Silicon Valley feigns benevolence with self-serving benefits packages

Amazon's parental leave policy is the latest in tech company trend of ostensibly generous perks meant to retain hard workers rather than give them a real break

Let's give Amazon the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the announcement of its revamped and significantly more generous family leave policy didn't have anything to do with the really bad PR that the company has been combatting since the publication of a New York Times exposi(C), including comments by some former Amazon insiders, about just how difficult it is to work for the retail behemoth.

Writing that the company "is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable", Times reporters collected somewhat hair-raising tales of what it means to be an elite worker at the giant online retailer. In the process, they raised the question of whether a gender gap might partly explain the problem, and recounted at least one instance where a woman was told by her boss that having children "would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level".