No, (most) companies are not rolling back parental leave
Deconstructing *that* viral WSJ article
In August, the Wall Street Journal published “Companies Are Cutting Back on Maternity and Paternity Leave,” an article that points out a supposed trend in parental leave benefits, claiming that “Hulu and some small to midsize firms” have decided to roll back pandemic-era changes to leave benefits.
Reactions to this claim have been predictably irate. And yet, I can’t get behind the objections to this article.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m staunchly in favor of increased parental leave. If the central argument of this article were based on fact, it would have me fuming too.
But instead, this article uses a combination of vagaries and inaccurate data reporting and is poor reporting at best and sensationalism at worst.
Specifically, the article:
Reports SHRM data in a misleading fashion;
Makes a claim about a vague group of companies with only one named member; and
Misrepresents the timeline and the impetus for Hulu’s rollback of parental leave benefits.
Below, I’ll walk through each point in more detail.
The article reports SHRM data in a misleading fashion.
The WSJ article states:
New data show that the share of employers offering paid maternity leave beyond what is required by law dropped to 35% this year, down from 53% in 2020 [emphasis mine], according to the Society for Human Resource Management [SHRM.org]
I decided to take a closer look at the cited data.
Though WSJ does not specify, the article’s numbers likely come from SHRM’s 2022 Employee Benefits Survey. This set of approximately 3,000 data points was sourced from an annual survey of SHRM members, representing companies with as few as two and as many as 25,000 employees.
Although membership in SHRM allows me to review the dataset, licensing agreements keep me from sharing that data outside the container of an advisor-client relationship. In the interest of making my point, I’ll attempt to give the broad outlines of my learnings.
The SHRM data shares percentages over a period of 5 years, 2018-2022. The percentages indicate the share of companies offering a given benefit. The survey is broken into sections and sub-sections, including a sub-section entitled “Leave for New Parents.”
Within “Leave for New Parents,” there are 8 potential categories. Here are those categories, copied word-for-word from the SHRM survey results:
Paid maternity leave (separate from paid family or parental leave plan and other than what is covered by short-term disability or state law)
Parental leave above federal FMLA (time beyond what is required by law) [emphasis mine]
Parental leave above any state FMLA (time or paid leave beyond what is required by law) [emphasis mine]
Paid paternity leave (separate from paid family or parental leave plan)
Paid parental leave
Paid family leave
Paid adoption leave (separate from paid family or parental leave plan)
Paid foster child leave (includes coverage by family or parental leave policies)
The WSJ article claims to cite “the share of employers offering paid maternity leave beyond what is required by law,” yet we see that a category of this exact description does not exist within SHRM’s data.
(Of note, the numbers cited within the WSJ article (“35% this year [in 2022], down from 53% in 2020”) do match the data for category 1 above (“Paid maternity leave” etc).)
Meanwhile, while the piece implies that pandemic-era changes (e.g. what we were doing in 2020) were rolled back recently (e.g. in 2022), the data indicates otherwise.
Here’s a view over time of all the categories within the “Leave for New Parents” sub-section of SHRM’s 2022 Employee Benefits Survey. (I’ve obscured the exact figures in order to comply with SHRM’s licensing agreements, but I believe that, in reviewing overall chart shape and change in data over time, useful information can still be conveyed for the purposes of this piece.)
Here’s what we’re looking at:
Categories 1-3 in orange; i.e. WSJ’s most likely inspiration for their cited data (NB: Some of these categories reported no data in 2020.)
Categories 4-8 in grey; i.e. all the other categories within the “Leave for New Parents” sub-section of SHRM’s 2022 Employee Benefits Survey
Noteworthy observations include:
In 2020, there was a spike across all categories.
Between 2018-2022, all categories experienced either net positive or net flat growth. No categories experienced negative growth over this period.
Between 2020-2021, all categories experienced negative growth, either returning to or staying above 2019 levels.
Between 2021-2022, all categories experienced flat growth.
In other words, companies did not report “try[ing] to re-establish pre-pandemic levels” of leave benefits in 2022, as the WSJ article suggests. If anything, that behavior happened in 2021
In its own analysis of the data, SHRM writes:
The prevalence of paid leave to care for family remained relatively the same [in 2022] as it did during the height of the pandemic [emphasis mine] […] These results indicate that organizations may be less willing to strip away benefits involving family member care.
The article makes a claim about a vague group of companies with only one named member.
From the WSJ article:
Companies including Hulu and some small to midsize firms are trimming weeks off their benefits for new parents
I can't find evidence of any other specific companies to substantiate this claim. It’s possible that "some small to midsize firms" refers generally to the companies that make up SHRM's dataset.
It’s been a month since the WSJ article came out, and Hulu remains the only named member of this group of “firms […] trimming weeks off their benefits.”
The article misrepresents the timeline and the impetus for Hulu’s rollback of parental leave benefits.
Glassdoor reviews of Hulu's parental leave collectively indicate that a rollback of their parental leave benefits has been underway for some time. Many cite the rollback as a consequence not of the pandemic, but of Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019. (This acquisition gave Disney a majority stake in the streaming service.)
One Glassdoor review in particular states describes a rollback of benefits and programs at large, not just parental leave:
Family leave “will be going from 20 weeks to 8-12, unlimited vacation replaced with 3 weeks, […] and various other culture-building programs and incentives discontinued.”
The changes are “termed a ‘harmonization’ with Disney.”
So all in all, this article seems to have a false sense of urgency.