I am all for taking parental leave supported with full pay and benefits for a good long time, but is there a point where that support stops? Six months? A year? Two?
It's not for everyone but some people will exit the work force for years for family. I don't think it is surprising or discrimination to expect there to be a gender bias in people making that decision. Those people are included in statistics.
Is it right to expect that choice to have financial consequences or do we want to fully financially support that decision for some as a society and make it a money neutral decision?
Parental leave (actually only for women) is 14 weeks on 80% pay. After that many women take unpaid leave to enlongate that time. After that they reduce to 20%-60% time on the job or quit their all together to raise their children for a couple of years. This reduces their pension, because they work less.
How do you fix it? Any way you look at it, the person spending 12 hours a day every day sharpening their skills is going to have a much higher income on average than the person that spends their time raising kids.
Reminds me of "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Living myself in Switzerland, married with a mother who stayed at home during the first 15 years of parentship, I can tell you we solved this without the government, we solved it as a team.
Just like we solved all our private matters.
The one thing we love about this country is that people here do NOT see tax as a solution to all. As a matter of fact, since this is a country with direct democracy, if we'd feel tax would be the solution we could initiate a referendum and solve that within months.
Because that's how it works to be part of a society. You sacrifice some of your work to raise the quality of life of everyone.
Roads, parks, power lines, communications cables, police, welfare, healthcare, sewage, electricity, clean water, healthy food, safe consumer products, clean environment, justice, protection for the vulnerable, duck wetlands, women's shelters, protection of creative works... These all cost money, and you pay for them with your taxes. Not everything goes equally to everyone, and not everything benefits everyone (by necessity), but the aggregate benefit is huge.
The point of taxes is to pay for things that benefit society as a whole. Having children, especially in high income countries, is not only important but also extremely necessary. I don't like children either but I also don't want to be the last generation to inhabit the planet. And it's important that children have support early in life to be successful.
It you’re concerned about fairness, the “salary” received during the maternity leave should no be related to the employment you’re taking leave from (not even to the fact of being or not employed).