NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN: Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible for women with children to remain in the work force. But these policies often have unintended consequences…
Unlike many countries, the United States has few federal policies for working parents. One is the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides workers at companies of a certain size with 12 weeks of unpaid leave.
Women are 5 percent more likely to remain employed but 8 percent less likely to get promotions than they were before it became law, according to an unpublished new study by Mallika Thomas, who will be an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. She attributed this partly to companies that don’t take a chance on investing in the careers of women who might leave.
“The problem ends up being that all women, even those who do not anticipate having children or cutting back in hours, may be penalized,” she said… (more)
EDITOR: We as a nation have a reason to subsidize parenting for infants and pre-school for children. So we as taxpayers should pay for this.
To expect businesses to spend more for female workers and therefore not either avoid hiring them and, when they do, paying them less, smacks more of communism than capitalism.
What many employers miss is the value of females as managers and executives once their youngsters become more self-sufficient or when mothers of young children have a good support system. We have long been aware of this and 80% of our firm’s managers are female.
