Why I was tempted to discriminate against women

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

by bootload • 17 years ago

30 56 17 years ago

joeyo• 17 years ago

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.

lucumo3• 17 years ago

> 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 :-/

eru7• 17 years ago

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.)

Alex3917• 17 years ago

A better solution would be to have the government pay the parent a stipend instead of the company.

eru7• 17 years ago

We have this in Germany. However --- how much is fair? And what about the other costs of maternal leave --- especially the job-guarantee?

cpr• 17 years ago

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.

Kirby• 17 years ago

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.

ryanwaggoner2• 17 years ago

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.

araneae3• 17 years ago

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.

eru7• 17 years ago

Have you read the article?

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

yummyfajitas2• 17 years ago

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.

motters• 17 years ago

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.

eru7• 17 years ago

You may want to have a look at the Swedish sitiuation.

Tichy8• 17 years ago

"so maternity benefits are essential if you don't want to cause harm to children at an age when they're especially vulnerable."

But why is that the problem of the company? It is a problem of society, and of the parents. Putting the burden on companies is just exploitation.

electromagnetic4• 17 years ago

The reason it is societies problem, is because society doesn't want to pay higher taxes so the government forces the burden on to companies who can feel free to lower its employees wages across the board to cover maternity and sick leave expenses.

I know in France parental leave is paid primarily through social insurance (IE the government) because the French have little problem in paying for services they want. The US is not the world, please do not base your judgements of the way parental leave works on the way it works in the US.

jerf• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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).

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

Three years seems a bit extreme. But then again, I'm not European.

lucumo3• 17 years ago

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.

doosra2• 17 years ago

I googled and found something online: http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/04/maternity-leave-laws-forbes...

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.

jacoblyles2• 17 years ago

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

doosra2• 17 years ago

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.

ryanwaggoner2• 17 years ago

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

camccann3• 17 years ago

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.

akd• 17 years ago

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.

zacharypinter• 17 years ago

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.

Tichy8• 17 years ago

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).

electromagnetic4• 17 years ago

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.

Tichy8• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

camccann3• 17 years ago

This is a good point. If the goal is to get mothers returning to work, why not make it easier for mothers to work instead of worrying about whether they'll have a specific job that apparently many decide to abandon?

saulan• 17 years ago

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.

jellicle• 17 years ago

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.

camccann3• 17 years ago

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.

eru7• 17 years ago

> 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.

`Mostly' is the word. There are also non-Americans on Hacker News.

bootload• 17 years ago

"... 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. ..."

Because it's worth thinking about "why there are so few women in Startups?" Is it really how good a person is as a hacker or entrepreneur that stops someone succeeding? Is the Startup playground as open and equal as you think?

araneae3• 17 years ago

# 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.

electromagnetic4• 17 years ago

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

araneae3• 17 years ago

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.

electromagnetic4• 17 years ago

Currently maternity leave is exchangeable by law in Canada, so it's not really a question of who takes it, but it's a question of how much you can take and where to distribute it.

IMHO the only negotiating factor on whether the mother takes maternity leave or whether the father takes it (likely after the baby is on formula) is income. If the mother makes a considerable amount more than the father, the logical step is for the father to take the maternity leave meaning the household has a greater net income when it has greater expenses. There's no sense struggling to make bill payments, and increase stress on a relationship over money issues.

DaniFong3• 17 years ago

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...

Tichy8• 17 years ago

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).

xiaoma• 17 years ago

But it doesn't mean that. The mother has the option to share the maternity leave time. In practice, men aren't as likely to take time off, not even in Iceland.

Why I was tempted to discriminate against women

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