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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

I have seen companies where having and raising children result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings: I personally know 2 women in my office that were promoted while in maternity leave and one after she left the company: some companies bend backwards to promote women. I also have a colleague in the team in US that took a 15 year break to be a stay at home mom, the kids are now teenagers so she came back to work; she was automatically promoted to a position similar with having the past 15 years working. My point: it depends on the company, country, field of work etc.

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Claiming someone got promoted after they left the company doesn’t really make sense. Just thinking about HR systems, I don’t believe the claim.

I do know someone who was promoted while on maternity leave (@FANG). She absolutely deserved the promotion and has done a great job leading her (analytics, engineering adjacent) team. She subsequently went on leave for a second child (no second promotion that I’m aware of).

That lady (a close friend of mine at that time) resigned because she moved to another country where we did not have offices. A few days before she left, she was promoted because the management had promotion targets for women, so they scored one for the target. Everyone knew she is moving out of the country, so the promotion was just a dumb KPI hack - when the target is to have 70% women in an IT organization of thousands, people do crazy things to manipulate numbers.

In my country during maternity leave the work contract is legally frozen, no change is allowed of any kind (due to a history of frauds with salaries, the government pays a big part of it so there were cases where they increased the salary 10 times for the duration of the leave). Still, nobody said anything because that target beats the law. The only thing they did not touch was the salary because this is the only thing the government is checking.

> ...and one after she left the company

This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to goose their diversity stats for free while not actually changing any part of their org chart.

Exactly. A manager reported one more female promotion for that year. Because the office in my country is relatively small, one promotion still makes a measurable impact.

What does someone getting promoted after they left the company mean, in practice?

An announcement was posted the person is leaving the company (she gave notice). 2 weeks later, another announcement was posted that the person was promoted. The person did leave the company as planned.

Do your male coworker get promoted while on bonding leave? Is that typical?

Males are rarely, if ever promoted, in the past 10 years the ratio was 10 to 1 female to male.

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