It would hurt me atleast. If I knew I would face a such situation I will rather take up some other profession.
My boss is a woman who was my peer in school and has children now. She is one of the best techies I have ever worked with and I love having her aboard.
The problem with such systems is that it is difficult to assess someone's ability to perform a job objectively. So the systems are design around measurable facts (ie. years of experience, education), biased towards promoting from withing, with the final selection being made by rolling the dice using tools like job interviews that are at best randomizers.
Humans aren't "resources" -- they are people. But we try to treat them like commodity goods, and in the process create some crappy situations for many people.
I would love it if things worked this way. But I told someone I could get coding in C# in a week, and probably be quite comfortable in a few months, and they sent me a polite rejection letter saying they were "impressed with my confidence" but there were many highly qualified candidates, etc. But then, that's probably the only advertised tech job I pursued that I didn't land an offer for.
I think paid sabbaticals have positive ROI too. Number crunchers don't think in those terms though.
It's a pity that when I read your good comments and the one above it, both had been downvoted into the grey. Many newcomers here at HN don't seem to understand that downvoting here is not meant to indicate that one doesn't like an opinion, it's supposed to be for comments that are abusive, obviously trolling, or that contribute nothing.
I propose an improvement to the downvoting API: One can downvote all they want, but each downvote will cost 1 karma/reputation point. That way, people with much good reputation can as needed mark abusive posts. But the newcomers will think more carefully about marking down posts they simply don't agree with since it can plunge them into negative.
If you are hiring based on candidates winning resume buzzword bingo, you are going to get crappy candidates anyway. Hire for intelligence and capability and five years off to have a couple of kids is meaningless.