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Business News/ Companies / People/  Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer sparks parental leave debate
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Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer sparks parental leave debate

Mayer's announcement reignites the debate around pregnancy and leave in the US, especially because maternity leave is not guaranteed by law in the US

A file photo of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Photo: AFP Premium
A file photo of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Photo: AFP

New Delhi: Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s announcement of becoming a mother the second time round has made the headlines, albeit for all the wrong reasons.

Mayer announced in a blog post on 1 September that she was expecting twin daughters in December and that she planned to take limited time off from work. “Since this is a unique time in Yahoo’s transformation, I plan to approach the pregnancy and delivery as I did with my son three years ago, taking limited time away and working throughout," she wrote in the post.

Three years ago, in 2012, Mayer took only a fortnight off when she had her first born. At the time, she had quit Google and joined Yahoo as CEO.

Mayer’s announcement reignites the debate around pregnancy and leave in the US, especially because maternity leave is not guaranteed by law in the US. (To clarify, the current US maternity leave policy is directed by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 which includes a provision mandating 12 weeks of unpaid leave annually for mothers of newborn or newly adopted children.)

Coincidentally, Mayers’ statement comes soon after a bunch of tech and consulting companies in the US announced new and enhanced parental benefits.

In late August, global management consulting firm Accenture announced its expanded benefits for working parents in the US and Canada. One of the major highlights of this, according to the company’s press release, is offering primary caregivers, both women and men, the opportunity to work locally for one year following their return from the birth or adoption of a child. Accenture will also pay for lactating mothers to ship breast milk home to their infants while travelling for work.

A similar policy was announced by IBM in July, allowing working mothers to easily ship expressed breast milk back home to their babies while travelling on business. 

“These new benefits provide working parents—particularly those who travel frequently—with more flexibility as they navigate the challenges of raising a family while continuing to pursue their careers," said Julie Sweet, Accenture’s group chief executive – North America, in the press release.

Other tech majors like Microsoft too announced major changes in their parental leave policies. In its blog post, Microsoft outlines the new benefits. Specifically, the company has increased paid parental leave to 12 weeks, paid at 100%, for all mothers and fathers of new children. For birth mothers, this is in addition to the eight weeks of maternity disability leave they currently receive, paid at 100%, enabling them to now take a total of 20 weeks of fully paid leave if they choose. This will come into effect from 1 November.

Netflix goes a step further by introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off for as much time as they want during the first year after a child’s birth or adoption. “We want employees to have the flexibility and confidence to balance the needs of their growing families without worrying about work or finances. Parents can return part-time, full-time, or return and then go back out as needed. We’ll just keep paying them normally, eliminating the headache of switching to state or disability pay. Each employee gets to figure out what’s best for them and their family, and then works with their managers for coverage during their absences," says Tawni Cranz, Netflix’s chief talent officer.

So what has changed?

But the question that needs to be asked is how come all these big companies are going all maternal and family friendly?

It seems that the new benefits are an acknowledgment that tech companies are struggling with not only hiring women but also placing them in tech and leadership roles. This is borne out by the diversity data shared by tech companies that shows how poorly they are performing on workforce diversity.

Top tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple fare the worse. Google data showed that women comprise only 30% of the company’s total workforce, 21% women are in leadership roles, whereas 17% are in technology-related jobs. At Facebook, women form 32% of the total employee base and hold a meagre 16% of tech posts. In comparison, Twitter fares better with 34% of the workforce being women. In fact, the social media company aims to increase the overall representation of women in the company from 34% to 35%, representation in its tech division from 13% to 16%, and in leadership roles from to 22% to 25% by 2016.

As Anne-Marie Slaughter, current President and CEO of the New America Foundation, wrote in The Atlantic: “The best hope for improving the lot of all women is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. “

No wonder then that parental leaves and other ancillary benefits are seen as an important step in helping to improve representation of women in corporate jobs.

“Paid parental leave is important for stronger families and healthier children—and wage changes are especially important for women, who make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers nationally," says Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook Inc., in her Facebook post announcing the new benefits. Facebook allows new parents four months of paid leave, plus $4,000 in “baby cash", while rival Google Inc. provides as much as 18 weeks of paid leave. Yahoo itself offers up to 16 weeks’ paid leave for new mothers, roughly doubling what most mothers got in the past—this benefit ironically was rolled out by Mayer after she became CEO though she herself may not avail of it.

Other benefits

As if paid leave and monetary benefits were not enough, Apple and Facebook also offer to pay female employees who want to freeze their eggs, until they are ready to become parents.

Bloomberg also reports that KKR & Co., one of the oldest private equity firms, has started flying out nannies on business trips, allowing the mother to concentrate on her work, while the nanny takes care of the baby.

In stark contrast, motherhood seems to be a liability at Amazon as was reported in a recent New York Times article, as employees work 85 or more hours a week, rarely take vacation and have no paternity leave. Do the new benefits then clash with a workplace that is slowly becoming more bruising than compassionate?

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Published: 03 Sep 2015, 02:24 PM IST
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