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Societal Benefits of Leave
The United States ranks dead last in the world in terms of the support that it gives new parents after having a baby. It’s just fact. So there is no paid leave in our country. Of the top 18 economies in the world, the United States is the only country that does not allow for any paid leave at all. So we do have unpaid leave which is a little bit of a misnomer. People think, “Well, you can get parental leave. If you’re a dad, you’re a mom, you can take time.” Well you can if you can afford it. So, first of all, only 56% of American workers qualify for FMLA because of the stipulations. You have to be at a company that has 50 employees. You have to have worked full-time for a year. You have to be working within a certain radius of your company’s home base. So that automatically disqualifies a lot of people.
But then when you look at who can actually afford to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave per child, the numbers go down even further, and what you end up with is that 25% of new American mothers go back to work less than two weeks after having had a baby which is just so markedly different from how it is in the rest of the world.
And I think a lot of people think erroneously that it would be really costly for our country to have some sort of paid leave program. But when you look at the other top performing economies in the world, these other countries that have… first of all, they have parity between moms and dads. They have the same leave for adoptive parents. They have all kinds of things that just make this about actually helping produce the next generation in a way that will make that generation go on to also support the economy. So in Norway, Norway is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world. Wonderful. That makes sense. They have almost a year of paid leave. Moms and dads are allowed to share it. Sounds great. But when you look at the economy, their GDP is the highest per capita of any top economic country in the world. It’s kind of amazing.
And on top of that, they have more moms who work than any country in the world. They also have more moms who work full time which is a really important distinction. It’s not just that they have mothers really involved in the workplace. They have mothers who really involved in the workplace, are also incredibly happy, have also taken this time away from their jobs, and somehow, the economy is still moving forward at a good clip. This is so far away from what we have in the United States, it’s almost… it’s sad, but it’s almost laughable. I’ve thought long enough hard about why does the United States have this particular problem when in many ways, we are a really pretty progressive culture. And I think it’s just that we’re so young. We haven’t had that many hundreds of years to have a long look back at how far we’ve come. And it’s a little bit… generationally, each generation has really worked hard to lap the next. And so we’re moving so quickly that we don’t stop, necessarily, to look back and assess and see that sometimes, being a little more long-lensed about it, realizing that offering a parent an additional two months of paid leave will make all the difference in the world.
Familial Benefits of Leave
We also, of course, have a huge gender parity problem. There’s an amazingly convincing study that shows that for every month of parental leave that a father takes, the mom’s lifetime earnings increased by 7% which is incredible. And yet, when we look at who is actually taking leave, of course, mothers take longer leave than fathers globally, but more so in the United States than anywhere else. And what that does is even in the most progressive couples, even in couples that came into their couplehood saying, “We’re going to be equal partners,” if mom is learning everything in that time about how to care for the baby and mom also, probably, is part of this generation that I’m part of too where we want to achieve everything as women. We feel we deserve it, and we do to be great at everything and to find answers and solutions, and so we become sort of professional perfectionists at parenting.
If dad’s off at work and we’re learning how to do that, and then when mom goes back to work and both parents… and I’m being binary about it, but it is obviously for partners as well, same-sex partners. When you come home at the end of the day, guess who knows how to do everything? Mom. And guess who wants everything done her way? Mom. And there’s a term for that, and it’s called gatekeeping.
And there are a number of studies that show that if dad has time alone with the baby or the partner has time alone with the baby after mom goes back to work and is able to take intermittent leave, so just, say, even a month at home taking care of the baby and learning some of these things on the ground, that it actually sets up a much better balance that continues through forever, essentially.
There’s a study that shows that fathers who take parental leave ultimately have better relationships with their teenage children which is amazing. And you think about who’s a teenager now, who that study was done on, and these are pretty progressive dads back then. And yet, I’m really glad we can learn from them.