

Why I was tempted to discriminate against women - bootload
http://www.gamesbrief.com/2009/11/why-i-was-tempted-to-discriminate-against-women/

======
araneae
_Rather than extending maternity leave, I would favour extending it as
parental leave and making it exchangeable between both parents, however they
like._

This is done in some fields already, like academia, where both parents can
elect to take leave. Not even close to equal numbers of men and women use it.
If you make it exchangeable, only women will take maternity leave, and the
reasons are fairly obvious.

* Giving birth is physically very traumatic, and requires a certain amount of recovery time.

* Breastfeeding makes working from the office difficult, to say the least.

* It's very difficult for many women to spend long periods of time away from their infants. This may not be PC, but it's true. Men may love their newborns, but they don't spend every minute away from them obsessively imagining their mother-in-law dropping their kid on the head.

~~~
DaniFong
It may tend to have different effects if paternity leave is available state or
country wide. Then social norms may begin to change. See, for example,
Iceland:

"…if you are in a job the state gives you nine months on fully paid child
leave, to be split among the mother and the father as they so please. ‘This
means that employers know a man they hire is just as likely as a woman to take
time off to look after a baby,’ explained Svafa Grönfeldt, currently rector of
Reykjavik University, previously a very high-powered executive. ‘Paternity
leave is the thing that made the difference for women’s equality in this
country.’"

[http://economicwoman.com/2008/05/21/human-development-and-
pa...](http://economicwoman.com/2008/05/21/human-development-and-paternity-
leave/)

~~~
Tichy
This is not a changing social norms. It is just parents trying to get as much
money out of the state as possible. It sounds as if the state pays 4.5 months
for women and 4.5 months for men. So it makes sense for men to take off the
4.5 months and collect the free money (granted they don't earn their wages
during that time, but it is still paid holidays).

~~~
DaniFong
Do you have proof?

~~~
Tichy
Just look at countries where it is optional who takes the maternal leave.
Didn't someone further up in the thread give an example?

Edit: reading again what you wrote I am not sure: is the law in iceland that
each parent can take up to 4.5 months leave, or is it 9 months they can divide
freely (ie 9 months mother, 0 months father or vice versa would be possible?).
I thought they can only take at most 4.5 months each.

I only just know read the article you linked, and it didn't actually give
numbers for the proportions of men and women taking the leave. So the claim in
the article is worthless (it sounds like just some politician justifying their
policies).

I have read before that things in iceland are quite different, though. I think
it is much more common that the whole family (grandparents) takes care of
children and divorced women, so maybe there is less pressure on them.

------
doosra
I googled and found something online:
[http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/04/maternity-leave-laws-
forbes...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/04/maternity-leave-laws-forbes-woman-
wellbeing-pregnancy.html)

According to the article the law grants 12 weeks _unpaid_ time off to care for
a newborn baby. The old job is guaranteed on the mother's return. The woman
must also have worked at the company for at least one year. Moreover,
companies with less than 50 employees are exempt from this law so most
startups are not bound.

I don't find this law unreasonable.

~~~
jacoblyles
I do not believe the author is covered by US law.

~~~
doosra
Ahh... the author of the gamesbrief article seems to be talking about the
situation in the UK. It seems a lot different in the US. I wonder if the
gender discrimination the author talks about happening in the UK also happens
in the US despite considerably laxer laws.

------
araneae
_# Only about half of women return to their previous jobs, a figure largely
unchanged since maternity protection was introduced in the 1970s.

# Sixty per cent of women signalled their intention to return to work, but
research suggests that two-thirds of those that pledge to return had no
intention of doing so (I struggle to reconcile this point with the previous
one)._

It's easy. 40% of women signaled their intention to return to work and failed
to. 20% of women signaled their intention to return to work and did. 10% of
women did not say they would come back to work, and did not. 30% of women did
not signal their intention to return to work, but did.

Conclusion: 70% of pregnant women are indecisive.

~~~
electromagnetic
We just need a control group measurement and we'll have a scientific study
relating to the effect of pregnancy on decision making.

------
yummyfajitas
Also relevant:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons>

The seller knows more about the quality of the good provided than the buyer,
and has an incentive to hide this information. There is no effective warranty
procedure (indeed, such a procedure would probably be illegal). The criteria
for a lemon market are satisfied.

~~~
forensic
This seems to plague all employers in software.

See Paul Graham's essay about how the only way to spot a good hacker is to
hack with them. Which puts all programmers in a lemon market.

~~~
yummyfajitas
It's less of an issue for programmers. The only sure way to spot a good hacker
is to hack with them, but there are still pretty decent signaling and warranty
mechanisms. Look at what the programmer has done in the past and fire them if
they suck.

In the US, signaling and warranty mechanisms are illegal in the context of
maternity.

------
joeyo
_Research has suggested that maternity leave of of around three to four months
helps women’s employment but longer periods lead to what economists call
‘statistical discrimination’ against women in general._

One solution would be offer equal length paternity leave for men to minimize
that effect. That said though, the bill mandating three years of maternity
leave that the post alludes to does sound a bit excessive.

