Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation backtracks on one-year parental leaves
> [heading] How do they manage in Canada?> 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?”Okay, so... how do they do it? They never answer the question.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/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'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?What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers?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?I'm not trying to make some kind of gotcha. I really don't know the answer, and I figured the article would answer what seem like extremely obvious questions that arise, but it didn't.I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage? Is that an improvement?There's also something unsettling about "here's how [countries where the native birth rate is pretty much 0 or 1 babies] do parental leave!" feels a bit like... the women already did half the corporation's work for them.