Corporations & Parenting

A guest post on paid maternity leave

Jul 26, 2022

This week I have the pleasure of adding this guest post from my friend and author, Yelena Sheremeta.

She now writes a newsletter called The Corporate Manager but I met her as the founder and Editor-In-Chief of www.Tirzahmag.com which is an online women’s ministry I’ve helped with over the past 7 years.

I truly enjoy her perspective as a Christian navigating the corporate world of law and her new journey in motherhood.

It is always evident that Yelena researches everything she puts out and tries to take objective views over quick opinions. I hope you love and appreciate her thoroughness (links are provided as footnotes).

Please let us know your thoughts in the comments and sign up for her newsletter! Her website also includes a new dating guide created by her and her husband AND links to her book on waiting seasons!

https://yelenasheremeta.com/

Scroll down to read.

As for me I am slowly working on upcoming newsletters and spending my week in Oregon. Everything is on my phone so links are listed a bit different today. Enjoy!

Yours,

Chanel

Here is a statistic that should shock you:

1 in 4 women in the U.S. go back to work within 10 days of giving birth—a reality that disproportionately affects low-income families and people of color, and is directly tied to poor infant and maternal health outcomes.

If you’ve given birth, you know that at 10 days, your body is still probably bleeding and definitely is still healing. So, going back to work, especially one that requires physical labor, would be incredibly difficult, and maybe even painful.

The U.S. is the only country out of 41 nations 1that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. Not only that, but the smallest amount of paid leave required in any of the other 40 countries is about two months.

Estonia offers 86 weeks, Australia is at 1 year, France ranges from 16 to 26 weeks, Poland is between 16 and 18 weeks, the U.K. offers 14-18 weeks, and Canada and Cuba are at 18 weeks. Now, not all leave is the same (some of it is fully paid, and some can be a portion of your pay), and not all leave is government paid, but instead is mandated for employers to provide by law. See a full listing here.2

Note, the U.S. does have FMLA leave for certain medical and family reasons, including child birth, but that is unpaid leave (unless your employer chooses to pay you, but they’re not required by law to do so if you take FMLA leave).

So, why does paid family leave matter?

It gives women a viable option to stay in the workforce. For women without access to paid family leave, nearly 30% dropped out of the workforce within a year of giving birth. One in five did not return for more than a decade. This has an economic impact: fewer women in the labor force costs the U.S. economy more than $650 billion each year, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.3
It’s good for business. Research suggests4 that companies with women in senior leadership are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide better customer experiences. Another study5 found that innovation is six times higher in organizations with workplace cultures that have equal numbers of men and women.
It gives mama and baby time to recover and bond. The first few months are critical to a baby’s development and it gives mom and baby time to bond. A NYU study 6found that infants’ brains were further developed when a mother was able to stay home with them for the first three months than the infants whose mothers went back to work right away.

That’s not even taking into account how hard those first three months are between the sleep deprivation and how dependent newborns are!

It’s an important benefit for women today. Millennial women are prioritizing benefits, flexibility, and work-life balance, so if companies want to hire and keep good employees, paid maternity leave is not just a nice to have benefit, but a must have.

For some families, it isn’t an option financially for the mother to stay home if maternity leave is unpaid or to quit her job after having a baby. And although paid family leave is beneficial for businesses in the long run, often the upfront cost of paying for an employee not to work for several weeks is just too high of a cost to pay for many employers, unfortunately.

But a company’s decision to not provide paid leave comes at much greater cost than a few paychecks - it impacts businesses, babies, families, the economy and society as whole.

What is your company’s paid family leave policy?

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