Along with extended periods of paid time off it seems that American workers who are fortunate enough to also be parents are getting some additional benefits: lifetime paychecks not conditional on job performance. This New York Times article describes how male professors with kids gets extra time to publish before being evaluated for tenure and consequently are 19-percent more likely to get it.
[The Times complains that women with kids are less likely to get this lifetime cashflow stream, but neglects to consider that mothers may not work as hard to get it. If the female professor with children is married, for example, her husband may have a high income that relieves her of the fear of losing the university paycheck. Mightn’t she still strive hard for tenure due to the possibility of a divorce? Or if she is a single mother? Certainly she has fewer financial incentives to do so than a father. In Massachusetts, for example, a woman with a child has a 97-percent statistical chance of winning custody of that child and, with custody, a 23-year stream of profitable child support. Assuming that a female university professor had a high-income sex partner in producing one or more children, ownership of those children will provide her with financial security. Why would she work super hard to achieve a financial security that she had already achieved by producing a baby?]
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Extra benefits/time off for parents is a not-so-distant cousin of paying people to not work. It contradicts the usual ‘equal pay for equal work’ mantra.