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The Case for Universal Paternity Leave | | | Paternity leave, unknown for much of the last century and still rare today, serves several functions. For employers, it is an attractive benefit to dangle in securing employee talent. For family advocates, it is a means of ensuring that more children grow up with involved fathers. For the women's movement, paternity leave counteracts the traditional female monopoly on child-rearing and its contribution to the paucity of women in powerful positions in society. | |
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< | Women remain underrepresented in significant part because of continued expectations - by men, women, and employers - that women are far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children. So long as women, including those well-educated, do so in vastly larger numbers than men, the problem of female underrepresentation will continue.* | >
> | Women remain underrepresented in significant part because of continued expectations - by men, women, and employers - that women are far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children. So long as women, including those well-educated, do so in vastly larger numbers than men, the problem of female underrepresentation will continue.*
- What is the point of making footnotes in a wiki, and then not linking them? The whole style is unhelpful and absurd. If you need purely explanatory notes, which you shouldn't in an essay like this any more than they would be tolerated on the Op-Ed page, then link them to the word or phrase to which they apply.
| | | Maternity Leave: A Partial Solution | | | The rise of PLPs incentivizes more men to take parental leave than otherwise would. However, so long as paternal leave is optional, females, because of powerful economic and social forces, will continue to take the vast majority of leave. In order for paternity leave to dent the problem of female underrepresentation, it must be universal and it must be mandatory. | |
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< | Immediate implementation is politically unrealistic, but the Swedish system is a workable model and a worthy goal, so long as it is modified to require that couples split their leave 50/50 - either sequentially or concurrently - if they opt into the system at all. The system would be expensive, but at least part of the costs to productivity would be offset by a happier workforce no longer forced to fight the family - career battle. A few couples might be dissuaded from having children altogether because of the burden of required leave by both parents. Other couples might have children later in their careers, after having comfortably moved through the ranks, leading to more parents having children for the first time when older. But these effects, if present, will be on the margins. Most parents will choose to have children, and most parents would opt in to the system of paid leave. The result could be a society of parents who take career breaks of equal lengths in order to raise children.***** Many more children could grow up with two parents involved in their lives from birth. Family, rather than being in constant conflict with career, could be in harmony with it. And the problem of female underrepresentation could be one step closer to being solved. | >
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- That's ludicrous. People have rights. Your proposition is unconstitutional, just as it would be unconstitutional to tell mothers they have to stay home with their children until their children are ready to enter first grade.
Immediate implementation is politically unrealistic, but the Swedish system is a workable model and a worthy goal, so long as it is modified to require that couples split their leave 50/50 - either sequentially or concurrently - if they opt into the system at all.
- A government benefit cannot be conditioned on acceptance of an unconstitutional condition. Such a statute is as void as one that requires you to register as a Democrat in order to pay into or collect Social Security.
The system would be expensive, but at least part of the costs to productivity would be offset by a happier workforce no longer forced to fight the family - career battle.
- A "happier workforce"? Who do you think you are kidding?
A few couples might be dissuaded from having children altogether because of the burden of required leave by both parents. Other couples might have children later in their careers, after having comfortably moved through the ranks, leading to more parents having children for the first time when older. But these effects, if present, will be on the margins. Most parents will choose to have children, and most parents would opt in to the system of paid leave. The result could be a society of parents who take career breaks of equal lengths in order to raise children.***** Many more children could grow up with two parents involved in their lives from birth. Family, rather than being in constant conflict with career, could be in harmony with it. And the problem of female underrepresentation could be one step closer to being solved.
- This isn't social analysis. This isn't even science fiction. There is no polite name for what this is. You don't have any evidence in support of these predictions, because no society on earth has dared the experiment on your astoundingly tin-eared terms.
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Notes | |
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< | *It is true that one reason for the female underrepresentation problem may be that, because women on average hold less powerful (and hence less lucrative) positions than men, many women elect to serve as the parent who takes time off to raise children because it is the rational economic decision in light of the parents' respective salaries. In this sense, the fact that women bear the brunt of the child-rearing burden is an effect of the problem of female underrepresentation, as well as a cause. Regardless of the precise mechanisms at work, however, it is clear that the cycle must somehow be broken. | >
> | *It is true that one reason for the female underrepresentation problem may be that, because women on average hold less powerful (and hence less lucrative) positions than men, many women elect to serve as the parent who takes time off to raise children because it is the rational economic decision in light of the parents' respective salaries.
- It is true that one reason women are underrepresented in positions of power is that women, being underrepresented in positions of power, stay home more with the children? That's not logically coherent.
In this sense, the fact that women bear the brunt of the child-rearing burden is an effect of the problem of female underrepresentation, as well as a cause. Regardless of the precise mechanisms at work, however, it is clear that the cycle must somehow be broken.
- This is a sort of description of a feedback cycle, as opposed to the first sentence, which is a fallacy. But it is not a credible description of such a cycle, because the causal mechanism is unidentified.
- So far as breaking the cycle, is concerned, why didn't you take the simple route, dissolve the "nuclear" family, and call for communal child-raising? You would at least have had the kibbutzim to provide you with some data. Too radical for your very moderate social taste? Then why didn't you take another simple and much more moderate route, and call for a pervasive system of guaranteed state-provided work-time child care, allowing any custodial adult taking care of a child at any preschool stage of life to sign that child up for competent and well-monitored care during the adult's daily work period? Sixty-two million French people are wrong, perhaps. But at least you would have some data. Non. You would prefer to make up a crackpot system not in use anywhere in the world because no one wants to stand for it, and which is flatly unconstitutional in your own legal system, because that way you can be sure to solve the Woman Problem. Or at least as sure as you can be given that you have absolutely no data of any kind.
| | | **At one time, women were frequently fired merely for having become pregnant. | | | ****The statistic might be even more skewed if not for the fact that each parent is required to take a minimum portion of the available leave time - approximately 20%!.
*****Single parents raise different issues which are outside the scope of this paper. | |
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- I look forward to your solution to the problem of how to get men to do half the housework.
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