The Case for Parental Leave in the United States

Excel Data Dashboard

CASE DESCRIPTION


As someone who has primarily worked in a field that does not offer paid leave, I have witnessed colleagues who have struggled to navigate having to choose between receiving an income and caring for their newborn. I am passionate about this topic not only because of what I see regularly in my place of work, but also because of how it impacts marginalized communities that I identify with.


I chose to dive deeper to find out what leave policies were like across other industries.


This data was retrieved from a public dataset on Kaggle from June, 2023. Excel was utilized to clean the data, draw insights, and create an interactive dashboard.

KEY FINDINGS


  • The International Labor Organization (ILO) has a standard of 14 weeks of maternity leave. Only 69% of the companies that were crowdsourced for this dataset met this standard.
  • The companies with 14 weeks of leave were mainly represented in the technology and finance industry. 20 tech companies and 8 companies offered 14 weeks of both maternity and paternity leave to their employees.
  • Grant Thornton offered the most parental leave to their employees with 51 weeks offered for both maternity and paternity leave.
  • While 97% of companies offered paid maternity leave, there is some work to do when it comes to improving paternity leave policies. Only 16% of companies offered paid paternity leave, and only 2% offered unpaid leave.

RECOMMENDATIONS


  • In order to ensure alignment with the recommendations of the International Labor Organization(ILO), companies should review their current family leave policy to provide a minimum of 14 weeks leave for new parents.
  • Due to a discrepency between maternity and paternity leave, the details of policies should be reviewed to ensure that both parents receive an equal opportunity for paid leave.
  • The data does not provide information on leave for gender diverse individuals, nor does it provide information on leave for same sex relationships or non-birthing parents. Policies should be updated to reflect language that includes all genders and relatioship types, and includes adoption to ensure equitable leave for all employees.
  • Companies should monitor ILO recommendations and update their policies accordingly to maintain alignment with recommendations in the future.