The Landscape of Parental Leave-Taking in the United States

• In Event: Choices and Tradeoffs: How Modern Family Policies Reshape Time, Risk, and Work

Abstract

The United States stands out as the least generous provider of parental leave benefits in the developed world, but little is known about how much leave U.S. parents actually take in the weeks surrounding the birth of a child. This paper leverages restricted-access, high-frequency data to document the parental leave landscape in the United States. We show that the average working American mother takes approximately 7 weeks away from work around childbirth, while the average father takes less than 1 week. In addition, a substantial share of mothers, and virtually all fathers, perform work even in the week following their child's birth. Despite the increase in state- and firm-level allotments of paid parental leave benefits, the length of maternity leave has declined since 2005, while paternity leave has remained roughly constant. Leave-taking is longer for mothers with more labor-market experience, mothers who live with the child's father, and mothers in states with universal access to paid leave. We find that the length of maternity leave is nearly identical for women with and without college degrees, although mothers with lower levels of education tend to start leave at an earlier date and return to work more quickly after childbirth. These results have implications for our understanding of parental investments in young children and the way new parents balance the family and career in the weeks around childbirth. Our results also suggest that the gap between the U.S. and other developed nations in the allotment of paid and unpaid leave actually understates the gap in leave-taking.

Authors

• Daniel Tannenbaum, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Brenden Timpe, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  Presenting Author