Yahoo recently hired a pregnant woman to be their new CEO. This is generating a fair amount of discussion on the subject. The best so far is from Forbes.
[Marissa Mayer]’s a CEO and can give herself work-from-home days if she needs to. She can hire a nanny, a nurse, a courier, a cook. She can set her company policy so that infants are allowed in the workplace (which has benefits like higher morale in the office!). Her hot-ass husband is a venture capitalist with a flexible schedule who can take the kid to doctor appointments and whatnot.
You know who’s not a CEO? Almost everyone else. Marissa Mayer is an outlier, and while her actions may make splashy headlines, her situation doesn’t apply to the rest of us. […]
Things have improved immensely since the early ‘70s for college-educated women like me: In 1971, 27% of working women with B.A.s were able to take paid maternity leave; by 2006, that figure was 66%.
For women whose education topped out at high school, though, 16% had paid maternity leave in 1971. And these days? Why, would you look at that: The number hasn’t improved at all.
The vast majority of women going back to work after two weeks have nothing in common with Marissa Mayer. They’re dragging their weary butts back to work, and wrapping up their boobs because there’s no place to pump at work. They’re getting paid by the hour.
Clancy has quite a bit of vacation and sick leave saved up, so we’re not going to be taking as much of a financial hit as a lot of people do when it comes to maternity leave. Even so, it’d be nice if Clancy had been able to take her vacation days and get some time to take care of the baby after it is born. A lot of other countries apparently manage this, but not ours.
Having said that, there are some real concerns that would come along with it. The Forbes author gives an anecdote about how she declined to take advantage of something she was legally entitled to. Similarly, I know a pregnant woman who is under a degree of pressure not to take advantage of her due maternity leave. She talked of taking eight weeks of leave, and the response was along the lines of “We’ll see.” She was legally entitled to it, but an uncooperative employer can make life difficult for you if you take advantage of it. And if you force, force, force it upon them and go after them for anything that merely sniffs like a punitive response, you have essentially added a asymmetrical cost to hiring women.
Another female acquaintance, in response to Mayer’s hiring at Yahoo, mentioned on Facebook that she got her current job while pregnant. She said during the interview “I don’t know if you realize I’m pregnant or think I’m just a porker, but I’m only somewhat porker and very pregnant.” (You’d have to know her to believe as I do that yes, she would actually say this in a job interview.) She got the job. Would she have gotten the job if it meant that she would be gone for 12 weeks and that they’d have to pay her and a replacement? I don’t see employers as being that far-sighted.
So where does that leave us? The government could take care of paying the parents. A social evolution where men were just as likely to take the time off as women could negate any discriminatory effect. Alternately, if you had generous leave that was so limited that men would almost have to take the time off, you could relieve the discriminatory effect. Of course, then you would be discriminating against one-parent households. Unless you said that a single parent gets twice the leave, which then penalizes women who married their child’s father.
One other possibility, I suppose, would be tax credits to corporations with family-friendly policies. That would encourage more companies to offer paid maternity leave, but would let those that are worried about it off the hook. That would, of course, be yet another line in the tax code. There would also likely be some employers that would take the credits and then apply pressure on employees not to use them. Intuitively, it seems like the abuse would be less than simply by demanding maternity leave for everyone. Of course, you’d have to strike the right balance between “enough of a tax credit to encourage employers to do it” and “not too much of a tax credit to where they have to do it whether they intend to comply or not.”
Things have improved immensely since the early ‘70s for college-educated women like me: In 1971, 27% of working women with B.A.s were able to take paid maternity leave; by 2006, that figure was 66%.
For women whose education topped out at high school, though, 16% had paid maternity leave in 1971. And these days? Why, would you look at that: The number hasn’t improved at all.
It seems to me that hiring a temp fill-in for a maid or an assembly-line worker would be a lot easier and less expensive than for a managerial/professional woman. Just on economics alone this makes no sense.
Emphasis on “paid” I think. Even if they can find a replacement, paying two salaries is not going to be seen as desirable, for the most part. You’d most likely do it for women of more individual critical importance to keep them on board. The easier they are to replace with a temp, the easier they are to replace period.
We also discussed this in an employment law class. The Family Medical and Leave Act was necessary. It still has the problems of unintended consequences though in that it was largely written by well-educated people and was subconsciously(or not) geared towards jobs that well-educated people tend to take.
I think this is a case for a firmer hand telling employers they will give maternity and paternity leave to all employees and they will like it.
Then again, I have never been a fan of at-will employment.
If there’s any confusion, I’m not saying it wasn’t. If nothing else, it changed the goalposts of acceptable leave time. I’m less sure about the next step, though, of paid leave time.
A number of countries provide paid maternity leave by having the government pick up the bill, or part of it.
I have no real objection to the maternity benefit system in Canada, in which a mother can get, in total, 52 weeks of, 50 of which are paid through EI (Employment Insurance). You’re only paid 55% (I think) of your earnings, and you had to put in a sufficient number of hours in the precedding 17 weeks of work (I think it’s 17, might be 13, but be much more).
The breakdown in 17 weeks of pregnancy leave (which can be taken before the birth, obviously) and 35 weeks of parental leave (which must be taken within the first year of birth, and can be taken by either parent – though only one parent can be “paid” at a time).
Certainly, it’s still too costly for many women (and men) to take full advantage. And perhaps it re-inforces the Monday-Friday, 9-5 work week, making demands on the workforce’s time less dynamic, but it seems like it works pretty well – or, at least, I prefer it to just letting new parents completely fend for themselves.
“Even so, it’d be nice if Clancy had been able to take her vacation days and get some time to take care of the baby after it is born.”
With us starting to think about this, Zazzy has had to be very careful about using any vacation time, since she can theoretically roll it over and use it to extend her time at home with the baby. Which is really shitty, if you ask me. Basically, every day she takes off now is potentially one less day home with baby.
Yeah, ditto here. The “vacation” days that we’re most bitter about are the ones she took in order to get caught up on paperwork. Each one of those is a day less pay later this year. We are fortunate insofar as Clancy does have a generous vacation package. So we don’t have it as bad as most. Also, getting vacations approved would be tough anyway.
Other things unique to Ms. Mayer’s situation:
Yahoo is in trouble and would make all sorts of concessions for someone with her credentials. (There’s a jokey rumor that, since Google needs a healthy Yahoo to avoid anti-trust scrutiny, they asked all their senior execs to consider taking the Yahoo job.)
No one hires a temp CEO; her duties will devolve to the CFO and senior VPs when she’s not able to work full-time. She’s still the new face of the company, leave or no.
If she can devise useful strategies and evangelize them to the senior execs and her staff between now and October, she won’t be needed badly day-to-day.