I completely agree that father's should also take leave.
I took two weeks paternity leave. It was one of the toughest but best things I've done. My wife absolutely needed some extra support and help around the house. As I is, even with my help I don't know how she did what she did. She's amazing (as are many mothers).
I wanted to take four weeks but I couldn't get it approved. Even though I have 4 weeks a year vacation (in theory). As it is, the two weeks was really tough to swing. No matter how many times a startup CEO says "take all the time you need"... they usually don't mean it. And with good reason; capital is very limited.
She worked for a large company and she worked until 1 week before the baby and went back 4 weeks later. She wanted six but we couldn't afford it.
As it is my current company does consulting to pay the bills and our president is already freaking out about one of our employees who is pregnant, expecting people work overtime to fill the gap.
Edit:
To add a little bit more detail. I find the 7 weeks in this article insane (awesome but insane). I could have never pulled that off.
Also, my wife's experience by different than that graph. She makes more now than when she had our daughter. With that said, she also finished her master's degree in Biomedical Engineering (part time, took her years) right before the kid so the degree offset the earnings drop she would have probably had.
"Capital is very limited" is such a corporatist excuse for not treating employees humanely. Corporations of course want perfect worker bee cogs that never take time off, or have families at all ideally. It is on workers to band together and push back on these unreasonable expectations, since we can't do it successfully individually.
In small companies if you run out of capital you go out of business and all your employees are out of a job. What about the humanity of those people who would lose their job? We're not talking public companies where executives make bonuses... we're talking companies where the bank account can barely pay salary for the next month never-mind pay a bonus.
If a company can't afford to give its employees humane leave, it can't afford to have employees. That's sad for the company, but it's how capitalism works.
I completely agree that father's should also take leave.
I took two weeks paternity leave. It was one of the toughest but best things I've done. My wife absolutely needed some extra support and help around the house. As I is, even with my help I don't know how she did what she did. She's amazing (as are many mothers).
I wanted to take four weeks but I couldn't get it approved. Even though I have 4 weeks a year vacation (in theory). As it is, the two weeks was really tough to swing. No matter how many times a startup CEO says "take all the time you need"... they usually don't mean it. And with good reason; capital is very limited.
She worked for a large company and she worked until 1 week before the baby and went back 4 weeks later. She wanted six but we couldn't afford it.
As it is my current company does consulting to pay the bills and our president is already freaking out about one of our employees who is pregnant, expecting people work overtime to fill the gap.
Edit:
To add a little bit more detail. I find the 7 weeks in this article insane (awesome but insane). I could have never pulled that off.
Also, my wife's experience by different than that graph. She makes more now than when she had our daughter. With that said, she also finished her master's degree in Biomedical Engineering (part time, took her years) right before the kid so the degree offset the earnings drop she would have probably had.