Does anyone in the US care about paternity leave?

Netflix recently announced unlimited time off for new parents, no questions asked. What really caught my attention in the announcement is the concept of equal maternity and paternity leave. Balancing a career while raising a family presents many well documented challenges (thanks, Sheryl). In Lean In, Sheryl cites that “43% of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers or off-ramping for a period of time.” How can we reverse this exodus?

One obvious strategy is balancing the childcare responsibilities across both parents. Societal norms about gender roles are not going to change overnight, but one easy target is the treatment of maternity and paternity leave. Anecdotally, I’ve watched friends and colleagues struggle with how to maintain their professional momentum while taking time off for their newborns. For fathers, time off has the perception that it’s a “treat” (if you get time off at all). A little vacation before returning back to the real world. Because, what can a father do for a newborn anyways?

As I look at the announcement by Netflix, I’m naturally left to wonder, how bold is this step? Is this a marketing ploy to acquire better talent, or will Netflix parents actually take extended time off? Will a man taking a year of paternity leave be perceived any differently than his female colleagues? Will this lead to more women in upper management? Will other companies follow suit?

My curiosity piqued, I craved data to research this question (what can I say, I’m an engineer). And that’s when I turned to Quid. I used Quid to collect and analyze thousands of articles referencing paternity leave from the past two years. We can use the world’s collective intelligence to understand the public perception of paternity leave, how the discussion is changing over time, and who (or what) is influencing the debate.

Media interest is growing…but do consumers care?

I was pleased to find that the discussion about paternity leave is growing steadily over time. Two events in particular have driven spikes of attention: (1) Boomer Esiason criticizing baseball player Daniel Murphy for missing opening day for the birth of his son — the largest single event in the past two years — and (2) the recent Netflix and Microsoft announcements about new parental leave policies.

While the media may be giving paternity leave more airplay, the level of social amplification for these articles is quite low. Four of the top ten most socially shared articles were covering Prince William’s leave for the birth of Princess Charlotte. Scattered efforts by Sweden, Virgin, Netflix and Washington State to improve family leave benefits also saw some social lift. One highly shared article in particular caught my eye — the US Is Still the Only Industrialized Nation Without Paid Maternity Leave. The headline says it all.

Paternity leave is a big deal abroad, not in the US.

Digging deeper, we can break down the conversation into a narrative map, which clusters the thousands of articles about paternity leave into the distinct topics of conversation. In the map below, each dot represents an article, and the lines between dots indicate when two articles have highly similar language.

The first thing I noticed was how many times ‘paternity leave’ was used in reference to baseball and cricket players taking a leave of absence from a game, seen in the peripheral green clusters to the top right. Interesting…but not that informative.

Next, I dove in to the central narratives in the map and was struck by the strong presence of political efforts abroad to improve parental rights — 24% of the total conversation. Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Iceland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Lagos are all leading the charge on paternity leave initiatives.

I learned that the Nordic countries have been working for decades to drive gender parity, and sit at the top of the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Index.” In Sweden, parents are entitled to an astounding 480 days of paid parental leave. Even more remarkable, the society seems to have embraced the fact that childcare is not a “woman’s issue” — close to 90% of fathers in Sweden take paternity leave.

While parental rights in Ireland and the UK lag behind their Nordic brethren, the issue appears to be a hotly contested topic of debate, tightly coupled with national political races. Elsewhere in the world, paternity leave is cited as a potential solution for the low birthrates plaguing countries like Japan, South Korea,Singapore and Hong Kong. Japan and South Korea have the two widest gaps between pay for men and women among developed countries, making them unlikely candidates for progressive family policies. However, when getting women back in the work could improve the GDP of Japan by 15%, the economics begin to trump the legacy societal norms.

In contrast, the US is largely underrepresented in the discussion. Obama’s Paid Leave policy in the US comprises only 9% of the discussion, and is completely disconnected from the debates raging around the world (seen from the distance between these clusters on the conversation map). I’m led to assume that family rights initiatives abroad are not tightly intertwined in the debate for the Paid Leave policy in the US, and vice versa. I expected that the 2016 presidential election might create a wave of interest in parental rights, and therefore paternity leave, but alas, no such narrative exists. If presidential candidates are addressing parental rights as a campaign issue, it isn’t in the context of paternity leave.

A handful of tech, financial services taking a stand

A limited number of companies in the past six months publicly announced support of extended parental / paternity leave. In June, Richard Branson announced that Virgin Management would allow up to one year of fully paid leave for selected new parents. Interestingly, Netflix announced a similar policy two months later and received nearly four times the press. Adobe, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs have also announced more flexible family time. The response to these policies is widely supported as a positive step forward, but some skeptics wonder, will anyone actually take the time off? “Theory does not equal practice, and unlimited vacation policies don’t work,” cites a Business Insider article. Will parental leave fall into the same trap?

On the flip side, some companies have been brought into the discussion for less positive reasons. Amazon is cited as a key example of a company with a hostile corporate culture for new parents. Apple and Facebook have faced backlash in association with their offer to pay to freeze the eggs of female employees. Marissa Mayer’s intention to take just two weeks off from her role as CEO of Yahoo for the birth of her children has prompted dismay as well.

Mets player Daniel Murphy still the poster boy for paternity leave

We can also extract out the people mentioned in the discussion to understand the top influencers and opinion leaders. I was surprised to see that Daniel Murphy, the baseball player, is still the most prominent figure associated with paternity leave, on the basis of unique article volume. The Daniel Murphy story broke in April 2014, and yet he still owns the largest share of voice. CNN journalist Josh Levs is a more recent champion for paternity leave, after suing his employer to get more paid time off for biological fathers. Fewer articles have been published about Josh, but they have been widely socially shared — clearly something in his story is piquing public interest.

The most prominent people in the conversation are global politicians. President Barak Obama the UK’s Nick Clegg have the largest share of voice in promoting parental leave legislation (the latter’s reforms more successful than the former’s). Some, like Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong or Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, have become unlikely sources of support.

Even more interesting than who’s leading the discussion is looking at who’s missing. Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg are brought in to the conversation as famous working mothers. Where are the famous working fathers? Corporate leaders need to promote cultural acceptance of family leave, and the acceptance will never set hold if men aren’t leading by example. Same holds true for political leaders in the United States. The fact that we are the only developed country without paid maternity leave is frankly embarrassing. This isn’t just a social issue, it’s an economic one — and we as a country have yet to give paternity leave the attention that it deserves.

Addendum (Nov. 23, 20:00 PT)

One day after writing this blog post, Mark Zuckerburg announced (on Facebook, of course) that he will be taking two months of paternity leave for the birth of his first child. The move has been met with widespread applause (although some question why he wouldn’t take the full four months offered to Facebook employees) and public interest, and a general acknowledgement that this “really matters”.

Initial analysis in Quid reveals that he will soon be the most widely discussed figure associated with paternity leave, surpassing Daniel Murphy. Here’s hoping the level of public interest holds, and that Zuckerburg can become a catalyst for systematic change.