Excuse me for being flippant but, I don't care if you're a 10- or 10,000- person company, but I'm going to take >4 weeks of vacation per year and if you can't handle that then you don't deserve to exist in the market.
There is a huge difference between a few weeks of vacation a year (probably taken in 1-2 week chunks) and multiple continuous months of parental leave. The latter can absolutely kill a startup, especially when the person leaving is a subject matter expert in a critical area.
if that wasn't mentioned in the employment agreement, then you (the boss) just lied about the conditions of employment.
I think a startup deserves the right to not hire somebody who plans to take multiple months off (without telling the boss), but a startup also needs to be upfront about it. I think a bit of transparency goes a long way towards making the market more efficient.
Third time I post this: my partner's company is a small startup of ~12 people and 7 of their women employees became pregnant and had babies while working for them. One of them was a very important manager, who gave birth to twins and came back within a month. The company is doing just fine, thank you.
If a startup dies because it's hiring human beings, it should maybe start to pivot into employing dogs? Or robots, of course.
Whoosh, your 4 weeks isn't comparable to 2 months of degraded quality of life and recovery after pregnancy. Not to mention the children if the father is also working full time.
