Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves
&gt; [heading] How do they manage in Canada?<p>&gt; In Canada, companies have had no option but to make 52-week parental leaves work, when requested, since 2000. The question Canadian companies ask isn’t “Can we do it?” but “How do we do it?”<p>Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question.<p>If you have say, a CFO or a specialist mechanic (that you only need 1 of, but definitely need) and they take a year off, what do you do? Just go without a CFO&#x2F;mechanic for the year? Or do you start the hiring search, bring in another person as a temp CFO for a year? What if you can&#x27;t find a temp, so you hire someone? Is the person entitled to their old job back? Do you fire the new person or the old one?<p>What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you&#x27;ve torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person&#x27;s job description and offload their work onto their coworkers?<p>More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees?<p>I&#x27;m not trying to make some kind of gotcha. I really don&#x27;t know the answer, and I figured the article would answer what seem like extremely obvious questions that arise, but it didn&#x27;t.<p>I <i>suspect</i> that firms <i>have</i> learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is <i>that</i> how they manage? Is that an improvement?<p>There&#x27;s also something unsettling about &quot;here&#x27;s how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!&quot; feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation&#x27;s work for them.