> "While the intent of the law was to support women's participation in the workforce, our findings reveal a critical backfire," continued Bapna, a professor in the Information and Decision Sciences Department in the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. "Companies that can't absorb the cost of extended maternity leave are effectively closing the door on women before they even have a chance to prove themselves."

> The authors recommend that employer-paid leave policies be accompanied by safeguards that protect women from discriminatory hiring practices.

If we are to properly mitigate the incoming demographic crash, governments must crack down on corporations that discriminate against current or would be parents. I wonder if taxing corporate profits based on the differential between payroll demographics/embedding population demographics would be an effective deterrent. Say, IRS checks a given corp payroll, if there's too few parenting employees when compared to the surrounding society, possibly signaling discriminatory hiring practices, due taxes should be raised, to negate any economical benefits the discrimination against parents yielded in first place. If what they avoid to pay in maternity leave just becomes punitive revenue tax, then it ceases to exist an incentive to fire/not hire mothers.