From the corresponding Alpha Mummy blog post on the Times website:

4. Maternity leave law affects all women - whether or not they want to have children

Even if a woman has decided she never wants to have children, when she's of child-bearing age - and especially if she's married or in a long-term relationship - she'll be subjected to the same fears and concerns from employers. In other words, every working woman from age 21 until the menopause has a harder struggle for her "commitment" to be taken seriously. After all, who knows when she'll lark off to make babies?

http://timesonline.typepad.com/alphamummy/2008/07/5-reasons-why-e.html

Yup, I can personally attest to this. Something should be done about this, don't you think, or should I suffer for other people's choices?

Much as I'm for parents spending time with their children, requiring employers to allow parents of EITHER sex to take a full year off after the birth of a child is a bit much, business-wise, and could serve as the basis of discrimination against people of child-bearing age, especially those who are married but do not yet have children.

The reason maternity leave laws were put into place, after all, wasn't to give mothers a chance to emotionally bond with their infants but to allow them time to physically recover from childbirth. Men simply do not have the same need of that.

The reason extended parental leave works in Sweden is because it is heavily government subsidized. Whether that level of subsidy is sustainable over the generations has yet to be seen.

would be a sensible personal leave policy for all employees, regardless of the reason. Not everyone has children, but almost everyone has parents, siblings, friends, loved ones who might at some point in a person's career need care and attention.

Removing the "parental" portion of a leave policy spreads the risk (and the benefits) across all employees, making it harder to discriminate.

...so mamas get maternity leave, so do papas....this is getting ridiculous. The original purpose of maternity leave was to give the mother time to recover from the birth.

Having children is a choice, a personal decision in someone's personal life. When you have a child, you accept certain consuqences, at least I did. I am so tired of all the people whining about this, more leave, come in late, etc. Deal with it.

Both women and men parent, so benefits should be shared by both. Instead of maternity or paternity leave, just call it family leave and drop the whole question.

As a side note, I find it appalling that here in the U.S., the country that touts "family values", we have little leave for child care of any kind. Go figure.

....and I'm a single woman who can't have kids (due to DES exposure). It's very annoying to have employers give you a hard time because you're not male. Many men don't want to believe this happens in today's society, but it does. Women still get paid less than men, and we still get discriminated against.

That being said, I've had the displeasure of working with several pregnant women who act like total idiots during and after their pregnancies. They slacked off at work and dumped responsbilities (like travel and meetings) on the single women in the office. Funny how they never made the guys pick up their slack. They dumped on the single females, who they must have assumed had no lives because they didn't have a husband.

Having a baby is a big deal, but it's not the end all, be all. There needs to be a restructuring the workplace, so women with kids can jobshare or work part-time but keep benefits. I think it's disgusting that two full-time salaries are needed nowadays to support a family. Clearly, salaries are not keeping up with the cost of living.

Anyone who thinks you can take a year off many jobs without adverse impact to your career is just plain nuts. Employers cannot hold jobs open of a year. In many industries, the market changes so fast over the course of a year that the job a person held when he/she went on leave no longer exists. Neither women nor men could possibly take a full year away from their jobs without setting back their opportunity for career advancement by at least two on most types of career tracks.

My brother-in-law is Swedish and I've visited there a few times. You're absolutely correct about how their system works. However, there's one aspect that you might not see as well. Swedes don't face the problem of placing their infants or young babies with total strangers for extended periods of the day. The stressors on families, especially single parent familes is nothing like that in the U.S.. Now compare outcomes for children in the U.S. with those in Sweden.

Generous leave may come at a high cost monetarily to Sweden as a nation, but then Americans also pay a tremendous cost in terms of the individual costs to families, to young children and to our society (I think) as a whole. When you place families and children at the bottom of the list of priorities, the results are never good.

Leeandra - "The reason extended parental leave works in Sweden is because it is heavily government subsidized. Whether that level of subsidy is sustainable over the generations has yet to be seen."

Well, you have to realise that the Nordic countries are far, far more homogenous than the US, pay taxes up to 60% of their income and, still, women will get passed over for a job if there are two equally qualified candidtaes and the other is a man. For example, you can get 250 euro per month government daycare, but when you get 40,000 euro per year ( a reasonably higher than average salary ) that is taxed at 50%, that doesn't seem like such a bargain.

Also, even in the Nordics where men are offered up to 6 months of leave that he can share with the partner, men often don't take it as many are afraid it will have a negative impact on their job/career. Finland has started to notice that many more jobs are going contract-style and pregnant women are merely being laid-off at the announcement of their impending small human. Oh...and if you're a foreigner and female looking for a job in the Nordics? Good luck.

The woman can also opt to take an additional two years of leave, unpaid, where the employer has to take the employee back after the leave is over AND, if she gets pregnant again after the 1 year period is over she can tack those years together computed by some formula that I never quite figured out. It's no wonder employers would steer clear of women when not only do they have to pay for her, but also her replacement for up to three years!

You can have it all, just not all at once and not always the way you had planned.