The Paradox of Parental Leave

"When it comes to parental leave policies in Corporate America, both parents are equal, but some are more equal than the others."

It would be a glorious understatement if I said the last three months of my life were uninteresting. It was initially filled with days of fervent anticipation, followed by joyous and sleepless nights, and now, filled with existential conundrums on whether changing diapers is my true calling. We welcomed our baby boy on Christmas Eve, and I have been loving every minute of my soon to be over 8-week parental leave with the family. Even though my parental leave is coming to an end, my partner has a few more weeks of parental leave left to attend to the needs of our infant. While this may be considered fortunate, it’s unfair to the parents, predominantly mothers, who are stuck with overtime baby duty.?

Raising infants, as most parents can attest, is a complex and resource intensive effort. It is like any large-scale program in the corporate world. Your schedule is not under your control, your workload is varying because of changing requirements and, most importantly, your stakeholder is upset most of the time and you don’t know why. You need an awesome team to overcome any challenges and keep the stakeholder well fed, well burped and happy. However, imagine your plight if half the team is removed from the program for reasons at best unknown, and at worst illogical. This is a ramification of a laissez-faire attitude towards parental leave policies at the federal level in the USA.

Much has been said about the federal paid parental leave policies, or lack thereof, in the USA. While our society is in the digital age, federal paid parental policies seem to be stuck in the Stone Age. With the collapse of the Build Back Better bill, paid parental leave at a federal level in the near future is as realistic as self-driving cars petitioning for human drivers to take over and save them from the mental agony of dealing with the rush-hour traffic on I-93 in Boston. On second thought, the latter is more likely. The private sector, on the other hand, has introduced varied paid parental leaves but very few are reflective of the values permeating through most of the modern workforce.?

Many companies that strive for gender equality have parental leave policies that perpetuate gender inequality. Maternity leaves typically exceed paternity leaves in most of the Fortune 500 companies. Some companies do not use paternity or maternity but use ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ caregivers. These terms masquerade effectively as gender neutral terms but they subconsciously reinforce the medieval mindset of women as caregivers and men as breadwinners. This mindset certainly doesn’t work today, especially when you have a twofold inflation problem in the household: inflation of diaper price (up 14% from last year) and inflation of the number of sullied diapers (up 20% from last week in our household). You need both parents to be breadwinners and caregivers to maintain fiscal and mental sanity. Various research studies have shown that mandatory equal parental leave positively affects the social, behavioral, psychological and cognitive outcomes of children. It also reduces the stigma of men taking parental leave, improves women’s mental health and reduces the pay gap between men and women.?

The pandemic has rapidly accelerated digital transformation in many organizations; however, it has not accelerated the need for meaningful parental leave policies. So, what can we do to nudge our organizations towards the North Star for parental policies? In true consulting fashion, I present my suggestions with a 4-letter acronym (SAIL) that will be not-so subtly referenced again at the end to drive home the point.

1. Share more parenting stories: Have more conversations with your colleagues, irrespective of gender, about your parenting journey. Share your embarrassing stories on failed parenting moments. Show off your newfound skill of changing diapers with a single hand in record breaking time. Brainstorm with other sleep deprived parents on creating a Tired Parent Yacht Club NFT collection. The possibilities are endless. The more you have these seemingly trivial conversations about parenting, the more it becomes part of the culture of your organization.?
2. Advocate for competitive parental leave policies: If you are a leader and you have the ears of policy makers in your organization, then convince your organization to have equal and significant parental leave with job protection for all parents irrespective of men or women, primary or secondary caregiver, white collar or blue collar, part time or full time, birth or adoption. There seems to be no consensus on the optimal number of parental leave; New America think tank recommends 3 months, WHO supports 4.5 months and UNICEF advocates at least 6 months of parental leave. Just remember that when it comes to guacamole at Chipotle and parental leave, the more the better.
3. Improve parental leave data transparency: You would be surprised to know that ~28% of the Fortune 500 companies do not have transparent parental leave data. While the likes of Fortune, Glassdoor, Great Places to Work etc. provide qualitative lists on best companies to work for, it would be even better if they can collate and evaluate quantitative data of paid parental leave. For inspiration, please see below a simple scatter plot of paid paternity leave vs paid maternity leave for select companies with some abstract splits to fit into the much touted magic quadrant framework. This will hopefully lead to employees feeling a sense of pride if their employer is in the right quadrant and employers being more accountable and striving hard for better parental leave policies.

1. Lead by example: You don’t have to be a major tech company leader like Alexis Ohanian or Parag Agrawal to take paternity leave and lead by example. If your organization offers parental leave, take it. If you have paid time off that you can afford to take with the parental leave, take it. If you have a colleague who is hesitating to take parental leave, encourage them to do so. The more the employees place importance on embracing their parental leaves, the more they can influence the management to make policy changes.?

In this era of The Great Resignation, competitive pay alone won’t cut it; you need competitive benefits to keep hold of good talent. Of all the benefits, mandatory, significant, and equal parental leave benefit is a no-brainer; it benefits women, children, men, employers and societies. I sincerely hope swift actions across the private sector, in the absence of immediate actions from the government, can help us SAIL towards better shores.?

For more serious reading on parental leave policies:

1. Paid Family Leave: How Much Time Is Enough? | New America Think Tank
2. Americans Widely Support Paid Family and Medical Leave | Pew Research Center
3. The History of Family Leave Policies in the United States | The American Historian
4. What dads can do for gender equality | OECD
5. Paternity Leave: The hidden barriers keeping men at work | BBC