Yet again, there's nothing biological that mandates that women should be disadvantaged due to having children. It's artificial and modern Scandinavia proves it.
Huh? Biology absolutely does mandate that. Unless wires have been completely crossed here, when you say "women should not be disadvantaged", you are presumably talking about employment / work.
The entire purpose of employment is to output work that is useful to other people / society at large. If you are not doing that, there is no reason for you to be gainfully employed by anyone else. Therefore, please note that any time I say "productivity" in the rest of this comment, I mean it in the sense of doing productive work for other people, e.g. employment.
As a side-effect of childbirth, women lose productive capacity. Men do not. This is not a societal choice, it is a physiological reality. It will continue to be true up until the moment women no longer need to carry a baby around in their wombs for 9 months in order to bring new humans into the world. Note I'm just talking about pre/perinatal here, not long-term child rearing.
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. I agree with you that this is probably[1] a good idea. But not wanting to overcompensate for actual biological differences is not sexism. This clearly doesn't fall into sexism because it doesn't apply to all women. It only applies to women that can + want to have children. The discrimination is not based on sex, it's based on a demonstrable loss in productivity that occurs naturally and by choice.
Again, this is very much unlike the disadvantage experienced by black Americans before the Civil Rights Movement, which was not a result of natural processes but rather a result of completely arbitrary bigotry and absolutely not in any way, shape, or form brought on by a choice made by black Americans.
[1] I say probably here because obviously paternity leave only applies to men who are having / have had children, so you will continue to have a similar problem (discrimination based on a loss in productivity), except now the sides are not "women having children" vs. everyone else but rather "people having children" vs. everyone else (i.e. people that don't want children). As I said though, I agree and still think this is better than the completely natural version of events, where only the woman side of the equation loses productivity, because at the end of the day in situations like these it is both the woman and the man who are choosing to bring a child into the world. And even though it is a choice to do so, it is obviously the kind of choice which we need people to make otherwise society will cease to exist, which is why I am happy to compensate for the loss in productivity due to this choice. That being said, once test-tube babies are both easy (easier/safer than natural childbirth) and normalized, I probably won't be able to countenance advantaged maternity/paternity leave (at least before the "birth" of the baby), because then it will be an entirely optional choice and you would be effectively punishing people that choose to have babies in the test-tube fashion.
It's artificial due to society treating child rearing as womens work. That's a social construct. In Scandinavia it's seen as an event handled by _both_ parents, equally. So both parents are expected to be just as absent from work as the other. This results in women not being singled out as a more "risky" employee over men. This is the default. That history has been cruel to women is no reason to treat what you describe above as the default. To assume that men need not take part in child raring before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.
You're treating a biological difference (the actual birth) of a few weeks as a valid reason for a much larger societal disadvantage.
Finally, child rearing should not be seen as a "loss of productivity" but as unpaid work, since without it, as you also noted, we would cease to exist.
Please re-read all of my comments with the fresh understanding (though it really shouldn't be as this was obvious from context and even explicitly stated) that I'm not talking about child-rearing. I'm talking about the pre/perinatal period when I am talking about a loss in productivity that women face by necessity due to biological reality.
I realise that you're now being deliberately obtuse but still; what is parental leave if not child-rearing?
The biological part is a couple of weeks, child-rearing that parental leave is a part of is for at least 12 months until daycare can take over. Fathers can and should do that as well. So in the end the amount of time away from work should be the roughly equal. So once again, if this sums up to equal portions away from work, which there is no reason not to, is there a biological argument for lower wage etc for women?
Do you also think that pregnant women get their salary deducted for their supposed loss in "productivity"?
Please let me know why this statement isn't true:
> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.
I am not being deliberately obtuse about anything, though I am starting to question your reading comprehension if I'm totally honest. Most of the questions in your comment can be answered if you'd care to actually read over my previous comments again. And then there is the last bit.
> Please let me know why this statement isn't true:
>> To assume that men need not take part in child-rearing before the child is ready for daycare is a sexist assumption.
This can be answered quite simply with: that statement is in fact true. Not sure why you feel like I should answer such a question, as I haven't implied anything like that.
> 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.
You can be not sexist without supporting every possible measure to attempt to achieve a perfectly egalitarian society.