Sponsor
Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award No. K12HD043488 and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation under Grant No. 48272.
Published In
Health Equity
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-1-2021
Subjects
Parental Leave -- Case studies, Workplace -- Policies
Abstract
Purpose: Severe racial inequities in maternal and infant health in the United States are caused by the many forms of systemic racism. One manifestation of systemic racism that has received little attention is access to paid parental leave. The aim of this article is to characterize racial/ethnic inequities in access to paid leave after the birth of a child.
Methods: We analyzed data on women who were employed during pregnancy (n=908) from the Bay Area Parental Leave Study of Mothers, a survey of mothers who gave birth in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016–2017. We examined differences in access to government- and employer-paid leave, the duration of leave taken, and the percent of usual pay received while on leave. To explore these differences, we further examined knowledge of paid leave benefits and sources of information.
Results: Non-Hispanic (NH) black and Hispanic women had significantly less access to paid leave through their employers or through government programs than their NH white and Asian counterparts. Relative to white women, Asian, Hispanic, and black women received 0.9 (ppp
Conclusions: Inequitable access to paid parental leave through both employers and government programs exacerbates racial inequities at birth. This form of structural racism could be addressed by policies expanding access to paid leave.
Rights
Copyright: Julia M. Goodman et al., 2021; Published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License [CC-BY] (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1089/heq.2021.0001
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/36687
Citation Details
Goodman, J. M., Williams, C., & Dow, W. H. (2021). Racial/Ethnic Inequities in Paid Parental Leave Access. Health Equity, 5(1), 738–749. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2021.0001