[larkost]

My wife, and quite a number of friends are from Europe (Austria, Germany, and Hungary mainly), and from anecdotes from them it is fairly clear to me that, at least in hiring practices, Europe is not a better environment than the U.S. in this regard.

For example, almost every European woman I have talked to about this has been asked either outright or strongly implied whether they were likely to have kids while employed. They have usually followed up with stories of women who were denied employment because of that. In some of those cases it was just because they were in the right age range, and despite their protestation the interviewer thought that they would.

In the U.S. I have never heard of someone being asked things like that (it is specifically illegal, and easy grounds for very expensive lawsuits).

It should be said that maternity leave (especially paid portions of it) is much longer in large parts of Europe. My sister-in-law has been on paid maternity leave now for 4 years. That ended a few weeks ago, but her employer informed her that during that leave she had build up x-and-x vacation, so she decided to take that, so she has been on "vacation" now for about a month.

That huge cost may be part of the push there. For people outside the U.S.: there is no national requirement for any paid leave, but it does require 12-weeks of non-paid leave (at least for larger companies). California was the first state to require 6 weeks of partially paid leave, but I am not aware of any states that have followed suit. It also should be said that many companied have their own more-generous policies, but those are more often the larger companies, especially ones with a mostly high-skilled workforce.

[purplezooey]

The root cause of all this is that we're all competing with an infinite supply of poor Asian people on the other side of the world that will work for pennies on the dollar.