Fundamentally, this is one of those places where if we want to change policy, the government needs to step in.
If we want companies to honor paternity and maternity leave, then when a parent takes such leave, the government needs to soak the employee's salary and benefits. 100%, no questions asked, full stop.
Any less is incentive for every company in the marketplace to find every excuse to cut parents out of the loop for costing more per-hour-unit-of-work than an equivalent employee with no children.
So what do you do when you have high risk scenarios that are semi-rare but semi-predictable, combined with a high loss when they happen?
It's called insurance.
That's the private/"market" based solution to privatizing and sharing risk across a pool. Given it's kind of an impossible thing to fake, there isn't much risk of false claims.
insurance doesn't work when the event is controllable (like pregnancy) and happens regularly to everyone.
Imagine an insurance company offering to sell to a business a plan for each employee, which covers their salary while they take leave.
The premium of this plan must be lower than their total cost in salary while they are on leave, since if it was higher, the business can just pay the salary!
Therefore, the insurance company must cover the cost by taking on the risk that some employee don't take parental leave (and thus, profit off those premiums).
But in aggregate, "everybody" reproduces. Therefore, there'd be nobody to "earn" the premium from. So the only remaining possibility to profit is from making interest from the premiums not yet paid out (which, while significant, can't really be as profitable as any existing insurance product).
yep. Health insurance shouldn't be called insurance. It should be called a levy, and all citizens making more than a certain amount have to pay into it, and all healthcare costs paid for by this fund. Insurance companies are middlemen that don't provide real value.
If we want companies to honor paternity and maternity leave, then when a parent takes such leave, the government needs to soak the employee's salary and benefits. 100%, no questions asked, full stop.
Any less is incentive for every company in the marketplace to find every excuse to cut parents out of the loop for costing more per-hour-unit-of-work than an equivalent employee with no children.