Skip to footer

Mother's Day: Top 10 states for working moms

1. California (A-)

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters/File
The California state flag flies above City Hall in Santa Monica, California in this 2009 file photo. California became the fist state to enact a paid family leave program, in 2002.

  • By Schuyler Velasco Correspondent

California has a wealth of provisions for working mothers. A state disability insurance (SDI) program offers qualifiers 55 percent of wage replacement for new parents.

More private-sector workers qualify for job-protected medical leave under California law than they do under federal FMLA – the state extends parental and family leave rights to workers caring for a domestic partner or the child of a domestic partner. Four months of pregnancy-related disability leave is also available to all private-sector workers who work for a firm of at least five employees, regardless of how long they’ve worked there. Some of these benefits aren’t available for state workers unless their particular bargaining units have opted for them.

California also gets points for a flexible sick-leave program, in which half of an employee’s sick days can go toward caring for a family member.

Both state and private-sector workers have nursing-at-work rights while their children are infants.

California and Louisiana are the only states that require employers to honor a pregnant worker’s request to transfer to a less strenuous job, if it’s possible.

10 of 10
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.