~~~
lucumo
_> One solution would be offer equal length paternity leave for men to
minimize that effect._

That will probably just extend the effect to potential fathers as well. It's
probably a "you just can't win" situation :-/

~~~
eru
But every one is a potential father or mother. I guess another solution would
be to require employees to put up a bond that covers the companies expenses in
case they go on absence. The cost of a risk of absence has to be paid by out
of the gross salary anyway, so we might as well make it more explicit.

(I do not know whether you could then put up a (possibly subsidisied)
insurance company to cover the bonds in case of having children. The problem
is, that having children does not work like accidents or fire.)

~~~
lucumo
_> But every one is a potential father or mother._

Not really. It's a sliding scale, but at some age the "new child probability"
drops dramatically. People who already have children over a certain age are
unlikely to have more children too.

~~~
eru
That's right. But here you are saver with older women than older men.

------
zacharypinter
I find this issue interesting. I'm a single male with no intention of having
children any time within the next 5 to 10 years, if at all. I have many
coworkers with families, and I completely agree that family should come first.
However, why should it be taboo for a business to recognize the difference
between the career-driven and the family-driven employees, regardless of their
gender? If I'm willing to sacrifice a few weekends here and there for a
project's success, isn't that worth something? If a position requires a higher
level of dedication, is it that bad for a business to screen out those they
know have family obligations that will prevent them from putting in the extra
effort? I think many businesses do this informally right now, but why should
it be a questionable thing to recognize? Some tasks are a better fit for less-
rounded individuals.

------
motters
It may have escaped games developers attention whilst rushing between
deadlines, but the human race wasn't just beamed down like something out of
star trek. Women occasionally give birth to...shock!...new humans. New games
developers even.

It's just a reality today that many parents are single, so maternity benefits
are essential if you don't want to cause harm to children at an age when
they're especially vulnerable. Any business which can't deal with the
realities of modern human civilization isn't really a viable business, in my
opinion.

I agree that maternity and paternity benefits should be equalised, so that the
costs of employing a man or a woman become similar. These days it's not only
women who choose to stay home to raise young children.

~~~
jerf
Companies are not charities. Giving out benefits to people not producing value
is very bad for them.

Turning companies into charities is a terrible idea, because it is companies
who are the ones who fund the charities, in the end. Forcing them to become
charities leads to the effects described in the article, where a company is
more reluctant to hire a woman in the first place due to the potential
expenses they may end up with. _Something_ has to be generating wealth, if you
want to spread the wealth around; be very careful about directly fiddling
around with companies. You can't necessarily let them do whatever they want,
either... I'm saying, be _careful_. Some people reach for simplistic
regulations almost by instinct, but you really need to be careful here,
because if you don't consider second-order effects, your simple answers will
end up hurting, not helping. Extending a lot of benefits to men will just
"equalize" the reluctance to hire.

It's a hard problem. I don't have a solution to offer. I just know some of the
solutions being offered are bad ones. Showering people with benefits is fine
and dandy as long as you only consider the first-order effects, but reality
doesn't stop there.

~~~
ewjordan
_Companies are not charities. Giving out benefits to people not producing
value is very bad for them._

These are people that have already produced significant value for a company,
so the notion that this is "charity" is really pushing it.

Given that many countries are having serious economic problems because of low
birth rates, there is a strong need to encourage people to have children;
ensuring that they don't go broke and lose their jobs as a result of having
kids and properly taking care of them is not a knee jerk reaction, it has a
very important economic function.

 _Extending a lot of benefits to men will just "equalize" the reluctance to
hire._

...and the market should correct for this by reducing wages by exactly the
amount necessary to cover the lost productivity.

While we're on the topic of higher order effects: removing these benefits from
women would cause an increase in wages, as well as a disincentive to have
children. That disincentive to have children has a real economic cost, and I'm
not seeing any effects that would tend to offset that.

I would question whether this is really a knee-jerk reaction - to me, it seems
to have many of the qualities of useful government intervention, in that
nobody would be likely to offer it on their own, but it has positive value to
the overall economy if everyone does it (in other words, the second order
population growth benefits are spread throughout the country, so there's no
direct incentive for an individual company to do their part to spend money to
cause them, a typical prisoner's dilemma situation).

------
ryanwaggoner
Here's a crazy (and perhaps illegal) idea: maternity leave insurance. This way
the risk gets spread across multiple firms.

~~~
camccann
Why limit it to maternity leave? Just make a general-purpose "valuable
employee vanished without warning" insurance. Could apply equally to someone
quitting, dying, enlisting in the army, running away to join the circus...

For a company large enough to diffuse the risk internally it wouldn't make
much sense, and for small companies it might not be feasible (could a five-
person software company afford a large enough insurance policy to mitigate the
loss of the lead developer?), but it might make sense for mid-size firms...

If memory serves me, some companies actually do things like take life
insurance policies on key employees for exactly this reason.

