More men getting paid for leave

More fathers are taking paternity leave, possibly because they are more likely than women to get paid for their time off, new research shows.

About 70 percent of men were paid during their leave in 2015, compared with less

than 50 percent of women, according to a study by researchers at Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research.

The number of men taking paternity leave was still much lower than the number of women taking maternity leave. However, the number of men taking leave has tripled since 1994, while the number of women has remained the same, the researchers said.

Overall, about 10 percent of men, or 22,000 men per month, in the workforce in a U.S. Census Bureau community survey took paternity leave. That’s compared with about 40 percent of women, or 273,000 women per month, who took maternity leave, the research found.

Dane Sapp, 26, a senior interactive developer at AEP, took two weeks off after his daughter Riley’s birth in August. One week of parental leave was paid by his employer, and he took the other week as paid vacation so he could get to know his daughter and establish a parenting routine with his wife, Jessica.

“I couldn’t imagine not taking it,” he said. “I was definitely grateful I was able to have paternity leave through AEP.”

His wife, who works at a local church, took a month of unpaid leave.

The reason men are more likely to get paid time off isn’t clear, though researcher Jay Zagorsky said it could

be because men aren’t willing to take unpaid leave. As the economy has improved in recent years, so have their chances for paid time off.

Claire Kamp Dush, an associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State, said the difference is frustrating but not surprising.

“Women have positions that have less privileges attached to them, they get paid less and they’re more likely to do part-time work,” she said.

Though paid maternity leave is increasing, it’s by less than threetenths of one percent a year, according to the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.

“At that rate, it will take about another decade before even half of U.S. women going on leave will get paid time off,” Zagorsky said. “This is a very low figure for the nation with the world’s largest annual gross domestic product.”

Women often use some combination of sick time and vacation time to get a few weeks of pay during maternity leave, Zagorsky said, though on average, women only take about four weeks of leave.

Zagorsky used data from the Current Population Survey by the Census Bureau, which also asks about leave.

Some states have enacted their own paid leave policies to supplement the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which allows for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, though those state laws

don’t appear to have made a difference in the number of women taking time off, he said.

Ohio House Democrats proposed legislation in April that would offer Ohio workers as many as 12 weeks of paid leave per year.

AEP, where Sapp works, offers one week of paid time off for fathers and adoptive parents, and women usually get six to eight weeks of paid time off after giving birth, said Tammy Ridout, spokeswoman for the company.

At Ohio Health, men and women use three days of accrued vacation or sick time and then are paid 70 percent of their salary for the remaining time they take off — two weeks for birth fathers and adoptive parents and six to eight weeks for mothers, said Marcus Thorpe, media relations manager.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. gives the primary caregiver, usually the mother, 16 weeks of paid leave; nonprimary caregivers get two weeks, according to spokesman Jeffrey Lyttle.

The first three months of a child’s life are important for development and for forming relationships between the child and its parents, said Kamp-Dush.

“It’s frightening that we’re not prioritizing that,” she said. “We need to support new parents ... if that is a priority, why aren’t our policies reflecting that?”