The U.S. is notorious for its failure to guarantee paid family leave for all workers. At the end of 2019, though, some progress was made on behalf of people who work for the federal government. A new law was passed that will give civilian employees of the federal government paid leave after the birth, adoption, or fostering of a child. That law, though, is much more generous to married-parent families than single-parent families.
As Indiana University law professor Deborah Widiss pointed out, it doesn’t have to be that way. In Iceland, for example, mothers get three months of leave, fathers get three months, and another three months is available to either parent. Single parents get the same total amount of time off — nine months.
In the U.S., single-parent families are eligible for only half the leave that two-parent families can take. As a matter of fairness, this would be important even if fewer than 5% of the women giving birth were unmarried, as was true, for example, from 1940 through around 1956. (Graph is here.) Since 2006, though, a remarkable percentage of women – about 40% — have been unmarried when they gave birth.
As is so often the case, the disparities hit certain groups particularly hard. People with less money are more likely to have children outside of marriage. They need paid leave more, but they get less of it. People with less education are also more likely to be single parents, as are Hispanics and Blacks.
The new U.S. law provides 12 weeks of paid leave for mothers and another 12 for fathers. In same-sex couples, too, each person can take 12 weeks “so long as each is recognized as a parent.”
In practice, the law could end up less unfair than it first appears if fathers rarely took advantage of the paid leave available to them. The heterosexual married-parent families in which only the mothers took the leave would look similar to the single-mother families. But that’s not what is likely to happen. As Professor Widiss noted:
“Early evidence from states that have implemented paid leave laws suggests that fathers are taking advantage of the opportunity. In California and Rhode Island, men account for almost 40% of parental leave claims. This rate is far above the average for industrialized countries of 18%, and very close to that of international leaders.”
The most obvious way to ensure that single-parent families are treated the same as married-parent families is to follow the lead of Iceland and offer both families the same amount of paid leave. Professor Widiss points out that there are other possibilities as well, such as “allowing single parents…to share benefits with a different family member – like the baby’s grandparent.”
I’d like to see even more options. We know informally – for example, from memoirs written by single women – that single people sometimes show up at the doorsteps of their sisters who have just given birth, and stay to help for substantial periods of time. Undoubtedly, other single people are doing the same for friends.
Research shows that single people are especially likely to be there for other people who need help for three months or more, even if they are not relatives. The availability of paid leave for single people willing to provide such help would be especially valuable, since they typically have only their own salaries for support; they cannot count on a spouse to pay their bills while they take time off from work to care for a friend’s child.
Of course, employees with new children are not the only ones in need of paid leave. In 2016, I addressed this issue in an article for the Washington Post:
“Paid family leave is of little help to single people if it does not cover the people who count as family to them. Fortunately, there is some progress on that front, too. In a September executive order, President Obama required federal contractors to provide sick leave for their employees. The leave “may be used by an employee for an absence resulting from caring for a child, a parent, a spouse, a domestic partner, or any other individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”
“The affinity clause was a major victory for single people. It wasn’t the first. Two months before, the National Partnership for Women and Families compiled a summary of legislative action on paid sick days at the state and local levels. They found the same wording in bills that were proposed in four states — Arizona, Hawaii, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.”
Now, a few years later, there is some progress being made beyond federal and state governments. Without waiting to be required to do so, certain companies are creating paid leave policies that are range beyond just the birth, adoption, or fostering of children. In a December 2019 article, Jena McGregor recounted stories from employees who had benefitted from such policies. Workers were able to take time off, with pay, to grieve the deaths of family members, to care for ailing parents and seriously ill older children, and even to stay home the week after adopting a pet.
I’d like to see such policies get implemented more systematically and more broadly. And I’d like the affinity clause, that recognizes the importance of people such as close friends, to be routinely included. That’s not just a nicety. It is a reflection of the way we live now, when the proportion of people who marry has been declining for decades, the age of marriage for those who do marry has been increasing, family size has been shrinking, and more adults are having no children at all. Taken together, these deeply significant demographic changes have created a new reality, in which friends, rather than relatives, are at the center of the lives of more and more people – especially single people.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
