What about the other thousands of things that can incapacitate your employees? Any one of your employees could get sick or have an accident.
Having a child is very much like that. The employee is on an extended sick leave, and then they're back and can be brought up to speed again. The big difference is that you know of this several months in advance and have every opportunity to make up for it and can take the time to train a substitute.
This is a good argument to treat parental leave just like other sick leave and leave it to a similar insurance system.
(To those to think companies' fear of children is rational, do you also think to ask your employees if they scuba dive, or ride a motorbike? That's probably more "dangerous" to the company than being of child bearing age, and the consequences far worse.)
You really believe that more days are lost to motorcycle and scuba accidents than to paid parental leave? I suspect the latter outnumbers the former by at least 1 and probably 2 orders of magnitude.
Having a child is very much like that. The employee is on an extended sick leave, and then they're back and can be brought up to speed again. The big difference is that you know of this several months in advance and have every opportunity to make up for it and can take the time to train a substitute.
This is a good argument to treat parental leave just like other sick leave and leave it to a similar insurance system.
(To those to think companies' fear of children is rational, do you also think to ask your employees if they scuba dive, or ride a motorbike? That's probably more "dangerous" to the company than being of child bearing age, and the consequences far worse.)