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by Osmium 3975 days ago
Congratulations Netflix. I'm personally a big believer that equal maternity and paternity leave is crucial for future equality in the workforce, and Netflix have just set a great example to the rest of the industry. And a full year is excellent too. Hopefully other employers will take notice, or even better it becomes a legal requirement. Why it isn't already in some countries[1] continues to mystify–to my mind, a business should not be considered successful unless it can afford to, and does, treat its employees like human beings.

[1] I say "some countries" but really it's only the United States and Papua New Guinea that haven't made it a legal requirement to have some form of paid maternity leave, among countries where data is available (e.g. North Korea isn't listed). Oman used to be in that list, but they left in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave and http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcom...
1 comments
icebraining 3975 days ago
Saying "the US" is usually not helpful here, since many of these issues are simply not legislated at the national/federal level. Some states do have paid leave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maternity_leave_in_the_United_...
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rosser 3975 days ago
GP is talking about parity between maternity and paternity leave. Citing statistics about the existence (or, as is demonstrably more common, non-existence) of maternity leave is pretty orthogonal to that.

Unless you're claiming that the fact that most states don't offer any paid maternity leave (and almost certainly no paid paternity leave, either) counts as the kind of parity the GP was arguing for, I guess.

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icebraining 3975 days ago
GP is talking about parity between maternity and paternity leave.

Not when talking about the US, otherwise it wouldn't just be two countries, since many -if not most- countries in the world don't have any paternity leave at all (even in Western Europe - see Switzerland).

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Osmium 3975 days ago
It's very encouraging to see some states have it, but an awful lot of that map is blank... I did see a news article recently about the Navy being quite progressive in this regard though (recently tripling its maternity leave time), which is also encouraging.
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