Download pdf
A Comparative Study of Maternity Leave Systems in the United States and Canada
- 1 The Chinese University of Hongkong
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Since World War II, Western countries have paid more and more attention to protecting workers’ rights and interests. Various laws on employment security have been passed in turn, and the value of women has been highlighted. At the social level, women can be used as an effective supplement to the social labour force to ensure the continuous output of social productivity and, at the same time, effectively improve the social status of women; At the household level, in order to improve the low birth rate after World War II, effectively ensuring women’s rights and interests can strengthen the role of female “mothers”, effectively increase fertility rates and ensure the health of newborns. With the exploration of women’s value, how women should balance family and work has received widespread attention, and the implementation of maternity and various family benefits has protected women. However, as “neighbours,” the United States and Canada have very different attitudes regarding women’s maternity benefits. This paper attempts to use case studies to explore why maternity benefits in the United States are less generous than those in Canada, which is also an economically developed country. Paid maternity leave is only partially impassable for the United States, but it has difficulties. The study shows that the US reluctance to provide paid leave at the national legal level is related to its market and family policies, ideology, company values, and popular support. It further explores possible recommendations for the reality of maternity benefits in the United States.
Keywords
paid maternity leave, gender inequality, neoliberalism
[1]. Rossin-Slater, M., Ruhm, C. J., & Waldfogel, J. (2013). The effects of California’s paid family leave program on mothers’ leave-taking and subsequent labor market outcomes. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 32(2), 224–245. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.21676.
[2]. Fallon, K. M., Mazar, A., & Swiss, L. (2017). The development benefits of maternity leave. World Development, 96, 102–118.
[3]. O’Connor, J. S., Orloff, A. S., & Shaver, S. (1999). States, markets, families : Gender, liberalism, and social policy in Australia, Canada, great Britain, and the United States. Cambridge University Press.
[4]. Berger, L. M., & Waldfogel, J. (2004). Maternity leave and the employment of new mothers in the United States. Journal of Population Economics, 17(2), 331–349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-003-0159-9.
[5]. Moss, P., & Deven, F. (2017). International review of leave policies and related research 2017. Leave Network.
[6]. Vezzosi, E. (2007). Why is there No maternity leave in the United States? European models for a law that was never passed. In M. Vaudagna (Ed.), The place of Europe in American history : Twentieth-century perspectives (pp. 243–263).
[7]. Hegewisch, A., & Gornick, J. C. (2016). “Paid Parental Leave: A Critical Review of the Literature.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 23(4), 498-525.
[8]. Gornick, J. C., Meyers, M. K., & Ross, K. E. (1997). Supporting the Employment of New Mothers: Pre-and Post-Birth Job Leave in Great Britain, Canada, and the U.S. Journal of Labor Economics, 15(S1), S145-S174.
[9]. Hegewisch, A., & Gornick, J. C. (2017). Why does the US lag behind the rest of the world in paid maternity leave? Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, 42(2), 273-292. doi: 10.1215/03616878-3691923.
[10]. Horowitz, J., Parker, K., Graf, N., & Livingston, G. (2017). Americans widely support paid family and medical leave, but differ over specific policies: Personal experiences with leave vary sharply by income. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.
[11]. Stanczyk, A. (2019). Does paid family leave improve household economic security following a birth? Evidence from California. Social Service Review, 93(2), 262–304. https://doi.org/10.1086/703138.
[12]. Dube, A., & Kaplan, E. (2002). Paid family leave in California: An analysis of costs and benefits. Retrieved from https://paidfamilyleave.org/pdf/dube.pdf.
[13]. Orloff, A. S. (1993). Gender and the social rights of citizenship - The comparativeanalysis of gender relations and welfare states. American Sociological Review, 58(3), 303–328. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095903.
[14]. Wikander, U., Kessler-Harris, A., & Lewis, J. (1995). Protecting women : Labor legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880-1920. University of Illinois Press.
[15]. Misra, J. (1998). Mothers or workers? The value of women’s labor: Women and the emergence of family allowance policy. Gender and Society, 12(4), 376–399. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124398012004002.
[16]. Vosko, L. F. (2010). Managing the Margins: Gender, citizenship, and the international regulation of precarious employment. Oxford University Press.
Cite this article
Feng,J. (2023). A Comparative Study of Maternity Leave Systems in the United States and Canada. Communications in Humanities Research,12,315-322.
Data availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
Disclaimer/Publisher's Note
The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s). EWA Publishing and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content.
About volume
Volume title: Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Politics and Socio-Humanities (ICGPSH 2023)
© 2024 by the author(s). Licensee EWA Publishing, Oxford, UK. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. Authors who
publish this series agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the series right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this
series.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the series's published
version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial
publication in this series.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and
during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See
Open access policy for details).