Do Employer-Provided Parental Leave Policies Live up to the Hype? Parental Leave and Gender (In)Equality

• In Event: 2351 - Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 12. Work/Family Considerations

Abstract

Most young heterosexual couples say that they want to have an egalitarian relationship in which responsibility for paid and unpaid work is shared equally. Prior to parenthood, they achieve this. However, the transition to parenthood sees a shift in the distribution of paid and unpaid work, with married mothers spending significantly more time providing doing unpaid work than married fathers. Paid parental leave has been touted by scholars and policy analysts as an important policy for reducing gender inequality and the economic costs to women associated with it. In the absence of a federal policy, more employers than ever have adopted paid parental leave. Given the rise of such policies, it is important to understand the whether these policies are actually designed in a way that has the potential to promote gender equality in leave-taking. To do so, I examine the parental leave policies of 128 brand-name companies that adopted or expanded their parental leave from 2015-2018. I find that, while the majority of companies offer some leave to fathers, on average that leave is significantly shorter than the leave offered to mothers. Additionally, I find that number of companies have separate parental leave policies for the primary and secondary caregiver, which reifies the notion that caregiving is not to be shared equally. Finally, using a gender equality index, I find that average score rests at the midpoint of the index, suggesting that while these policies are not overwhelmingly reinforce gender inequality, there is plenty of room for improvement. Taken together, the findings of this study suggest that scholars must be careful in advocating for parental leave policies without emphasizing the importance of equality in leave policies given the risk of reifying traditional gendered divisions of paid and unpaid work.

Author

• Miriam Barcus, University of Wisconsin-Madison