As you may be aware, I’m having a baby in three months. My spouse’s work offers one week of parental leave to non-primary caretakers of new babies, so I decided to put an hour in of internet research to see if I could make a little report that he could send on to HR or someone who might be interested. And then since I did that, I figured I’d post it to here! Happy holidays dear reader! Maybe this will be helpful to someone.
The main sources are all freely available on the internet.
Overall takeaways:
- Jobs that offer paid parental leave are increasingly important for Millennials and young workers and increase employee retention, as seen in the CWF study as well as the California experiment.
- Paid parental leave has no negative economic impact on employers, as in California experiment.
- Longer parental leave increases employee satisfaction with work-life balance, which increases worker happiness and thus productivity.
- For employees who are partners with other employees, leave for the non-gestating employee increases work-life balance satisfaction for the gestating employee and retention for that employee.
Here’s the Department of Labor briefing on paternity leave: https://www.dol.gov/asp/policy-development/paternityBrief.pdf. Selected quotes (sources mentioned are available at the end of this short briefing:)
- “In one study of working fathers in the U.S., those who took leaves of two weeks or more were much more likely to be actively involved in their child’s care nine months after birth – including feeding, changing diapers, and getting up in the night.6 Studies from other countries have confirmed that fathers who take more paternity leave have higher satisfaction with parenting and increased engagement in caring for their children.7”
- “Fathers are increasingly concerned about work-life balance, and nearly half of men surveyed report that the demands of work interfere with family life.11”
- “In a 2014 study of highly educated professional fathers in the U.S., nine of out ten reported that it would be important when looking for a new job that the employer offered paid parental leave, and six out of ten considered it very or extremely important. These numbers were even higher for millennial workers.23”
Here’s a 2010 California study on Paid Family Leave, which was implemented in 2004 and offered employees six weeks of leave at 55% of salary (followed by New Jersey and Washington): http://cepr.net/documents/publications/paid-family-leave-1-2011.pdf. This offers concrete evidence of the effects of paid family leave in general.
- Most employers report that PFL had either a “positive effect” or “no noticeable effect” on productivity (89 percent), profitability/performance (91 percent), turnover (96 percent), and employee morale (99 percent).
- Relevant pages: 7-10
Here’s a Center for Work and Family (out of Boston College) report on paternity leave: http://www.thenewdad.org/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/BCCWF_The_New_Dad_2014_FINAL.157170735.pdf
- Look at this chart, based on over 1000 worker fathers who were mostly (over 90%) well-educated professionals:
- “Only 20% of the study participants felt that all of the time off should be taken consecutively beginning with the birth of their children. More than 75% preferred the option to take the paid time off when it was most needed after the birth, within a specified period of time such as six months. For example, over a six month period after the birth of their child, they could take two weeks at the beginning and then additional days off as needed up to the maximum amount allowed.”
- Pages 1-14 are about worker desires, pages 15-20 are about employers’ implementations, including spotlights on Ernst and Young, Deloitte, and American Express. “• For policies that didn’t differentiate between primary and secondary caregivers, fathers were given an average of two weeks of paid leave • For policies that did have designated provisions for fathers who were primary or secondary caregivers, fathers as primary caregivers were given an average of about eight weeks, which was approximately three times as much as the leave offered to secondary caregivers”
- Takeaways: “Nearly three quarters of the fathers believed that the most appropriate amount of time for fathers to have off for paternity leave is between two and four weeks… 76% of fathers would prefer the option of not taking all their time off immediately following the birth of their children”
- Pages 27-28 are concrete recommendations for employers.
If no one wants to read this post , here’s a great and easy to read article from ThinkProgress that similarly cites a bunch of studies and includes anecdotal evidence titled “How Everyone Benefits When New Fathers Take Paid Leave.” I highly recommend this article.
Baking and Math 
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