So What If Yahoo's New Dads Get Less Leave Than Moms?

Dawn Kawamoto writes "Yahoo rolled out an expanded maternity/paternity policy that doubled the family leave for moms to 16 weeks. But new dads at Yahoo get only 8 weeks. It turns out that Yahoo is not the only Fortune 500 company to short-shrift news dads. But, really, do new dads think it's worth crying over? Hmmm...changing diapers or cleaning up code — both are messy, but one smells less."

Sweden, 1 year

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweden has 1 year paid parental leave, covered by the government, with a bonus if split close to even between parents.

Move here. It is nice. Well... except for the moose.

Re:Equal rights

[jittles]

Actually in California fathers are granted the 12 weeks required under the FMLA at the federal level. So while it may be legal to give mom's 16 weeks (though I am not sure it is), dads are required by law to get at least 12 weeks.

a discrimination case waiting to happen

[KernelMuncher]

American federal law prohibits policies that discriminate based on sex. By giving different leave times according to the person's gender, Yahoo is in violation. They could be subject to EEOC fines or even sued in civil court by any aggrieved parties (meaning the dads).

Re:Equal rights

[toastar]

unpaid

Re:Equal rights

[Enry]

Last I saw, FMLA says unpaid leave. Yahoo(!) is offering paid leave. Dads can still take 12 weeks, but the last 4 have to come out of vacation or unpaid time.

Re:Equal rights

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Brazil, where we've had 10 years of socialist government (seriously, the American say Obama is a leftist, but here he'd be considered extreme right wing, in the same level as the remains of the military government), women get 120 days off and men get 5 days, both with full payment, granted as constitutional rights. The first reference in English I found was Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave [wikipedia.org]

Re:Equal rights

[Dawn Kawamoto]

Hi Jittles, In my submission, I left out the word *paid* maternity, *paid* paternity leave. You're dead on regarding FMLA's 12 week requirement, but it does not require it be paid.

Re:What about lesbian couples?

[Swampash]

The one who squeezes the watermelon-sized thing out through the lemon-sized opening gets more leave than the one who doesn't.

Re:Equal rights

[BitZtream]

Yes, except we don't give them more time off because something came out of them. Medically, its a minor event. You're ready to just about anything you could do before hand (physically) in a couple days. About the only thing you can't do immediately is make another baby. C-sections are different as they have to cut you, but those are not the norm.

If you reduce it to 'recovery from the process of passing a child' then you reduce the time two no more than 1 week, unless the women works in a baby mill, in which case, I think its 6 weeks.

The time off is given for the 'family' not for medical recovery. The time off is so mom can be with her child, not because she is recovering. She isn't even taking care of the child for the most part during her 'recovery' period, its only after that when she starts doing her job.

I'm fairly certain you don't have any experience with women giving birth. We did it for hundreds of thousands of years when taking a break for more than a few hours meant something big and mean ate you alive. They even did it without hospitals ... or someone to tell them they were working too hard!

I want to spend that time with my child too.

Re:Canada!~

[p43751]

I see Your Canada and raise You a Norway.
47 weeks(100% pay) or 57 Weeks(80% pay).
Dad HAS to use 12 of the weeks or they will be lost.
Apart from a small part around birth, all weeks can be used by either mum or dad.

Re:Equal rights

[interkin3tic]

When you say "ultraliberal" you're thinking of very specific, small places within California. Like Berkley, Hollywood, and San Francisco. And even then, you're only thinking of the most outspoken residents. The OC is very conservative by national standards. The state legislature has plenty of conservatives in it, some of whom subscribe to the "starve the beast" theory, whereby you solve the budgetary problems by refusing to raise taxes without actually cutting spending.

(Also, side note, some residents of the OC evidently hate it when you call it the OC, so call the OC "the OC" whenever you get the chance.)

Re:Equal rights

[jeffmeden]

Except that the law isn't supposed to work like that. The US constitution does not permit women to get special rights that are not available to men. Which is why things like title IX don't specify a sex, they specify that both sexes are required to get equal opportunity to resources covered under the title. And that can mean extra resources for men, even though it usually works out benefiting women.

What's more the bulk of the maternity leave has nothing to do with pregnancy, and everything to do with bonding with the newborn. It's questionable as to why we're granting women all that time off and then bitching about how men don't spend as much time with their children. Well, no shit, we don't give them the same sort of break in terms of availability to bond with their own children.

As many others pointed out, FMLA covers both equally and supersedes this law (with unpaid leave). You can think of it as them giving a bonus to women that isn't available to men. but based on decades of salary data, men were getting bonuses all along and no one bothered to cite the constitution in protest.

In a perfect world anyone with a newborn would get paid leave, but most companies give 0 weeks of leave to fathers and 6 to 8 weeks to mothers (often at a discount) so why are we getting on Yahoo's case for going above and beyond 99% of the employers in the US, with the same difference?

Re: Equal rights

[Anonymous Coward]

tax rate of 51.1%

Re:Equal rights

[tiberus]

Don't forget that with FMLA only applies to certain companies (50 or more employees in the area), may not apply to you (upper 10% of earners and your leave would hurt the company), you and your wife work at the same place (then you have to split your 12 weeks). Pretty sure most companies require you to burn your paid time first, so it may be unpaid leave.

