Scandinavian-like parental leave (25 weeks +) in EA organizations
Leading the way with a policy combating demographic decline, while supporting talent selection and diversity in EA community
Paid parental leave creates an incentive to have (more) kids—or rather, it takes away part of the large financial incentive not to have kids. My concrete suggestion is to fund Scandinavian-like parental leaves for employees in specified EA organizations. This would open up more access to the large pool of talented family oriented persons. Further, having an unusually beneficial parental leave benefit could inspire other organizations to follow, and thus help combat demographic decline. The idea should be quite easy to pilot, implement and scale, and the results relatively easy to measure.
Hi, Greg. Thank you for your question. I’m very interested in exploring this idea further. First, I want to say that I have not done deep research on the topic. But I know some stuff, and I suspect some stuff. I could be wrong. Here are some of my thoughts:
1) My first point is that it is very plausible that paid leave period has a substantial effect on birth rates. I would sort of have a null hypothesis that there is a large effect, rather than zero/small effect.
2) I’m a statistician, and normally don’t put too much weight on personal experience. But before all my three pregnancies a thorough analysis with the conclusion “this is doable financially”, was very important in my decision-making. This N=1 (or N=3 if counting three kids), partly forms my opinion on the null hypothesis above. My impression is that most responsible adults have similar thought processes before getting pregnant. Further, after graduating, I was very motivated to have an impactful career. The apparent lack of job security and paid parental leave made sure I was 0% interested in any job at an EA org. Not the end of the world in this specific case, but there are probably a lot of more talented women out there, who also have a 0% interest for the same reasons.
3) I wrote Scandinavian-like because these are countries with generous parental leaves, and I know the setup well, as I’m Norwegian. Again, I have not researched in detail, but all three Scandinavian countries have birth rates well above the average in Europe. I also know France is on top of the birth statistics, and have generous set-ups. If I was French, the headline would maybe point to France instead of Scandinavia :)
4) Apart from (3), it is not straightforward to see a direct effect on leave times and birth rates in Scandinavia. Policies change very slowly over time (might add 1 week every now and then), and changes go hand-in-hand with other policies as free/subsidized kindergardens.
5) It seems to be a bit under-researched whether these policies have effect or not, and it is hard to analyze because of (4). That is at least my impression. So this could be really interesting and valuable as an experiment as well. It could provide insight into the effect of the Trillions (++??) governments use to support the systems today.
6) In Norway I have seen an interesting development over the last 10 years or so. Here, the social security covers 100% of your salary for 49 weeks, but with a max limit of about 60,000 $. About 10 years ago a few companies began to pay any salary above 60K to their employees during the leave. Now, 10 years later, this is standard in the market, and expected from any decent employer. This supports the opportunity to lead the way and affect what other companies might do in the future.
Does this make any sense? :) Happy to discuss this further, and to hear from others who might have more thoughts/research on the topic.