Dive Brief:
- With many employers today offering more generous parental leave policies, is now the time to have a baby for corporate employees?
- A recent article at Knowledge at Wharton notes that so far in 2015, several big name employers -- Accenture, Blackstone, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Netflix and others -- have expanded paid leave policies so employees -- mothers and fathers -- can spend more time caring for newborns or adopted children.
- The U.S. lags far behind the rest of the world when it comes to time off for early parenting, as there is no federal leave policy in place. It cites the recently proposed, and controversial, Washington D.C. law on parental leave as a model for the rest of the nation.
Dive Insight:
“It’s an idea whose time has clearly come,” says Stewart Friedman, Wharton practice professor of management and founding director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project. “Employees want work to be more flexible, and companies are realizing we have to be better. It’s not just an economic issue; it is a moral imperative. As I’ve been saying for decades, we need a new national policy.”
The article goes on to say that while individual employers are offering more generous leave along with the right support mechanisms for new parents, without a federal law in place, American workers overall still face a tough road.
“When it comes to parental leave, the U.S. is at the bottom of the list of developed countries,” says Lotte Bailyn, emerita professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Even so, the article notes that with women comprising a majority of the workforce today, benefits such as parental leave can play a large role in recruiting and retention, so employers should take a hard look at increasing paid leave. And while the world leads the U.S. on this front, it's still arguably the best time for starting or adding to the family.
