Maternity leave means that women effectively cost more than men for the same amount of work, in the long run and on average. This can be mitigated by laws, but cannot be eliminated without addressing the underlying social issues. And no, mandatory paternity leave doesn't eliminate it, as there are more single mothers than single fathers.

The logic is simple. Companies survive by making a profit. In order to do so, they attempt to cut costs for a given amount of work done. Currently, females on average end up spending more time on paid leave. Hence, there ends up being a bias.

And I'm not sure if it is one that can be fixed through legislation. Attempts in that vein tend to be counterproductive at best. It's more of a social issue.

And temps generally are worse productivity-wise than an experienced worker.

Or of a secretary / office assistant / whatever they're called these days (the person who's job is to make life easier for other people, so that said other people can get more of their own work done)?

If it was possible to objectively measure productivity, there wouldn't be any of these huge arguments about pay fairness.

You assume that, innate talents being equal, women are equal to men in terms of productivity. I mean, this is the stated intention of the Feminist movement in a nutshell, yes?

And then you take a look at the other stats (as I mentioned, females take more leave. And females are more likely to have a child and stop working [1]. And there are the liability issues, ironically caused by the Feminist movement.)

And so - equal productivity, but less hours for the amount of money you pay. It's a simple calculation, with the result that, if the above assumptions are true, women should, from an economic point of view, be paid less than men on average.

At which point, if you are still arguing that wage should be equal from economic terms, you've gone beyond saying women are equal to men and saying that women are better then men - and that is an entirely different ball of wax.

[1] http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/[email protected]?iid=13#M_7

Can someone please respond to these points with actual numbers to back their points?

All 8 people on my team have been around longer than that. I've been there 8 years, and the other senior person has been around slightly longer. Our boss has been with the company for I think 17+ years. (And our old boss, who took the other half when the team got split in a reorg, has been with the company for 30+ years.)

.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm says: """The median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.6 years in January 2014, unchanged from January 2012"""

"""In January 2014, median employee tenure (the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure) for men was 4.7 years, unchanged from January 2012. For women, median tenure in January 2014 was 4.5 years, about unchanged from January 2012. Among men, 30 percent of wage and salary workers had 10 years or more of tenure with their current employer, compared with 28 percent for women. (See tables 1 and 3.)"""

I have been linking the numbers behind my arguments. If you wish to show the numbers behind yours, I would be more than happy to discuss them.

Parents are your most productive employees. They are the only ones who are making more employees.

Yes, but it's better for the state to pay it so that because if companies pay maternity leaves completely, the cost is not distributed evenly.

>The continued existence of the species through childbirth is something that organizations should really factor into their budgets.

I disagree, that should be the responsibility of the state and individual families.

>Is not exactly a difficult cost to foresee as people have been doing it for quite a while now.

It's a cost that is easy to foresee if your company is large. If the company consists of 1-2 employees, the company can go bankrupt from the costs. I've talked to an entrepreneur whose company actually did go bankrupt from maternity leave costs.

edit - I am not against the state picking up the tab, by the way. I just think it is one of those costs that could be paid either way and I have limited sympathy for employers who complain that they couldn't possibly be expected to plan for the eventuality that some of their employees might become parents.

But for some reason you want to conveniently ignore all these facts and instead point to maternity leave and say that's why we should pay women less? Think again.

But further, if your weren't trolling, the answer to your question is that even if the assumption were true, to pay them less would be sociopathic. That's why it's wrong. Again, think.

If disabled people are actually, objectively, less productive workers, a drain on society, why is it wrong for societies to euthanize them?

However, the question becomes if men retire earlier.

And the answer is no. [1] Women retire earlier than men on average (at least in Canada. Don't have stats handy for anywhere else, unfortunately). And that's measured in years, more than compensating for the above.

Regarding disabled people, a simple answer is that society as a whole would be against it, as there is enough of a chance of any individual person becoming disabled that it is in their best interest to not allow such a law.

And making an argument from an economic as opposed to a moralistic point of view does not make one a sociopath. As you may not have noticed, I never mentioned my moral point of view on the matter, as it's irrelevant.

[1] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/71-222-x/2008001/sectionm/m-age...

[2] http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/BDLC/data/can/mltper_1x5.txt

[3] http://www.prdh.umontreal.ca/BDLC/data/can/fltper_1x5.txt

[4] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

Yes, making an argument involving decisions that affect the life chances of human beings and hiding behind "economic theory" is sociopathic.

That assumes that only insurance-based risk affects economics.

Mandating that companies pay employees not to work puts them in an awkward position where they're incentivized to discriminate. If government wants to encourage people to have kids, then government should pay parents directly.

Not to mention that in the case of single births, you'll end up with the women taking maternity leave while the men don't. And with marriage stats the way they are...

Which means that it's still advantageous for the company to hire men over women. Amortizing costs doesn't magically make the cost go away, it just hides it.

And it doesn't even cover the case when the mother and father split before birth.

http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

Well, one think the government could do is to cover pay during sick leave, parental leave and child care leave (i.e. when children are sick). This would also benefit startups/new businesses, where employees being sick/pregnant is not just statistics, but can make or break a business.

As having an experienced worker go MIA for months is bad for a company in terms of productivity, and substantially more women take maternity leave than men take paternity leave.

A temp worker is seldom as good at their job as an experienced worker.

Personally, I don't think government should cover things like sick leave, but that is another matter entirely. (In general, the larger the system, the less incentive for any one person in the system to keep the system as a whole running smoothly.)

The plural of anecdote is not data, and you are no exception.

StatCan: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2012002/article/11697-...

(Serious question.)

*Yes, anecdotal evidence but I hear it from her and her female engineering friends a lot. To the point I've offered to help any of them negotiate their contracts in the future.

I really like my work and I work a lot. I have worked in early-mid stage startup and now am working with a pre-series A stage startup. I have never shied away from asking for more responsibilities or climbing up the management chain. I am generally known as the more assertive person in the organization. But when it comes to compensation, I cannot bring it up. Not sure if it has to do with being a female.

It would be ideal if there was a 'go to' person who can push me more in negotiating for better compensation.

Well, the two variables your subjects have in common is being engineers as well as being female. Personally (being a male engineer), I'd say being a bad negotiator has just as much to do with being an engineer as being a woman (except if women engineers are even worse negotiators than I am).