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[Frumple]

... where do you get the idea it's unacceptable to force people to take leave? Paid administrative leave and whatnot is entirely a thing that happens, already, and there's similar provisions for a whole host of high-stress positions, just as examples. Hours and whatnot also get capped fairly regularly for all sorts of reasons. Stateside, at least, it's pretty firmly established the employee doesn't really have much of a right to decide that sort of thing -- it's largely in the hands of the employer and government.

[RedKing]

I have about 2 weeks of mandatory leave every year from just before Christmas through New Year's. It's not even paid leave, I have to save up my vacation (other than the actual holidays which are paid).

I'm kinda boggling at this idea that mandatory paid leave would be a horrible thing, especially in the context of having a baby. Since few of you have had that experience yet, let me tell you -- the company isn't going to be missing your skills that much, because you're going to be massively sleep-deprived for the first few weeks anyways. I remember working with a guy who kept falling asleep at his desk for the first week or two after his first kid was born. I sure as hell wasn't on top of my game when my kids were born, and they were incredibly easy compared to most kids.

[Loud Whispers]

Don't call it forced paid leave, call it compulsory holiday or some happy sounding shit like that

[Reelya]

Still, the idea is rife with problems

- it's still going to impact women more than men (meaning ordering gender-equal leave will only mitigate the negative effects on the gender pay gap and female promotions, not eliminate them), because of single mothers and the like. Making the paid leave mandatory would actually hurt single mothers more than it being optional.

This impacts women's promotion prospects more than men. Sure, if a business makes a risk assessment on that basis, it's not gender-neutral. But is it sensible to ignore actual concrete differences? An insurance agency might charge men higher premiums because they're more at risk of heart disease. That's not gender-neutral either, but it's a realistic assessment of the costs and risk the company faces. Similarly, you can look at data about the typical age at which women have a child, and the proportion of women who do this, their marital status etc, and get a good estimate of the likelihood of a specific, known woman taking that break in e.g. the next 5 years. If the estimate is accurate, and you can estimate how much impact that will have on company profits if you promote that person to a mission-critical role, that's not being sexist, that called risk assessment as long as you use realistic variables and estimates.

- you'd have cases such as forcing executive mothers such as Sheryl Sandberg to take career breaks, especially if they were a single mom. This could affect the promotion prospects of single women, since they *could* have a baby and thus end up out of action, whereas a single man can't get pregnant.

- if only one parent works, and you mandate that that parent takes a break, then that is clearly going to negatively impact the entire family's finances long term. But if you try and mitigate that by saying "well if only one parent is working, the other one doesn't have to take leave", then you create a financial incentivize for some couples to plan it so that one parent quits their job when the baby comes, and that's going to skew towards the mother quitting her job more than the father.

[Reelya]

Sorry for the double post, but this should be completely separate to what I just wrote:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/14/study-finds-surprisingly-that-women-are-favored-for-jobs-in-stem/

Is science finally becoming friendlier to women?

Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci think so. As the co-directors of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, they have spent much of the past six years researching sexism in STEM fields. And according to their latest study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, women are no longer at a disadvantage when applying for tenure-track positions in university science departments. In fact, the bias has now flipped: Female candidates are now twice as likely to be chosen as equally qualified men.

Good news for women, there. And also shows why partial studies should always be taken with a grain of salt, unless they've actually included real-world data after the experimental claim (which let's face it, if you're making a BIG claim, is just the basic level of journalism). I'm referring to the experiment where they sent out identical resumes with men and women's name on them and found a gender-gap here. That's all well and good, except we don't see that same gender gap in actual hiring rates and actual rates of pay for men and women with equal qualifications.

[Sheb]

Although one major caveat of that study is that the people knew it was a study and might deliberately have selected the female candidate to not appear sexist.

[Reelya]

Except they have other, non-experimental data that backs this up:

In a study published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, they found that young and mid-career women are more likely to receive job offers than male candidates, are paid roughly the same amount, are granted tenure and promoted at the same rate (except in economics), remain in their fields for the same amount of time, and are about as satisfied with their jobs.

Basically, the one field that I've seen that's consistently the most sexist based on pay gaps and women's advancement is economics/finance, not STEM. But I've also read that a lot of the frat-boy types go into finance, so maybe that's where the bro culture is strongest.

