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> Where does that happen?

In Poland for example. National Social Insurance pays you 80% of your salary for up to half a year of maternity/paternity leave. Additionally mothers often abuse the system and ask a doctor to say their pregnancy is threathened, so they are on a sick leave for months before birth.

It doesn't directly incur additional costs for the employer, but it's still making 20-35 y.o. women with less than 2 children slightly less attractive on the marketplace because training an employee just to have her disappear for a year or 2 is a big overhead.

Of course - employers can't officially discriminate basing on age/gender/number of children, but you can't prove they do, so whatever.

> Where does that happen?

In Spain. Also, it is still an objectively worse proposition for companies to hire women who are expected to have children soon than to hire other people. For several reasons (in Spain's current situation):

1) Even if you don't pay the employee's salary while on maternity leave, you still have to find a replacement and train them.

2) Paternity leave is shorter than maternity leave. And it can be transferred, something many couples do (usually in the paternity -> maternity direction). This translates to longer absence periods, and "rustier" comebacks after that.

3) In our society, mothers still carry a larger fraction of the burden of having children. That is, even after maternity leave is over, schools call the mother first if their child is ill, or gets injured, or whatever. Women are more prone to ask for flexible or reduced hours, etc. These are all inconveniences for the employer (w.r.t. employees in other situations).

I'm not saying I like it this way and I don't claim to have a workable solution, just describing reality...

> Then the only way to reconcile it is to have the government pay.

My point was that this only goes part of the way: even if the leave is publicly funded it can be very expensive for the employer when a parent leaves. Just because you don’t pay salary while the parent is away, doesn’t mean it’s free for the employer.

To mitigate that causing discrimination you’d need to go further. One example is a system that also compensated the employer (pays for the inconvenience and extra cost of finding a temp etc).

Another way that you mentioned is ensuring that men and women take equal amounts of leave, and that is happening in some places. Me and my wife got 400+ paid days to share but part of it is reserved for each parent and can’t be transferred. Currently that’s 60 of the days, but there have been voices calling for making the program individual, ie having ~200 non-transferable days for each parent. This is a tradeoff between families’ right to choose and gender equality, and so far the former has outweighed the latter, so it has not been split.

> equal male leave wouldn't solve the problem because they don't take it

That’s a chicken and egg problem. Once there is a large generous system in place, norms change. The most common case here is that the mother is home 8-12 months and the father then the following 4-6 months (because obviously breastfeeding is pretty convenient to do without bottling for the first months etc. so it’s nearly invariably the mother who goes first). If the program was individual/split I’m 100% sure that the leaves would also be very close to equal per parent. Both parents do take long leaves, as it’s not quite socially acceptable not to, and it’s accepted by employers (often encouraged) to do so, for both men and women. This is of course an effect of having the generous leave. If you can get paid leave, and your employer supports you leaving (or worst case at least can’t stop you) - then aren’t you a bad parent for choosing not to take the leave? That’s the status of it, more or less.

To be honest, if you're willing to have a kid while unwilling to leave work aside for your kid, that's just plain old bad parenting and IDGAF if it's "authoritarian".

I care about your kid being raised properly, because I don't want to deal with a criminal 20 years from now. That's why I happily pay taxes for education, less problems for me later even if I don't have kids.

So any father who doesn't take several complete months off work is neglectful? Which months are these, and if you take the wrong ones off are you neglectful? Is it the very early months where kids can't speak or ever remember what happened? Is it when they're learning to speak? This is an insane standard. Your kid isn't going to be a criminal because you worked when they were young. There are such things as evenings and weekends.

Mostly yes.

There is [0] plenty of research [1] on the subject [2]. Early infancy is when the sense of empathy and belonging develops the most, and this development improves with the participation of the father in child care [3]. Daycare is in general subpar in this regard until the children can go to preschool, 0-4 isn't optimal for socialization.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232438327_Empathic_...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282751496_Developme...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016363831...

[3] https://web.a.ebscohost.com/abstract?direct=true&profile=eho...

Consensus around where I live is that kids should be home, with a parent, at least the first year. I have no idea whether this has any support in science as being “better” for the kid, but I think it’s a nice thing to ensure kids and parents have this luxury so I’m happy to pay taxes to fund it (Also, since daycare is also tax funded, it doesn’t cost me that much, I’d pay taxes to care for this kid regardless). Unfortunately it’s still the case that women take nearly 2/3 of the leave but it’s moving in the right direction.

> Then the only way to reconcile it is to have the government pay.

Sure, and ideally through an additional corporate tax based on overall wage cost for a business. Seems like a daft expense not to mutualise against at a national level, rather than what is today essentially a corporate lottery.