> Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave.
You call men caring for the child as artificial. But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's, or do you actually think that women usually start to work again after just a couple of weeks on average?
I hate pulling the I've been around for a long time card. But I'll pull it now.
What I noticed is the time out for having children doesn't really interrupt a woman's working career that much. Not to mention women typically work up till the 7 to 8th month of pregnancy. So what gone for six months, two years? Out of 40-45 years of working? That's a couple of percent.
> But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's
Yes, this is true. Neither the actual mother nor the actual father is required to care for the baby after delivery. Believe it or not, this is how adoption works. That is one half of the point I've been making this whole time.
But now, if you go back and read my original comment, you will see the bit about how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences. This has nothing to do with sex/sexism and "believing women should stay home and raise the kids" and everything to do with the fact that this is just the reality of replacing someone with actual responsibility. If you've never been responsible for replacing someone who quit/took leave, then this might not be obvious to you, but it takes much more time and effort to replace two people for T/2 amount of time (each) than it does to replace one person for T amount of time. Hopefully you can see how this then relates to maternity/paternity leave.
And that is the second half of the point I've been making since my original comment.
So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?
> how extending the leave of someone who is already on one is much easier than setting up two leave-of-absences
So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard.
This is blatantly sexist also. "Well, it's easier to just extend one, and whoops, this just happens to always be the mother". The result of this strange rationalization is of course a deep skew to mothers being home and bearing the brunt of the negative effects of it.
This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable. How could you think that that is of even remotely proportional importance to the negative effects of always extending the mother's leave?
Ok, so there are two problems. The first is that you continue to put words in my mouth and project stances onto me that I have not taken. The second is that I think we fundamentally disagree on an important issue: what constitutes sexism.
> So what happened to the "it's actually just biological" argument?
It's still there. The question is "why is the default to give women maternity leave and not have like equal maternity and paternity leave or something?". You (and GC) are claiming this is rooted in sexism. I am claiming it is rooted in biology. Making decisions based on actual physiological differences between the sexes is not sexism. Not letting women participate in men's boxing because they'll get destroyed is not sexism, it is recognizing that there are literal biological/physiological differences between the sexes.
> So your argument relies on that it's more of a hassle for managers to arrange two parental leaves rather than one even though they have ~6 months to prepare? This might be the weakest rationalization I've ever heard...
What argument? My only argument is that this is not sexist. In order for something to be sexist, you need to be discriminating based on sex. Discriminating based on time lost is not sexism. "Small" differences have outsized effects when compounded across millions of people. Sure, if you take a single instance of this and look at it it doesn't seem like much. Unfortuntately though, we're talking about society-wide effects here. We're talking about why a society as a whole has adopted certain norms, not why an individual manager might do something. And honestly you're underestimating how much of a pain it can be to temporarily (that's how leave works) replace a valuable team member. You can't just actually replace them because they'll be coming back eventually. Do you hire and train up a new person only to fire them after the leave? Or keep them on when the other returns, so now you have two people when previously you only needed one? Or do you try your best to foist their work onto existing team members even though hopefully the entire reason that employee existed in the first place was because their work could not be easily handled by others. It's not easy.
> This "well, it's more of a hassle to managers" when it's usually entirely different workplaces, different managers and 6 months to prepare it is frankly laughable
Well, yes, exactly? Replacing two different people in two different workplaces with different managers is more of a hassle than if it was one manager and one team replacing two people. Thanks for helping make my point for me.
Your habit of "you haven't read", "you put words in my mouth" without substantiating either of them is pretty annoying.
If you perpetuate, support, or defend a system that knowingly creates an unequal outcome depending on the persons sex, you're a sexist. This isn't something that's undetermined, it's a fact. We know that if there's only leave for the mother, the mother is disadvantaged in the work place.
To take it really slow:
* Two people get a child, mother and father.
* The mother needs a couple of weeks after child birth to recuperate.
* The mother can take additional leave beyond that, the father can't take any leave at all.
* Whoops! Who's gonna work and who's gonna take care of the child now?!
This is a sexist system since it blatantly throws the responsibility of child-rearing on to the mother. Not granting fathers parental leave REQUIRES mothers to do it. And the only way this is accepted and seen as a default is because of traditional, sexist, gender roles where the mother is assumed to do the child-rearing.
The whole "it's more administration!" argument is just so pathetic that I won't bother commenting on it any more. Not even the most right-wing nut here in Sweden would try to argue that the administrative overhead is a significant problem. You also just skipped the actual point in my last paragraph - the question about proportionality.
> Any "disadvantage" occurs naturally as a result of loss in real usefulness (for a time) when it comes to employment. Now, you want to compensate for that natural loss in productivity by mandating that men artificially lose productivity in the form of paternity leave.
You call men caring for the child as artificial. But the fact is that beyond a couple of weeks the mother's "loss in productivity" is just as artificial as the father's, or do you actually think that women usually start to work again after just a couple of weeks on average?