Fixing Parental Leave: The Six Month Solution by Gayle Kaufman (review)

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) remains the only piece of federal legislation guaranteeing parents in the United States the right to take up to 12 weeks off from work to care for newborn or newly adopted children. The FMLA is frequently the subject of criticism across the world and across the academic literature on the subject of family leave largely because it is unpaid, making it very difficult financially for parents to take advantage of this leave, and does not cover approximately 41% of all US employees anyway. In her new book, Fixing Parental Leave: The Six Month Solution, Gayle Kaufman sets out to "find a good parental leave policy for the Unites States" (167). Not content to simply criticize the shortfalls of the FMLA, Kaufman looks closely at what the policy offers, who takes it, and, crucially, what other sources of leave Americans are taking to make up for its less-than-perfect policy, with the aim of offering a "solution" to the problems that the FMLA poses. This overview of the US leave policy would itself be a useful contribution to the literature, but Kaufman offers much more by providing a detailed comparative examination of the leave policies in place in three developed countries: the United States, the UK, and Sweden. Spoiler alert: the "solution" Kaufman offers is 6 months of federally mandated paid parental leave.

While the solution is in the title, it is absolutely worth the time for readers to journey through the entire book to see how Kaufman gets there. She structures the book around six "lessons" offered by her comparative policy study of all three countries:

(1) The United States is way behind the rest of the world when it comes to parental leave; (2) Parental leave is good; (3) Too much parental leave can be bad, especially for mothers; (4) Fathers should be partners, not helpers, (5) the UK is not a good model for parental leave and gender equality; and (6) The Swedish model is great—but not perfect.

Each chapter examines one of these lessons in detail, culminating in her concluding chapter, which offers her solution for a better leave policy in the United States, which looks much like the language of the FMLA, which is what Kaufman refers to as "gender-neutral" and allows for the implicit inclusion of fathers, but is both paid and longer (6 months, rather than the current 12 weeks that the FMLA currently offers). Kaufman arrives at 6 months as an ideal target length for leave through a broad review of the literature on the outcomes of family leave policies and their benefits (and drawbacks) across the globe for things like parental and child health, women's workforce inclusion, and gender pay equity.

Kaufman employs in-depth policy analysis as her primary technique, but also engages in discourse analysis and thematic analysis of in-depth interview data. The chapter on the United States is where the book really shines. Kaufman takes a detailed look at the text of the six US states that have (at time of publication) implemented paid leave policies, and offers a comprehensive review of the research looking at the outcomes thus far in these states. This is a much-needed contribution, since very little research has been done thus far on several of these states' policies, and I know of no other more up-to-date and thorough review of this kind. Furthermore, Kaufman also examines the family leave policies of several prominent US companies. Digging into the language of the policies themselves and the promotional language of the companies, Kaufman is able to group these companies into different categories of policy gendering which allow her to critique the effectiveness of these policies in signaling the companies' implicit values around gender equality. The chapters that look in detail at the UK and Sweden are equally well-researched and thoughtful about the design of the policies themselves, and what these designs communicate about...