Graduation Year
2018
Date of Submission
4-2018
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Government
Reader 1
William Ascher
Terms of Use & License Information
Abstract
The United States is the only developed nation that fails to provide its citizens with paid parental leave. The lack of parental benefit provision operates to the detriment of individuals and society as a whole by contributing to inequity across gender, race, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. As the demographics of the American workforce have changed, public policy has not kept pace. Paid parental leave is associated a number of health, economic, and social benefits. However, the greatest barrier to legislating paid parental leave is the philosophical underpinnings of American politics, specifically the strong current of liberal individualism and absence of maternalism. This thesis examines the policy option space for paid parental leave in the United States and recommends a paid parental leave policy that is gender-neutral and has a combination of three months individual leave and three months of shared leave at 100 percent wage replacement.
Recommended Citation
Joseph, Sydney, "Paid Parental Leave in the United States: Reconciling Competing Demands" (2018). CMC Senior Theses. 1961.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1961
Included in
American Politics Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Health Policy Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Policy History, Theory, and Methods Commons, Political Theory Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social Policy Commons, Social Welfare Commons
