New Research Reports
For Women in Unions, Paid Leave is Not a Pipe Dream
Institute for Women's Policy Research | Jeff Hayes | November 2, 2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted deep inequalities in access to basic health benefits like paid family and medical leave, paid sick time, and paid vacation. During the pandemic, these benefits were especially important: allowing workers to take time off to recover from the virus, care for a sick family member, or receive the vaccine without worrying about losing income. Union membership provides improved access to critical benefits like paid leave, along with better pay, health insurance, and pensions. For women, this advantage is especially helpful for weathering crises like COVID-19 and the resulting “she-cession.”
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Evaluating the Role of Campus Child Care in Student Parent Success
Institute for Women's Policy Research | Lindsey Reichlin Cruse, Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, Amanda Hare, and Susana Contreras-Mendez | October 26, 2021
To ensure student parents are wholly supported in their educational pathways, research is needed to understand the connection between quality, affordable child care and student parents' academic outcomes. Yet several challenges persist that make rigorous study of this connection difficult. Drawing on interviews with campus child care directors and a review of data and relevant literature, this brief presents a snapshot of the availability and importance of campus child care services for student parent success. It concludes with recommendations to improve conditions for rigorous research on the role of campus child care in the outcomes of college students with children.
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Emergency Response: Changes in State Child Care Assistance Policies During the Pandemic
National Women's Law Center | Karen Schulman | November 4, 2021
COVID profoundly destabilized the already tenuous child care sector. During the early months of the pandemic, many child care programs were forced to close under state health and safety mandates. Programs that remained open or reopened during the crisis struggled with new health and safety protocols that increased costs. Many programs also saw a drop in enrollment as some parents had concerns about safety, and other parents decided not to use child care while they were working from home or unemployed. As a result, child care programs, which already had very tight margins prior to the pandemic, have experienced even more intense financial pressures during the pandemic.
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Support for Paid Family Leave among Small Employers Increases during the COVID-19 Pandemic
National Bureau of Economic Research | Ann Bartel, Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher Ruhm, Meredith Slopen, and Jane Waldfogel | November 2021
Proposals for paid family leave (PFL) legislation in the U.S. are often met with opposition from employer organizations, who fear disruptions to business, especially among small employers. But there has been limited data on employers' views. This study surveyed firms with 10-99 employees on their attitudes towards PFL programs before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers found high support for state PFL programs in 2019 that rose substantially over the course of the pandemic: by the fall of 2020, almost 70% of firms were supportive. Thus, concerns about negative impacts on small employers should not impede efforts to expand PFL.
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Severe Maternal Morbidity in the United States: A Primer
The Commonwealth Fund | Eugene Declercq and Laurie Zephyrin | October 28, 2021
This report describes the severity and breadth of the maternal morbidity crisis in the U.S. and shows why addressing it is critical to advancing maternal health equity. As many as 60,000 women in the U.S. experience unexpected outcomes during labor or delivery that have serious short- or long-term effects on their health and well-being. A greater health system and policy focus on maternal health before, during, and after childbirth is needed to prevent deaths related to pregnancy and address inequities.
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Telework, Childcare, and Mothers’ Labor Supply
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis | Misty Heggeness and Palak Suri | October 28, 2021
This report studies the impact of increased pandemic-related childcare responsibilities on custodial mothers by telework compatibility of their job. The disparity between mothers and fathers widened over time, indicating the prevalence of inequality in sharing household duties. By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, mothers' employment was still adversely impacted by childcare disruptions. Our findings emphasize that while flexible work has been shown to increase women's labor supply, it is not sufficient to ensure continued and increasing levels of women's labor force participation if accessible and affordable childcare is unavailable while they work for pay.
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