Paid Paternal Leave And The United States - 1386 Words

Paid Paternal Leave and the United States Part One: Problem Statement/Background The women s rights movement in the 1960s made one of the most monumental accomplishments of gaining equal opportunities in the workplace with the Equal Pay Act guaranteeing women â€Å"equal pay for equal work† as their male counterparts. Although this opened doors for women to have the same opportunities in the workforce as men it didn t, however, address the fact that women would most likely work during pregnancy and after giving birth. During the late 1970s, the amount of women in the workforce increased and consequently it spurred on the mandate of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act banning businesses on firing or denying women jobs based on â€Å"pregnancy,†¦show more content†¦In the U.S. only about 16 percent of companies offer fully paid maternity leave and many families take on significant debt and resort to take on public assistance during the birth of their child. This is contrasted against Sweden, where parents are given over a year of paid leave days per child, to be shared between them and used any time before the child turns eight. The U.S. has recently became the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns when Australia - the only other developed country that didn’t have a paid paternal policy - just passed a parental leave law in 2010. Most of the rest of the world has paid maternity leave policies, too. Papua New Guinea – a developing country – is the only other country that does not. Additionally, several countries in Europe give new fathers paid time off as well or allow parents to share paid leave i.e. Sweden (huffingtonpost.com). Although the U.S. has some form of paid leave only half of all first-time parents take any paid leave and that compensation usually comes from other benefits such as sick days or vacation time. Furthermore, only about 13 percent of the private sector workforce is employed by companies that offer designated paid family leave. Recently, California, New Jersey and Rhode Island have implement