[Sheb]

Doesn't make that on study you posted earlier any better. :p But yeah, it seems the current large amount of male academics is more of a leftover of previous time.

[Reelya]

I was just reading up on Sweden's paid paternity leave, and it looks like the right way to go.

They basically have 2 months paid leave reserved for the dad only, it's optional but it's a "use it or lose it" system, so you have a strong incentive but it doesn't need to be a draconian thing. In the end, once enough men started to take the leave, the stigma attached to men taking time off for kids (which is worse than for women according to studies) went away, and now 85% of Swedish dads take the time off.

This one move has had the biggest impact in Sweden on the gender pay gap: much more than you would expect to get from the American headline legislation that I've been claiming is pure lip-service to the problem, The Paycheck Fairness Act.

There is one good thing in the Paycheck Fairness Act, and that is the right of employees to discuss wages. This is good from a "class" perspective, I like the idea that workers can freely trade information about their employment conditions, it allows for better solidarity. But that's probably going to help men equally as often, or even more often than it helps women. Men tend to aggressively bargain harder for wage rises and promotions. I think having more data on your colleagues wages is also going to be used strategically by men to get ahead. In other words, we can't say for sure whether employees freely trading information on wage and employment conditions will help women more than it helps men, but it's great from a worker's rights point of view, so I'd support the act on that basis.

The Paycheck Fairness Act claims it's going to reduce the gender-gap, and the part of the gap that it works on must clearly be what is called the "unexplained gap" since the Act allows differences if they can be explained by the same types of factors economics use when working out the "unexplained gap". But the "unexplained gap" is much higher for women with kids, which are not factors the Paycheck Fairness Act is designed to correct. Call the raw unexplained gap 4%, say half of that turns out to be provable discrimination within single companies, and that the Paycheck Fairness Act fixes half the problem, and you're looking at a reduction in the gender gap of <1% from this law. But as paychecks equalize in general, you will almost certainly see more and more occasions where women are being promoted more often than men and getting paid more to do very similar work (companies which promote affirmative action policies), and they will now come afoul of the Paycheck Fairness Act themselves. Men do sometimes win discrimination lawsuits. So the net balance might be lower than predicted.

Quota systems also seem like a band-aid compared to mandatory paternal leave. They're a legislative quick fix at the output-end of the pipeline which require zero resources or effort. A toothless paper tiger in response to a deep structural issue. How effective is that likely to be?

[Sheb]

It depends what your quota system's goal is. Where it is most effective is to "break open" a field dominated by men, by showing everyone that women can do it to, breaking the "that is a men's job" stigma, and creating women in that position who can then mentor other women. In that regard, it can be effective (and I can dig up my favorite randomize trial study if you want). Ideally though, you'd want your quotas to be limited in time: they are at best a necessary evil.

Also, I wouldn't mind men-only quota in some other professions (kindergarten teacher for example) for pretty much the same reason.

[Reelya]

The atlantic article I posted about AA effect in college classes provided an important caveat: if it is a skill-based area and you put a quota in for some demographic, then you generally exclude the worst-performers of the previous demographic, then bring in additional people of the "target" demographic, who scored below the cut-off point for the class normally.

For example, you take a class that's mostly white, then exclude the bottom 30% and replace them with black people who were previously below the minimum cut-off point. Even if black and white people in the general population were equally-good at that skill, they're no longer equally-good in the classroom you created. Some studies suggest this has a negative effect even on black students who didn't get in on preferences.

An example would be a class where you need 300 on the SATs to get in, but you want more black students, so you bump up the minimum for white students to 350, while bringing in a pile of black students who scored 250-299. That gives you a nice fat gulf of scores in there: the best black student in class may be 50 SAT point below the worst white student. Not the type of image you want to reinforce. And this would be true even if blacks weren't that much lower in SAT scores in the general population: maybe people from the black culture just prefered to do a different course to the one on offer for cultural reasons.

[nullBolt]

I do find it very funny there's no initiative to have more women work as garbage(wo)men. I wonder why that is.

[Sheb]

Because being barred from becoming a dustwoman isn't as negative an effect as being barred from better professions? I'm not sure what your point is.

[penguinofhonor]

Probably the same reason people talk more about needing male nurses than male maids.

[mainiac]

I do find it very funny there's no initiative to have more women work as garbage(wo)men. I wonder why that is.

You must be easily amused.