is ridiculous.
Honestly I don't think we will really have equality until babies are grown in test tubes, and that's not society's fault.