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THIS ESSAY IS STILL BEING EDITED, but comments are welcome. | | | -- By MichaelBerkovits - 05 Apr 2008 | |
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< | Paternity leave, unknown for much of the last century and still rare today, serves several functions. For employers, it is an attractive benefit to dangle in securing employee talent. For family advocates, it is a means of ensuring that more children grow up with involved fathers. For the women's movement, paternity leave functions as a way of counteracting the traditional female monopoly on child-rearing and that monopoly's contribution to the scarcity of women in power positions in the economy. | >
> | Paternity leave, unknown for much of the last century and still rare today, serves several functions. For employers, it is an attractive benefit to dangle in securing employee talent. For family advocates, it is a means of ensuring that more children grow up with involved fathers. For the women's movement, paternity leave counteracts the traditional female monopoly on child-rearing and that monopoly's contribution to the scarcity of women in power positions in the economy. | | | | |
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< | Women remain underrepresented in positions of power, in significant part because of continued expectations - by men, women, and employers - that women are far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children. So long as women, including well-educated women, continue to take career breaks to raise children in vastly larger numbers than men, positions of economic power will continue to diverge along gender lines. It is true that one reason for the female underrepresentation problem may be that, because women on average hold less powerful (and hence less lucrative) positions than men, many women elect to serve as the parent who takes time off to raise children because it is the rational economic decision in light of the parents' respective salaries. In this sense, the fact that women bear the brunt of the child-rearing burden is an effect of the problem of female underrepresentation, as well as a cause. Regardless of the precise mechanisms at work, however, it is clear that the cycle must be broken if we are to become a society with a sex discrimination-free workplace. | >
> | Women remain underrepresented in such positions, in significant part because of continued expectations - by men, women, and employers - that women are far more likely to interrupt their careers to raise children. So long as women, including well-educated women, do so in vastly larger numbers than men, the problem of female underrepresentation will continue. It is true that one reason for the female underrepresentation problem may be that, because women on average hold less powerful (and hence less lucrative) positions than men, many women elect to serve as the parent who takes time off to raise children because it is the rational economic decision in light of the parents' respective salaries. In this sense, the fact that women bear the brunt of the child-rearing burden is an effect of the problem of female underrepresentation, as well as a cause. Regardless of the precise mechanisms at work, however, it is clear that the cycle must be broken if we are to become a society with a sex discrimination-free workplace. | | |
Maternity Leave: A Partial Solution | | | Maternity leave programs help mitigate the female underrepresentation problem by incentivizing some women to begin careers that would otherwise have been too harshly inconsistent with family life. Paternity leave programs mitigate the underrepresentation problem by ensuring that more men take career breaks in order to help raise children. The more men who take paternity leave, the less parental leave is a distinctly female issue, and the less it operates to exclude women from privileged positions in society. | |
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< | Paternity leave, once nonexistent, has gradually become more common. The FMLA treats males and females symmetrically: employers covered under the FMLA must offer at least twelve weeks of unpaid leave to new fathers as well as new mothers. However, while many employers go above and beyond the FMLA-required minimum limits for female employees, the same is not true for male employees. For example, among the Institute for Women's Policy Research "Working Mother 100 Best Companies" - a set of employers that one would expect to be particularly friendly toward family leave issues, none offered more than six weeks paid leave for new fathers, while nearly 50% did so for new mothers. Another study, conducted in 2005, found that 54% of all employers offered some paid leave to new mothers, while only 12% offered (any) paid leave to new fathers. So long as paternity leave programs (PLPs) remain less generous than their maternity counterparts (MLPs), men will not find leave as attractive an option as do women. | >
> | Paternity leave has gradually become more common. The FMLA treats males and females symmetrically: employers covered under the FMLA must offer at least twelve weeks of unpaid leave to new fathers as well as new mothers. However, while many employers go above and beyond the FMLA-required minimum limits for female employees, the same is not true for male employees. For example, among the Institute for Women's Policy Research "Working Mother 100 Best Companies" - a set of employers that one would expect to be particularly friendly toward family leave issues, none offered more than six weeks paid leave for new fathers, while nearly 50% did so for new mothers. Another study, conducted in 2005, found that 54% of all employers offered some paid leave to new mothers, while only 12% offered (any) paid leave to new fathers. So long as paternity leave programs (PLPs) remain less generous than MLPs, men will not find leave as attractive an option as do women. | | | However, it is likely that even if PLPs were both universal and as generous as MLPs, men would still be less likely than women to take time off. For example, in Sweden, where employers are required to offer sixteen months paid leave at 80% salary (subsidized by the government), to be split as a couple sees fit, men only take about 20% of the available leave. The statistic might be even more skewed if not for the fact that each parent is required to take a minimum portion of the available leave time - approximately 20%!. |
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