Pregnant employees are undoubtably less of an investment for the company when you consider paid leave. In fact the company might actually lose money on you.
This is a lot different than racial, sex, or age discrimination as a result of social bias or stereotypes.
So it makes sense there is discrimination from companies and managers - especially competitive companies where the managers are paid based on their team performance. In a truly capitalist market you would rarely hire someone at risk of becoming pregnant.
That leaves me to believe the only good solution is some type of mandatory leave for both men and women. Rather than trying to avoid the discrimination (via penalties, laws, etc.), force an equal leave rights for men and women so the companies no longer have to consider a particular gender over the other.
Then you'd just be discriminating against the youngish, the married and a bunch of other factors. I just think these kind of answers are the first logical steps in trying to address the problem. With more thought and experience people will arrive at the realisation that there may actually not be a good mechanism to socially engineer the desired outcome.
Devolving decision making to the business owners and managers, and to individual workers is what allows the system to work. Attempts to override and legislate decisions will fail with unintended consequences and ultimately make things worse in other ways. A complete solution would require totalitarian control, at which point you may as well just have central planning.
People already discriminate against young women based just on the risk they could get pregnant, doesn't seem like it'd be that bad to spread it across to young men as well.
This is a lot different than racial, sex, or age discrimination as a result of social bias or stereotypes.
So it makes sense there is discrimination from companies and managers - especially competitive companies where the managers are paid based on their team performance. In a truly capitalist market you would rarely hire someone at risk of becoming pregnant.
That leaves me to believe the only good solution is some type of mandatory leave for both men and women. Rather than trying to avoid the discrimination (via penalties, laws, etc.), force an equal leave rights for men and women so the companies no longer have to consider a particular gender over the other.