We keep a communal pack-and-play at our office in the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. It makes life easier for the mothers who work here, a small decision that sends a loud message: "We support working parents, and we welcome babies." When women who work at EPPC return from the paid maternity leave that our organization offers, their infants often become part of our community. No one bats an eye when babies and toddlers bob up on Zoom calls or in the office halls. It is normal for female staff and scholars to arrive at work retreats with a baby in tow, and fathers often come along to care for their children as needed.
At EPPC we are trying to live out the commitment to supporting families and children that we promote through our scholarship. But judging by a new report we've authored surveying the family policies of the Fortune 100 companies, many major American corporations have a long way to go to truly support the mothers and fathers in their workplaces.
The problems begin with a surprising lack of transparency among many of the corporations in the Fortune 100. Though some companies view transparency and generous benefits—and especially transparency about generous benefits—as recruiting tools, it was difficult, even impossible, to find specifics about the family benefits that many companies provide. This makes it difficult for prospective workers to know how a company will help them care for their loved ones and balance work with family responsibilities.
Support for parents in the workplace—whether in the form of paid parental or family leave, adoption assistance, robust health-care benefits, or help with child-care costs—is a critical consideration for many Americans as they decide where to work. These sorts of benefits attract and retain good employees, which should motivate major companies to be more forthcoming. And yet companies that tout their family-friendly benefits are often reluctant to publicly provide details. Some say they provide adoption assistance but do not disclose the amount of financial support they offer or whether it is capped over an employee's career; others say they provide parental leave but don't disclose the length of that leave or whether it is fully paid.
Transparency is especially important for large, standardized companies that can easily offer it and that lack the flexibility of smaller organizations—EPPC does not have a written policy about an office pack-and-play; it just happened. Some Fortune 100 companies may prefer to be opaque, especially those that provide minimal benefits for parents. For example, it should be standard across every industry to provide 12 weeks of paid leave for mothers and fathers after the birth of a child, and likewise for employees who are adoptive or foster parents. But some companies offer only the bare minimum: job-protected, unpaid leave as required under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act. Others offer less than 12 weeks of leave, provide far less leave for fathers (or "non-birthing parents," as some policies describe them), or offer non-biological parents smaller leave periods than biological parents.
Given many companies' reticence to provide details about family benefits, it was surprising how many were eager to wade into culture wars over family issues. A majority of Fortune 100 companies responded to the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson decision by publicly pledging to cover travel costs for employees who could no longer obtain abortion procedures in their home state.
Such politicking is risky business. It is not just that abortion, by definition, kills a living human being. Championing it risks alienating customers and employees, and it is not clear that employer-sponsored abortion tourism is what most women and families really need or want. This seems to be another instance of an aggressive ideological minority demanding that companies wade into the treacherous seas of political activism.
This public pro-abortion stance also opens up companies to accusations of exploitation and hypocrisy if they are not as supportive of options such as adoption and parental leave as they are of abortion. Incentivizing abortions for female employees—and touting it as a pro-woman decision—while not simultaneously increasing support for parenting sends the message that companies would rather pay for an abortion than cover the extra expenses of employing mothers or of having to replace them if they leave the company to raise their children.
This discrepancy signals to women that they will have the best chance of remaining competitive and advancing in their careers if they choose to postpone or avoid motherhood—rather than that their workplaces will find creative ways to support them as they care for their children. It responds to the asymmetry of human reproduction by demanding that women conform to a male pattern, rather than accommodating and welcoming women in the workplace as women. Current and prospective parents should expect better from their employers.
Alexandra DeSanctis and Nathanael Blake, Ph.D., are fellows in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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