While time to bond would have been great, I don't have any real heart-burn about Yahoo's benefit offering for a few reasons. 1) I do believe that on average, women are likely to need more time off to recoup from giving birth, especially as it seems troubled pregnancies are becoming more common. 2) I'm much more bent over how a female dominated field like education (birth - high school) has zippo paid parental leave benefits. Considering the current overall state of such benefits Yahoo deserves applause, albeit possibly with a raised eyebrow.

Sheesh folks are getting bent over Yahoo increasing an already generous benefit for women but, not for men. How about we cut them a huss until everyone else in the country has the paltry 8 weeks of leave dads at Yahoo will get, then we can paint signs, hop on a buss, protest outside their offices, sign "Give Peace a Chance" and boycott their services...

Politically correct ideology bumps into the facts

[sideslash]

Yeah, companies shouldn't discriminate against women in hiring. A woman can perform just as well as a man. In fact, she must be even more efficient in her work than a man, for her average to stay as high even with her longer maternity leave. /sarcasm

I have a huge problem with society-enforced institutionalization of untruths. Don't demand that people smile, nod their heads, and repeat along with politically correct mantras that are obviously false. Tell it like it is. People can (learn to) handle it. Women of childbearing age are statistically at higher risk than others for being lower performers for a company in the long term, both during and after pregnancy. Maybe we should or shouldn't allow discrimination (I'm not commenting on that because I'm making a different point), but the numbers don't lie. Neither should we.

Full disclosure: I am a male who as a teenager and twenty-something was charged higher auto insurance rates than females my age, because (once again) the numbers don't lie.

Re:Equal rights

[hedwards]

You can't have it both ways. If women want to complain about being underpaid, then they're going to have to accept the cut to benefits like this that it's going to take. They're also going to have to be willing to make the other sacrifices that men make in order to get those bonuses.

Also, women should stop complaining about men being less involved in the lives of their children, when men are being provided with fewer opportunities to do so.

Just because they're going above and beyond 99% of the other employers, doesn't make the practice of granting women additional leave any less sexist. It just means that they aren't as bad as the other companies are.

Re:Equal rights

[Rene S. Hollan]

No, men don't have a choice if contraception or sterilization fails. Women can always chose to abort. Contracts to abort in event of contraceptive or sterilization failure are unenforceable at law.

Men can become fathers, with legal child support obligations, if their semen is stolen out of a used condom. It has happened, and the argument is that the child's needs for support outweigh the father's rights to not be made a slave.

Men can become fathers, with legal child support obligations, if they donate semen for artificial insemination, and later the child goes on welfare, with exceptions existing only if the sperm donation was done under state guidelines.

Re:Equal rights

[meustrus]

hedwards, you have no idea what you're talking about.

1. 1. Mothers normally need at least 2 weeks to physically recover from having a ~5" diameter baby pass through a normally ~1.5" tube, to say nothing of the cervix which before childbirth is normally dilated less that 1/8" and the sore abdominal muscles that forced that baby through. In case of Caesarean section, it can take months for the mother to physically recover.
2. 2. Babies need attention to properly develop. A mother's (or father's) love is vital to a child's emotional and psychological development. The lack of such attention can lead to serious and permanent relationship deficiencies.
3. 3. Newborns need to eat every 2 hours, even through the night, until they are anywhere between 3 and 9 months old. The best food for them is breastmilk, providing superior immune support and brain development to formula. In order for the mother to maintain adequate milk production she must either feed the newborn or pump out the milk every 2 hours. Otherwise she will be painfully swollen and will produce less milk thereafter.
4. 4. Even after the mother has physically recovered, she still has a newborn baby that needs constant attention. You can't get daycare for newborns unless you have at least middle class income. Even then there is a severe shortage of care providers because in most areas there are laws severely limiting the number of infants a single daycare worker is allowed to watch at any one time. This is for good reason because infants really need constant attention not divided between a dozen babies in order to develop normally.
5. 5. Remembering that newborns eat every 2 hours, parents of newborns get very little sleep. Assuming you could get daycare for your newborn, both parents will still be sleep deprived for months unless they are rich enough to afford a nanny.
6. 6. Finally, despite all of this difficulty, parents want to be with their new baby. Mom didn't live through 9 months of random nausea, general fatigue, severe mood swings, and discomfort due to carrying an extra 20 lbs. between her legs, followed by the most painful experience the most women will ever have to live through (and far more painful than anything most men will experience), just to drop the baby off with somebody else and go back to work. Parenting is a special joy and will be the single most gratifying experience in the lives of most people. All people have a natural right to pursue happiness. It is immoral to even suggest that staying home with your children for even the few months when they are most vulnerable is an unnecessary indulgence. Any company not willing to give you that is devouring your soul and will leave you spent, poor, and deprived of any source of true happiness.

P.S. Slashdot, if I use an <ol> it's because I want my list items to have numbers in front of them without having to add them myself. Otherwise I'd just use <ul> or a series of <p>s.