That policy punishes the company of hiring any fertile woman.
My dad used to hire for a large engineering department. One of the things he had to keep in mind is that if a woman is hired, they can leave pretty much at any time due to FMLA, and hiring someone else is not feasible (due to law). The simple result is if he were given a choice between a man and woman of equal capacity, he would pick the man every time. Women have too much legal baggage.
My answer is that you extend the same rights to the man, and that calculus would equalize itself... but that is wishful thinking here in the US.
Even when you extend the rights to the man, there's still the traditional cultural expectations will end up with the leave on the mother. I mean, I'm a liberal stereotype and we didn't split the parental leave until our third kid - we went the traditional way for the first 2. So even in the optimal "extend rights to both" we still have the problem that the female employee took leave and the male one didn't.
We can remove the financial burden from the company by shifting it to the Employee Insurance system, but I don't know how to remove the HR problem of "you have an employee who has gone for a year of unpaid leave and you must give them back their job when they finish their leave". There's no easy answer for that one.
But, shouldn't that choice be within the family, rather than government applying uneven pressure for the female to "mother"?
It may be the case with my wife and I as well. We've discussed it, and whoever makes more per 2 weeks will be the one to continue work. But we'd both want that choice to be our own.
And also to be more specific, my dad was Wilbur Crawley. Worked at Faurecia, and was over 50+ engineers in an automotive setting. After being burnt by 2 engineers he brought on, whom were women, both within 2 years were pregnant. Cool, none of his concern, until they FMLA'd and were out for about a year each.
Both projects they were put in charge of were scrapped as the projects themselves had one less person (leaving 2 engineers). They were beaten to market on one of them and the other one fizzled as the engineers were reassigned.
And this also goes back to male vs. female salary issues too. Do women get paid as well as men, given the appropriate experience level? The main source I know of has bad controls. But, the more I think regarding this, what is the cost of FMLA with regard to women?
Is Salary_man == Salary_woman + FMLA_cost ? Ugly indeed.
How were they out on the FMLA for a year? The federal FMLA caps out at 12 weeks, and I'm not aware of any state that has a FMLA that would extend to a year's leave.
> they can leave pretty much at any time due to FMLA, and hiring someone else is not feasible (due to law).
Why? Around here you see plenty of job offers that go "must start on X and will be terminated on Y (1 year later) -- to replace an employee on maternity leave". I would imagine you would publish that offer plenty of months in advance to X, so you'll have a replacement person hired on time.
That policy punishes the company of hiring any fertile woman.
My dad used to hire for a large engineering department. One of the things he had to keep in mind is that if a woman is hired, they can leave pretty much at any time due to FMLA, and hiring someone else is not feasible (due to law). The simple result is if he were given a choice between a man and woman of equal capacity, he would pick the man every time. Women have too much legal baggage.
My answer is that you extend the same rights to the man, and that calculus would equalize itself... but that is wishful thinking here in the US.