------
Tichy
I think if society wants maternity leave, it should pay for maternity leave.
Why should businesses have to compensate for the higher risk of employing
women? I don't think it is discrimination to avoid hiring women if hiring
women simply is going to cost more. It's certainly not the fault of the
business if women get pregnant (also not that women CAN get pregnant -
businesses did not invent genders and sex).

~~~
electromagnetic
Blacks have a higher chance of diabetes, should a business be allowed to not
employ blacks because they drive up the costs on businesses to provide
benefits to its employees?

Your argument is asinine. Men and women are unable to choose their gender,
just like they are unable to choose the colour of their skin, thus it is the
logical conclusion that neither should benefit from a choice they did not
make.

~~~
Tichy
To be honest, yes, I think if somebody has a known risk, I should be allowed
to take that into account. If SOCIETY wants equality for everyone, then
society should pay for it. I don't think diabetes in blacks is such a high
factor (never heard of it before), but if it were, then society could create
some kind of insurance to compensate the risk.

Same goes for gender - I don't say that they shouldn't have equal chances, but
it is the task of society to pay for that, not of individual companies.

I think making companies pay is just an artifact of the mentality that says
"companies are evil, they are rich and just exploit us poor bastards. They
have so much money that we can just take from them whatever we want". Now
maybe there are some companies that are like that, but I don't think it holds
for the average small to medium company.

------
wvenable
Subsidized day care would also mitigate these problems as well. My wife is
returning to work in a month at the end of her 1 year (Canada) maternity
leave, but the cost of daycare is enough to make the decision difficult.
Nearly half her income goes to daycare. If there was daycare in her building,
however, that would have made the decision to go back much easier.

~~~
saulan
Quebec has subsidized daycare. You can apply and pay as little as 9$/day or
you can get a tax break corresponding to that. Although the program is costly
for tax payers, it will pay itself pretty soon. Quebec now has a positive
birth rate for the first time in a long time.

------
akd
How about this possible solution? If you're employed by a company and you want
to take maternity or paternity leave beyond a standard period, you have to
quit your job. Your employer is given a lump sum payment from the government
to cover the cost of finding your replacement, based on some metrics such as
the salary of the position. These payments are covered by an increase in
payroll tax for all employees.

That way, all companies are shouldering the burden of people having children,
so they have no real reason to discriminate against women likely to become
pregnant.

------
lucumo
It's a bit of a problem that a law intending to equalise the relation between
a larger company and its employees, is likely to upset the balance between a
small company and its employee.

If you have 50 people working for you, maternity leave of one employee doesn't
affect operations all that much. If you have only one employee, it can destroy
your company.

------
cpr
This was well-covered in George Gilder's "Sexual Suicide" in the 70's (later
re-issued as "Men and Marriage").

It's an unavoidable fact of human nature that X% of women in the workforce are
going to drop out to have children, and the market adjusts for this fact.

------
jellicle
I'm trying to figure out why this article is posted, as a UK anti-
discrimination bill doesn't seem to matter much to mostly-US programmers.

Additionally, the linked article is simply false; there's no proposal to raise
maternity leave to 3 years, and what changes are being proposed to the UK's
maternity leave laws (minor tweaks) are not in the mentioned Equality Bill.

For what it's worth, the UK requires employers to pay women 90% of their
salary for 6 weeks only, and then a nominal amount for up to a year (which
most families will not be able to take, since it's not enough income to live
on), and the woman must be offered her job back upon completion of the leave.
Most women take six weeks and then return to work, or quit entirely to take
care of the kid. It's better than the U.S., but hardly a socialist utopia
gouging out the soul of the hard-working noble capitalist, or whatever the
linked article was trying to say.

False all around. Nothing to see here, move along.

~~~
camccann
_It's better than the U.S., but hardly a socialist utopia gouging out the soul
of the hard-working noble capitalist, or whatever the linked article was
trying to say._

What the article was trying to say is that placing burdensome restrictions on
companies that have female employees will result in a completely predictable
incentive to _hire fewer women_.

If female employees are, on average, effectively more expensive to the company
than an equivalent male employee, what do you expect businesses to do?

And no, "it's illegal to discriminate against hiring women" doesn't help. Lots
of things are illegal and people do them anyway.

------
Kirby
I'm more tempted to think of people as individuals who make their own life
choices, rather than think of all women as 'pregnancy risks'. Especially in
technology - a lot of geek women don't have or want kids.

And as an employee, I want at least the illusion that the company cares about
us having fulfilling, valuable lives, rather than as producers in a harsh
economic calculus. The same way they want me to think of them as something
more than a paycheck. This kind of thinking is the fast track to having
mercenary workers who constantly jump ship to other companies.

So glad I don't work for this guy.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_I'm more tempted to think of people as individuals who make their own life
choices, rather than think of all women as 'pregnancy risks'. Especially in
technology - a lot of geek women don't have or want kids._

Am I the only one who sees the hint of a contradiction there? Granted, it's
not as broad as "all women", but you still seem to be stereotyping.

~~~
araneae
People are individuals, but there are things which hold true, on average,
between certain populations.

It's not a contradiction, it's called outliers... or even 1/10th a standard
dev, depending on how close the means are.

