On Thu, Feb 04, 2010 at 05:02:05PM +0000, Philip Potter wrote: > On 4 February 2010 16:50, Dominic Thoreau <domi...@thoreau-online.net> wrote: > > On 4 February 2010 16:29, Raphael Mankin <r...@mankin.org.uk> wrote: > >> > >> It's 9 months of full salary more expensive to hire a woman who gets > >> pregnant, takes her full maternity leave and then decides not to return > >> to work. Adding on to this advertising, time to review CVs, time to > >> interview and so on, the cost of recruitment can itself run into > >> thousands. > > > > These days aren't parental leave rights extended to a fairly generous > > degree towards the father as well? > > IIRC if the mother wants to return to work the father can take > > parental leave with very similar conditions (of course, since I have > > no real possibility of being in this situation in the near future I > > may have mis-remembered it) > > Statutory paternity leave is up to 2 weeks. There may be more generous > employers but the law does not require it. But perhaps you're on to > something -- make paternity and maternity rights more equal and it > becomes less of an incentive to discriminate against childbearing-age > women.
In the Netherlands, men can take paternity leave as well (at the expensive of the maternity leave). I know couples who split up the leave, each of them working half a week for the first couple of months. But most of the time, it's the women who take the leave. Abigail