{"id":2879,"date":"2017-05-26T15:48:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-26T14:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpol.qub.ac.uk\/?p=2879"},"modified":"2017-05-26T15:48:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-26T14:48:38","slug":"parental-leave-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/qpol\/parental-leave-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Credit Where Credit\u2019s Due: the Trump Administration\u2019s Proposals for Parental Leave"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first four months of the Trump Administration has given us much to disagree with. The list is a long one but for many is likely to include the travel bans barring people from Muslim-majority countries<\/a>, moves to repeal the Affordable Care Act<\/a>, and key planks of the 2018 federal budget proposals<\/a> released earlier this week.<\/p>\n

But there is one surprising proposal in all this that I find myself in the unusual position of supporting, and that\u2019s the Administration\u2019s call, apparently driven by Ivanka Trump, for the introduction of six weeks of publicly-funded paid parental leave<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The US is the only<\/em> developed country in the world without some form of guaranteed paid parental leave<\/a>. Even in the developing world there are only three countries \u2013 Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Guyana \u2013 without some form of paid maternity leave<\/a>. This matters for lots of reasons.<\/p>\n

For one, the US has one of the lowest rates of labour force participation among women of prime childbearing age in the OECD. See chart\u00a0below. That\u2019s a lot of unused potential that could be increasing family incomes and driving up economic growth.<\/p>\n

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In general, the countries with higher maternal participation rates tend to be those where parents have access to well-developed paid parental leave schemes complemented with extensive, affordable childcare. Of course this association does not prove a causal relationship from one to the other, but there\u2019s a growing body of evidence from parental leave reforms across the world, including in California which introduced its own modest paid parental leave scheme in 2004 in the absence of a federal scheme, that access to paid parental leave does<\/em> lead to increased labour supply among mothers of young children, particularly among more disadvantaged mothers who are the least likely to be covered by employer-funded schemes and the least likely to be able to afford to take unpaid<\/em> leave in the absence of a paid leave scheme<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Paid parental leave also impacts positively on health for both mother and baby, for example by extending breastfeeding and allowing more recovery time among mothers who would otherwise have to return to work sooner. For compelling accounts of the experiences of mothers in the US who had to return to work within a few weeks of giving birth see this presentation from Jessica Shortall:<\/p>\n

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