Danielle Weisberg was sitting on the floor with her 1-year-old son in October of last year when she received a news alert that paid family leave had been eliminated from President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package.
Weisberg, who is co-founder of theSkimm, a media company designed to help millennial women live smarter, said, “I felt in that moment both the weight of being a business owner and the disappointment of being part of this country that has not figured out yet how to support ways to make sure our workforce has what they need to succeed.”
According to Paidleave.us, one in four mothers in America returns to work just 10 days after giving birth, and the U.S. is the only industrialized country without a national paid family leave policy.
Weisberg immediately posted a photo of her son on the Instagram account that she shares with theSkimm co-founder Carly Zakin, along with a caption that concluded: “it’s disgraceful that the U.S. does not have paid family leave. To continue to be a competitive, modern, and at all equitable society — we need to get our sh-- together when it comes to how we support parents.”
Weisberg and Zakin spent the next 24 hours reading hundreds of stories from parents across the country who were forced to go back to work too soon after giving birth, parents who had no paid maternity leave at all and parents who literally worked remotely from laptops during labor to accrue enough work days to become eligible for short-term disability. Because the post seemed to strike a nerve among their followers, they encouraged parents to continue sharing their stories by using the hashtag #showusyourleave.
One state government lawyer (and mom of four) posted a photo with her newborn twins along with the comment that she received no paid maternity leave but her engineer husband received one week of paternity leave. Another mother shared that she received just three days of paid maternity leave and used the sick days she had been saving for 10 years to heal and bond with her daughter. And some have used the hashtag to troll organizations not providing paid leave.
The co-founders of theSkimm, who offer 18 weeks of paid leave for adoption, fostering and surrogacy at their company (plus bereavement leave for pregnancy loss, phased return to work, unlimited PTO, backup childcare and flex scheduling), also wrote an op-ed urging parents to “get loud about the struggles we’re faced with in navigating new parenthood and how paid family leave, or lack thereof, has an impact.” They also created a Change.org petition to help amplify the conversation and advocate for national action. Today, it has over 30,000 signatures.
The campaign went viral at the end of January when Weisberg and Zakin encouraged companies to be transparent about their parental leave policies by posting them on social media. Almost 300 companies—like Pinterest, Hootsuite, Instacart, and Morgan Stanley—have responded across all social platforms. As a result, rather than burying leave policies in dense employee handbooks, some companies are sharing them clearly and openly with the public for the first time.
The big question is if the campaign will help facilitate real change at the national level. Weisberg and Zakin certainly hope so. “Our goal is to build a movement to expand paid family leave, leader by leader, company by company and employee by employee so that every American has access to the information and policies they need to support their families,” said Zakin.
Accessing parental leave is a “cumbersome” process
In the past, if employees discovered they were pregnant, the onus would be on them to find out their parental benefits and figure out how to use them, explained Kimberly Didrikson, mother of three and founder of Learning Motherhood, a company that helps parents through the transitions of parental leave and the return to work.
Didrikson said, “You do the digging. You pull out that employee handbook you haven’t looked at since you started with the organization and look through it to figure out what you have for options. And then from there, you are also on your own to find out what your state has available for you.”
Didrikson said that in many cases the responsibility is still currently on the parent to do all of the legwork: “From getting the right information over to your company, to getting the information to your state, to actually getting paid. And then if you want to talk to someone that’s human, you’re going to be on hold for quite some time. It’s a cumbersome process.”
And that is only if your company offers a leave policy. If not, the only paid leave you might be eligible for is through the state—and state policies vary widely. Currently, only seven states have paid family and medical leave programs available for eligible workers.
Why parental leave is a win-win for employees and companies
Parental leave began to become more prominently discussed when Google’s parent company, Alphabet, expanded its paid parental leave policy from 12 weeks to 18 weeks in 2007. As a result, the retention rate of women post-maternity leave increased by 50 percent.
“Previous to that change from Google, most policies in the U.S.—if companies even provided any leave—were 12 weeks, and that 12 weeks was only for the birthing parent,” said Mary Beth Ferrante, mom of two and founder of Wrk/360, a company that helps improve workplace culture by decreasing burnout and caregiver stigma. “What we saw after that first change from Google was a movement to recognize that: one, we need to give mothers more time; and two, that particularly in tech and financial industries, companies started offering increases in paternity leave,” she said.
Ferrante and Didrikson cited the immense benefits of generous and transparent parental leave policies from a company standpoint. In addition to increased retention rates, parental leave policies also demonstrate support for employees, attract top talent and build gender equity at a leadership level.
Weisberg said that the ultimate goal of the #showusyourleave campaign is to provide transparency and start to change the paid family leave disparity: “There is not a lot of hope out there that this is going to get done at a national level. We need to make sure that companies step up. And this campaign and the petition is really about getting them to do that.”
The company has received anecdotal feedback from audience members who have learned about the campaign and approached their companies to open a dialogue about leave policies and how to best adjust them to fit the needs of employees.
Weisberg stressed that paid family leave isn’t just a “nice to have.” She said, “This is not a perk. This is a necessity. It is imperative as a company that you have the basics in place, and strong family leave policies should be part of the essential foundational package of what you are offering your employees in order to be considered competitive.”
On a personal level, Weisberg is pregnant with her second child, who will enter the world in late spring. In her Instagram reveal of theSkimm’s newest “launch,” she said, “This has me thinking how lucky I am to be in a position to set a paid family leave policy that I’m proud of—and also to benefit from it.”