The US is the only rich nation offering no national paid parental-leave programme. Why is that – and could it change?

The US might be one of the world’s wealthiest nations, but on one key metric it comes in last: it’s the only rich country offering no national paid parental-leave programme. Today, only 21% of US workers have access to paid family leave through their employers, even though, according to the Pew Research Center in 2015, both parents work full-time in almost half all two-parent families.

This lack of provision sits in sharp contrast to European nations, where subsidised parental leave is standard. Research has shown paid parental leave offers inarguable benefits for parents, children and the societies of countries who provide it. There’s also broad backing for it in the US; according to an academic study published in April, around 82% of Americans support access to paid parental leave. That figure has remained roughly the same for years and includes support from across the political spectrum.

The reasons the US remains an outlier on paid parental leave are complex, combining post-World War II needs with a complicated national cultural identity of individualism and self-determination. Now, however, there’s a significant push for change. In April, US President Joe Biden proposed a $225bn (£163bn) package of paid family and medical leave benefits that would allow workers to take up to 12 weeks paid leave to care for a new-born or family member.

American individualism fed into perceptions of the social and economic value of maternity leave.

In Europe, paid parental leave often went hand-in-hand with public healthcare and state-sponsored early childhood education – a trifecta through which parents could form early bonds with their children, and then return to the workforce while their children got a strong educational start. Tax from everyone to pay for these universal programmes sowed the seeds for a strong future workforce and an educated, healthy society, the thinking went.

But in the US, paid parental leave was viewed with more suspicion; instead of a way of keeping people in the paid labour force as they pulled themselves up, many saw it as “an entitlement which people will take advantage of to get money from the government funded by businesses and taxpayers”, says Terri Boyer, founding director of the Anne Welsh McNulty Institute for Women’s Leadership at Villanova University, US.

Whether Biden’s initiatives can pass remains to be seen – and even proponents like Joya Misra, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of Massachusetts, aren’t confident. “I think my hesitancy has to do with the partisan way politics happen,” she says, citing the use of the filibuster as a last-ditch but effective tool to block legislation. There are ways around it – but that could lead to the bill passing without vital guarantees for workers that their jobs would be protected.