This paper evaluates the impacts of unpaid maternity leave provisions of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) on children's birth and infant health outcomes in the United States. My ...identification strategy uses variation in pre-FMLA maternity leave policies across states and variation in which firms are covered by FMLA provisions. Using Vital Statistics data and difference-in-difference-in-difference methodology, I find that maternity leave led to small increases in birth weight, decreases in the likelihood of a premature birth, and substantial decreases in infant mortality for children of college-educated and married mothers, who were most able to take advantage of unpaid leave. My results are robust to the inclusion of numerous controls for maternal, child, and county characteristics, state, year, and month fixed effects, and state-year interactions, as well as across several different specifications.
Women now constitute a significant portion of the workforce, making the effects of pregnancy on professional image (others' perceptions of competence and character at work) more salient. While ...opinions regarding how pregnant women should manage others' impressions and the consequences of doing so abound (Noveck, 2012) research to substantiate or disconfirm these opinions has lagged. In this paper, we present three studies that develop and test a model of social identitybased impression management (SIM) techniques used by pregnant workers. In Study 1 (n = 35), we utilized qualitative methods to identify the motives and strategies used by pregnant women to manage their professional images. In the second study, we collected two samples (n = 199 and n = 133) to develop and validate two scales based on the motives and strategies identified in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 200), we employed a time-lagged design to examine how SIM motives and strategies affect important workplace outcomes: perceived discrimination, burnout, and returning to one's job after maternity leave. Our findings demonstrate both positive and negative outcomes of the motives and strategies women use to manage their images at work when pregnant.
Working mothers often find themselves in a difficult situation when trying to balance work and family responsibilities and to manage expectations about their work and parental effectiveness. ...Family-friendly policies such as maternity leave have been introduced to address this issue. But how are women who then make the decision to go or not go on maternity leave evaluated? We presented 296 employed participants with information about a woman who made the decision to take maternity leave or not, or about a control target for whom this decision was not relevant, and asked them to evaluate her both in the work and the family domain. We found that both decisions had negative consequences, albeit in different domains. While the woman taking maternity leave was evaluated more negatively in the work domain, the woman deciding against maternity leave was evaluated more negatively in the family domain. These evaluations were mediated by perceptions of work/family commitment priorities. We conclude that while it is important to introduce policies that enable parents to reconcile family and work demands, decisions about whether to take advantage of these policies can have unintended consequences – consequences that can complicate women's efforts to balance work and childcare responsibilities.
•We investigate how women's decisions regarding maternity leave affects their evaluation.•Women who choose to take maternity leave are seen as less competent at work and less worthy of organizational rewards.•Women who choose not to take maternity leave are seen as worse parents and less desirable partners.•Perceptions of whether women prioritize family or work play an important role in these processes.
In this paper, I assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between highly educated (high-earning) and less-educated (low-earning) women. ...I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increased the financial incentives, by up to 21,000 EUR, for highly educated and higher-earning women. Using the large differential changes in maternity leave benefits across education and income groups in a differences-in-differences design, I estimate the causal impact of the reform on fertility for up to 5 years. In addition to demonstrating an up to 23% increase in the fertility of tertiary-educated women, I find a positive, statistically significant effect of increased benefits on fertility, driven mainly by women at the middle and upper end of the earnings distribution. Overall, the results suggest that earnings-dependent maternity leave benefits, which compensate women according to their opportunity cost of childbearing, could successfully reduce the fertility rate disparity related to mothers' education and earnings.
•Evidence on the effect of paid maternity leave on fertility decisions is sparse.•I analyze the introduction of earnings-related paid maternity leave in Germany.•I use large differential changes across earnings and education groups using differences-in-differences.•The reform increased fertility, in particular of highly educated women and higher-earning women.•Paid maternity leave is effective policy for incentivizing fertility in women with higher opportunity costs
El año 2011 se extendió la licencia maternal postnatal en Chile de 12 a 24 semanas.Objetivo: Determinar el efecto de la extensión de la licencia maternal en la prevalencia de lactancia materna en ...Chile, según grupos de pobreza.Método: Estudio ecológico sobre la prevalencia anual de lactancia materna exclusiva al 1° mes y 6° mes y complementada al 12° mes en el sistema público de salud entre 2008 y 2018, en base a los registros estadísticos mensuales de la atención primaria. Se calculó la prevalencia a nivel país y por grupos de regiones según el nivel de pobreza reportado por la Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional (CASEN). Se determinó la variación en la tendencia temporal mediante modelos de regresión de Poisson segmentados (joinpoint), estimando los porcentajes de cambio anual.Resultados: A nivel nacional, las prevalencias de lactancia materna exclusiva al 6° mes y complementada a los 12 meses aumentaron 5,9% y 4,2% anualmente desde 2011, alcanzando un 58,9% y 40,2% en 2018, respectivamente. Este patrón se repite en los diferentes grupos de pobreza regional, con mayores prevalencias en el grupo más pobre, alcanzando 61,7% al 6° mes y 51,6% a los 12 meses en 2018. La lactancia materna exclusiva al mes disminuyó 1,7% anual entre 2008 y 2014, para luego mantenerse, alcanzando un 74,4% en 2018.Conclusiones: La prevalencia de lactancia materna exclusiva al 6° mes aumentó significativamente a partir del año 2011, con la extensión de la licencia maternal. Este efecto se produce en todos los grupos regionales de pobreza, estrechando las diferencias en la prevalencia.
Maternity leave is a critical employee benefit that allows mothers to recover from the stress of pregnancy and childbirth and bond with their new baby. We aimed to examine the association between the ...extension of a maternity leave policy and maternal use of mental health services and prescription drugs in a universal public healthcare system.
This study uses administrative medical records from 18,000 randomly selected women who gave birth three months before and after an extension of the maternity leave policy. More specifically, mothers who gave birth after January 1st 2001, were entitled to 50 weeks of paid maternity leave, while mothers who gave birth before that date were entitled to only 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. Medical records were analyzed over a seven-year period (i.e., from October 1998 to March 2006). We examined the number and costs of mothers' medical visits for mental health care in the five years following delivery, as well as maternal use of prescribed medication for mental health problems.
We found that mothers with extended maternity leave had - 0.12 (95%CI=-0.21; -0.02) fewer medical visits than mothers without a more generous maternity leave and that the cost of mental health services was Can$5 less expensive per women. These differences were found specifically during the extended maternity leave period.
The extra time away from work may help mothers to balance new family dynamics which may result in less demand on the healthcare system.
We study a change in maternity leave entitlements in Norway. Mothers giving birth before July 1, 1977, were eligible for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after that date were ...entitled to 4 months of paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. The increased time spent with the child led to a 2 percentage point decline in high school dropout rates and a 5 percent increase in wages at age 30. These effects were larger for the children of mothers who, in the absence of the reform, would have taken very low levels of unpaid leave.
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