Which is also why a lot of the latest policies are to provide equal maternity and paternity leave. Which is pretty good anyways, why shouldn’t fathers be able to take as much time off?
If your goal is gender equality, though, it needs to be equal, and we should encourage fathers to take the full time off as well. Otherwise, from an employer's perspective, women are ultimately lower-value employees, because they have an additional pool of time off they can utilize, while men do not.
Balancing that out gives one less reason to favor one gender over the other when it comes to hiring and assigning a salary.
One thing is the leave shouldn’t be “all at once or lose it” but a bucket that can be drained over time. The mother can use it very early and the father later which provides the best experience for everyone.
What if women are higher-value stay-at-home parents than men? Then maybe the optimal equilibrium is reached by more maternity leave taken on average by women than paternity leave taken by men… which produces an inverse result in the workplace.
It all hinges on whether or not sex/gender (and everything that comes with it) makes you more likely to enjoy and/or excel in certain roles. My gut feeling is it does.
If it does, then the goal of that kind of equality is a false goal.
It would be best if we gave parents the choice to determine what split is best for children themselves.
Right now, there isn’t really choice, because few countries have had equal leave rights, and those that do have had them for such a relatively short amount of time that we have no idea. So we haven’t been able to test any sort of hypothesis at all. All we have is culturally bound gut feelings, but if we just listened to those then we would still think that there are only four elements, that the earth is flat, etc.
And in the US we don’t even have legally mandated paid maternity leave, so even that would be a start.
No, that is not the kind of equality this discussion is about.
In this case, we are asking whether two hypothetical people who are completely identical in every way except for their genitals will receive the same opportunities, rewards, and treatment from their employers and their peers.
It is not for public policy to speculate on which parent will produce more value for the baby or the household by staying at home. The point you were responding to originally was this: If you mandate more parental leave for women than for men, you end up creating an incentive for employers to hire men instead of women (or choose to let women go when layoffs come around), because their benefits cost less.
That is the type of gender inequality we are talking about, and I hope you will agree that fixing it is not a "false goal".
I read the thread more closely and, you’re right, if men are not allowed to take the same amount of paternity leave as women, then that should be changed so that any person can take the same amount of parental leave. I didn’t realize that was not the case (I don’t live in the States). I was responding more directly to the notion that men should be encouraged to take the full leave / same amount of leave as women.
There is a lot of cultural pressure around men taking leave even if it is available.
Shinjirō Koizumi caused controversy when he took two weeks of his family leave as a minister because Japanese men never take it due to cultural reasons even though they are legally entitled to a full year of paternal leave. https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/asia/japan-koizumi-paternity-...
And he was the son of a former prime minister, so even he was not powerful enough to be immune from criticism of this kind
While the details differ, the social benefit are mostly similar for both maternity and paternity leave. It create a better bond between parents and child, resulting in children that grow up more healthy and productive for society. Parental bonding take times.
