Addressing the unintended consequences

It's remarkable that it has taken this long for women to figure out that large companies aren't going to continue blithely hiring women of child-bearing age when women keep getting pregnant and then quitting on them:

Companies should be able to ask their employees about whether they hope to have children, Sheryl Sandberg, one of the most senior women in Silicon Valley, said Ms Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, said that women are held back at work by stereotypes firms are unwilling to talk about. She said employees faced non-overt discrimination as well as overt discrimination and a lack of flexibility.

The 43-year-old mother-of-two called for a much more open dialogue about gender, which included discussing with female employees whether they plan to have children, The Telegraph reported her as saying.

The UK law is particularly bad, as it not only creates incentive to discriminate against all young women, but is shamelessly abused by women who have an incentive to lie to their employers, assure them they are coming back, and then let them know at the last possible moment that they will not be doing so.  It would actually be better for employers if they were permitted to pay women to leave as soon as they got pregnant, otherwise they can find themselves in limbo for more than a year, not knowing if the woman is going to come back to her job or not.

The irony, of course, is that the individual not being hired to replace the new mother is usually another woman.

I am a strong advocate of policies that help women put children ahead of careers.  But I don't believe that most maternity-related laws do so.