Parental leave global comparison: US still among least generous

If you have read Modern Parenthood before you know that we try to bring a critical eye to the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about families and parenting. We have questioned the massive anti-bullying trend sweeping the country’s schools, for instance. We raised some questions about the anti-sex trafficking movement. So we were certainly willing to debunk a myth here. 

Stephanie Hanes

Correspondent

Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.

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Except ...  this one seems to be pretty right on. According to a number of reports, the US does seem to be out of step with other countries when it comes to maternity leave policy. (It also is one of the few countries that has not signed two international conventions on women’s rights that outline the importance of paid leave for new moms.)  

The Project on Global Working Families, a joint venture by Harvard and McGill Universities, developed with the support of the Ford Foundation a “Work, Family, and Equity Index,” in which it evaluates policies such as parental leave, paid sick leave, work hours, and support for breastfeeding. Researchers scoured national labor codes and other laws, dug into the International Labour Organization’s database of global labor, social security and human-rights legislation, and reviewed dozens of secondary sources – all to try to piece together what can sometimes seem like an apple-orange comparison of different countries’ labor policies. 

Of the 173 countries the researchers evaluated for policies around childbearing, they found that 169 offered moms guaranteed leave with income. (This is either because the government provides it, or because the government mandates employers to provide it.)  Ninety-eight of those countries offer 14 or more weeks paid leave.  

And dads aren’t left out. (At least not totally.) Sixty-six countries ensure that fathers receive or have a right to paid parental leave. 

So what’s up with the US? 

As anyone who followed this last presidential election knows all too well, we are a country resistant to “government meddling” – especially in areas that we have traditionally thought of as private.  This gets even more virulent if you start messing around with business bottom lines, which would clearly be affected if the government required employers to pay women during maternity leave.  (Not to mention the following complaints of non-parents who might wonder why they don’t get paid leave for some other sort of family obligation.) 

Supporters of paid leave have counter arguments. They say that paid leave would result in improved employee retention, health and quality, and would more than offset the financial hit to the employer, or to the taxpayers.  

But at this point, it’s not something the US federal government has been willing to legislate. 

And if you look closer, the US might not be as bad, comparatively, as it seems.  In many countries that seem to have cushy maternity leave, a huge percentage of women work in the informal sector. That means they don’t benefit from the policies. And in other countries – Somalia, for instance, which guarantees 14 to 25 weeks paid leave for new moms – the ability of government to enforce policies is sketchy, at best.

Still, there is growing pressure from US mom groups to revisit the issue of paid parental leave.  

In the meantime, we'll envy Sweden. 

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