Employers and Their Pregnant Employees : New Study Finds Wide Gap Between Corporate and Work Force Views of Parental Leave Policy

NEW YORK —  Everyone knows about Jane. Jane is part of the 44% of the work force that is female, and among the 75% to 80% of that female work population who will become pregnant while employed. When Jane announced her pregnancy, her employer did everything right. Congratulated her, first off. Helped her work out a generous period of leave time. Even planned a part-time return program; just what she wanted.

“And guess what?” said Phyllis Silverman. “Jane did not return.”

Jane, unfortunately, is both a symbol of work-force America’s failure to accommodate women employees adequately during their childbearing years--and an uncomfortable example of why so many companies find it difficult to deal with women who both work and have children.

As president of Catalyst, a national nonprofit organization that works with corporations to develop the leadership capabilities of women, Felice Schwartz has studied corporate America’s response to the rising number of mothers and mothers-to-be on the job. Silverman designed and directed the project that became Catalyst’s “Report on a National Study of Parental Leave.”

“The prevailing feeling in the corporate world today,” Schwartz said, “is that women who have children are not as likely to make the same commitment to their careers as are men.”

On the contrary, Silverman said her research has shown that “women are quite interested in work and their careers, and they are similarly quite interested in their families.”

While national parental leave bills are pending in both the House and Senate, America remains the only industrialized country that has no national parental and medical leave policy. “We’re kind of behind the times in building a bridge” between home and the office, said Maureen Maxwell, a legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), one of the co-sponsors of the House version of a measure that would make parental leave mandatory.

And yet women with children under the age of 3 constitute the fastest-growing segment of the national work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Indeed, 46.8% of women with children under 1 year of age are working outside the home, up from 34% in 1979.

“I think parental leave, or I suppose we should say the lack of parental leave, is a crisis for the working mother,” said Barbara J. Berg, author of “The Crisis of the Working Mother” (Summit Books). “I think the present situation gives families--and mostly women--the near-impossible choice of being with their children or child, or keeping their job.”

Policy Suggestions

Two and a half years ago, Catalyst’s Career and Family Center launched what it believes now to be the most extensive study ever of corporate parental leave policies. Three-hundred eighty-four corporate respondents completed a 10-page questionnaire and 112 women participated in focus groups in eight major cities. The resulting “Corporate Guide to Parental Leaves,” unveiled here recently, contains clear suggestions for all aspects of parental leave policy. It also produced findings that Silverman, a social scientist, termed “constantly surprising.”

Probably the most startling revelation was that rather than seeking prolonged periods at home with their babies, women deemed three months the ideal leave time following pregnancy. “When we asked about the ideal leave, over and over what we got from the perspective of both an employee and a mother was three months,” Silverman said. “But employees wanted payment during the leave, and they wanted a part-time transition back onto the job.”

In fact, 63% of the companies in the Catalyst study reported that the average length of disability time for maternity was five to eight weeks. A scant 4.7% of the companies reported an average of one to four weeks and 32.2% showed nine to 12 weeks.

Sixty percent of the companies Catalyst looked at said they offered limited part-time return for some employees. But only in one case--Corning Glass Co.--was that policy actually written out explicitly.

‘Disability’ Leave

Since the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed in 1978, employers have been required to treat pregnancy exactly as they treat short-term illnesses and injuries. Of the companies that answered the Catalyst survey, fully 95% offered some short-term disability leave to employees--although 23.2% said they had shortened their unpaid leave periods since the 1978 legislation. About 13% had lengthened the unpaid leave period.

Only 38.9% of the companies Catalyst studied offered full payment during disability leave, with 57.3% offering partial payment. Unpaid disability leave was provided by 3.8% of the respondents.

For a majority of companies (62.7%), compensation during disability was linked to an employee’s length of service. About one-fourth of the companies used job rank as a determination of compensation.

Just over half the companies, or 51.8%, allowed women to supplement their disability with unpaid leave and guaranteed job return. Thirty-seven percent of the companies offered unpaid leave for men. For women, the length of unpaid leave with a job guarantee varied from one week to one year, but in more than half the cases the length was three months or less.

In listing conditions for reinstatement, more companies--42.6%--offered a comparable job than offered the same job (38%).

Unpaid Work at Home

One more surprise in the Catalyst findings was the number of women who continued to work at home during leave time after a child was born--but on an unpaid basis. “When we talked to the 112 women in our focus groups,” Silverman said, “maybe two or three did not do some work at home.” In some cases, she found, “women were coming into the office gratis--they were working free for a day.”

That result certainly conformed to the experience of one recently pregnant professional, for example, who recalled making business calls from home the day she brought her daughter home from the hospital.

The Catalyst study showed also that attitudes toward parental leave often did not coincide with the actual policy. Although 37% of the companies offered unpaid leave for men, for instance, “we found that among those companies, 41% of those same companies did not consider it reasonable for men to take any leave--in spite of the policy,” Silverman said. Similarly, “even though 52% of our companies offered unpaid leaves to women, 80% of all companies thought it was reasonable for women to take unpaid leaves.”

Silverman said she was “amazed,” too, at the “extent of responsibility that women in managerial and nonmanagerial jobs felt toward their jobs and their colleagues.” In focus groups, Silverman said she heard consistently that women were particularly concerned about finding suitable replacements for them during their leave periods. “There was some guilt (about being away from the job), and there was tremendous responsibility about that job,” she said. “They wanted that job to be done well.”

Complicated Issue

One thing the research pointed to, Silverman said, is that parental leave is a complicated issue. “If there were a realization of the number of people that are going to be out on leave, there would be more attention to systematizing a policy.”

Roger Shelley, president of the Revlon Foundation, one of the sponsors of the Catalyst report and guidelines, observed that “Women are not just striving to be in the work force. They are here, and they are going to be here.”

On the other hand, Shelley conceded that his own company had been remiss in formally acknowledging this trend. “To be perfectly honest,” he said, “we do not even have an articulated policy like this--and it is in our own self-interest that we do it.

“The competition for bright people--women or men--is fierce,” Shelley said.

And Felice Schwartz concurred: “A leave of a couple of months--and, I would say, even a year or two--pales next to the need that we have in this country for the talent that women bring to the marketplace.

Said Silverman: “I think a company would have to have its head in the sand not to know what’s going on.”

“Even the smallest company has half of its employees female,” Schwartz said; “you know, they’re not expendable anymore.”

Still, author and working mother Berg said, “As long as corporations have been able to get away with it--as long as women have been willing to twist themselves into pretzel shapes to conform to this, at great personal emotional and physical expense, there’s been no reason for companies to change.”

Changing Attitudes

Just 20 or so years ago, Schwartz recalled, “women were guilt-ridden and they were considered pariahs if they went back to work after having children. Today that woman has a navy blue suit and a briefcase and is considered an accepted part of our society.”

Recalling one company where “six managerial women announced their pregnancies at once”--only to discover that the company had no official parental leave policy at all, Silverman emphasized that one of Catalyst’s firmest policy recommendations is that “a parental leave policy should be explicitly communicated in writing, clearly identifiable and distributed to all employees.”

Certainly, Silverman said, “we do not foresee the time when any manager will greet the leave of an employee as a cause for celebration.” Nonetheless, Schwartz predicted, “as soon as they digest the reality that women are going to be in the circle of the chief executive officer, all of this is going to fall into place.”