Megan Sholar begins her book by outlining what should be seen as an alarming fact about the United States: it is the only industrialized country in the world that does not offer its citizens nationally sponsored paid maternity or parental leave from employment. While there is clear evidence that paid parental leaves have positive societal effects, from improving gender inequities in the workplace and home to providing greater economic security for lower income workers, Americans are quite divided over the need for federal intervention in this area. As a result, the one family leave policy that has successfully passed through Congress has been the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which only protects workers from job termination. Yet while the federal government has been unable to pass a paid parental leave policy, Sholar highlights the important variation that exists across the states and municipalities: some states provide their residents paid parental leaves while other states have proposed paid leave policies but have been unsuccessful in passing them through their state legislatures.
It is this variation in paid parental leave benefits across different levels of government that Sholar seeks to explore and explain in Getting Paid While Taking Time. The book’s core objective is to highlight the role that women’s organizations have played in ensuring successful passage of paid family leave policies. Sholar argues that when women’s organizations prioritize family leave as a core issue and when they are more politically cohesive about a policy solution, paid family leaves are more likely to be passed in legislatures. Using legislative histories supplemented with archives of documents produced by women’s organizations, she offers useful historical detail on the processes that have led to the failure to pass paid parental leave at the federal level. The book also offers a comparison across states and traces events that have led to policy success in some states against those that have led to policy failure in others.
An interesting insight offered in this book is how politically divided women’s organizations have been over what constitutes an ideal parental leave policy. Sholar takes as a given that parental leave is characterized as a women’s policy issue but emphasizes that even though women’s organizations take ownership of this issue, they are not in ideological agreement over how to implement it. On one side of the debate are women’s groups who advocate for “equal treatment” between men and women and believe that uniform parental leave policy should be given to all employees. An example of this would be to offer the same amount of paid leave to both men and women upon the birth or adoption of a child. On the other side are those who advocate policy that recognizes the special challenges that women experience in balancing work and family. Advocates of this position argue that parental leave policy is not problematic if “special treatment” is offered to women, typically in the form of longer paid leaves for women compared to those offered to men. This “equal treatment” versus “special treatment” divide characterizes feminist debates over how to implement paid leave.
Sholar explains how this political divide has challenged the strength and influence of women’s organizations on policy passage, particularly at the national level. While the equal treatment position does tend to dominate most arguments in favor of paid leave today, her summary of paid leave benefits provided by governments and by private businesses shows that paid leave in practice varies quite a bit and follows either the equal treatment or the special treatment solutions.
One of the outcomes that is recognized by the author but could have merited greater attention is that women’s organizations alone do not explain policy success. In the case studies highlighted by the author, involvement of labor unions, groups representing senior citizens, and groups representing individuals with disabilities were often involved in paid leave lobbying efforts. While Sholar offers a convincing argument that women’s organizations were indeed major players, there appears to be an important story of coalition building in the history of paid parental leave policy. One is left to wonder how these coalitions were created and to what extent the coalitions helped to generate a more uniform message and strategy that led to policy success. In terms of opposition groups, she identifies business groups as the most prominent but also acknowledges that ideological opposition among elected representatives was a key variable. Given that the case studies on states were relatively short, there was not a significant amount of time offered to the specific politics of these other groups and political actors. This might be a ripe area for new scholars interested in paid leave policy to explore.
Sholar has identified what will likely be a core issue in the coming years. We can expect that with the increasing rate of income inequality, there will be a greater need for policy solutions like paid parental leave. At the end of the book, Sholar recounts the attention that the 2016 presidential candidates directed to the need for such a policy. The primary strength of Getting Paid for Taking Time is that it offers extensive histories of paid parental leave policy at both the national and state levels. It contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the important role that women’s organizations have played in policy passage. This is a great reference book for those who are looking for the most up-to-date policy developments on paid parental leave policy.
