LGBTQIA+ is a popular cause with employers because it cuts parental leave costs?

by philg

Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? looked at the question of why individuals might love to wave the rainbow flag.

What about employers, though? Why is it Pride Month Every Month at employers whose businesses don’t relate to romance, sex, gender reassignment surgery, or anything else that might seem directly related to LGBTQIA+?

Let’s consider heterosexual sex acts from an employer’s point of view. These encounters regularly result in the accidental production of children whose existence then leads to (1) up to a year of paid parental leave during which time employee productivity is zero, (2) additional years or decades of reduced productivity, and (3) massive increases in costs for health insurance (or health care for the self-insured employer).

From a rational employer’s point of view, therefore, it makes sense to promote all things LGBTQIA+. From my 2016 visit to the Facebook campus (see Open-pit Coding), for example:

Another way to look at it, which of the follow individuals would you rather employ?

Related:

  • Broody hen compared to gravid human in the office: “Just as a broody hen negatively impacts a farmer’s productivity, a gravid human poses a significant inconvenience to her employer. That’s why companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple pay for female employees to extract and freeze their eggs. It’s great to see tech companies empowering women the same way that factory farms empower their battery hens!”

8 thoughts on “LGBTQIA+ is a popular cause with employers because it cuts parental leave costs?”

  1. Looking at anecdotal examples surrounding me, those who did not saddled themselves with families with biological children, do not saddle themselves with having steady employment at a cubicle farm or manufacturing plant or construction site, with one exemption who is slow by birth. Those who are single and employable run from curse of being productive. I think that the individual on the motorcycle will hands down win the heart of a construction company owner. Individual on the scooter will get financial / g;glorified clerical London City job, his fashion seems to originate there a couple of years back.

  2. great photo juxtaposition — one of the funnier things i have seen on this blog in a long time.

  5. Well, think about life in the age of COVID. California and NYC, where tech companies hired many of their workers, are currently festering sh*tholes. E.g. if you want to hang out with friends in NYC right now, the thing to do is to freeze your nuts off at an outdoor restaurant (today’s weather forecast says that it will be 37 degrees this evening, first with snow, then with rain).

    The single people without kids are all eventually going to move to cheaper parts of the country, or leave the country entirely, and then once they’re living somewhere cheaper, they might decide that they’ve saved up enough and don’t need to work so hard anymore. Remember, the best engineers are getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Some are at over a million a year if they joined the right company at the right time (e.g. Airbnb or Snap). If you have three kids you need to send to private school and then Stanford, you’re going to be working a heck of a lot harder at your boring, status quo, won’t change the world, Zoom/Google Hangouts calls all day, can’t eat in a McDonald’s due to COVID, big tech job.

    • Anecdotally, the impression me and my friends get is many of the individual contributors are unmarried and don’t have kids, but most of the managers are married with kids. At some point I think it becomes valuable to employers to hire someone in a stable situation rather than someone who’s at risk of saying “f*ck it, I’m going to move to Thailand, since the cost of living is way lower there and there’s way less COVID” after getting passed up for promotion one too many times (Although I see Thailand is currently battling an outbreak)

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