Blog post by Drake Van Egdom – summarizing Van Egdom et al. (2024)
Blog edited by Keaton Fletcher
October 2024
The birth of a child brings extensive family demands, even for academic faculty who often have flexible jobs. Mothers in academia may face even more challenges as they are more likely to juggle children, household responsibilities, and job demands, leading to less uninterrupted work time they can spend on research. These difficulties can create a loss of high-quality research. As a result, supporting faculty with children is important for academia as a whole.
The United States does not provide paid parental leave at the federal level and only offers 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act. Childcare is expensive in the United States, which organizations can address by providing childcare benefits, such as onsite childcare or childcare subsidies. This national context provides further impetus for organizations to support parents given these two dependent care policies positively impact employee and organizational outcomes, including work-life balance, job satisfaction, and turnover. In a study published by Van Egdom and colleagues in the Journal of Business and Psychology, they add to the importance of dependent care policies by demonstrating their value for long-term improvements in research productivity.
Using data from 386 U.S. Business School faculty members and 6,945 yearly observations using survey data linked with publication data scraped from Google Scholar, Van Egdom and colleagues tested if the availability or use of paid parental leave and childcare benefits after each child improved research productivity in the long term, as well as examining gender differences.
Results show that availability and use of childcare benefits and paid parental leave were generally effective for improving research productivity over the long term. As an example, a faculty member with one child and access to paid parental leave would see an increase of 8.8 publications after 20 years compared to the same situation where they did not have access to paid parental leave. There were few gender differences, with mothers having only neutral or positive effects and fathers having a mix of neutral, positive, and a few negative effects. In sum, all parents generally benefit from dependent care policies.
The results suggest that universities should provide paid parental leave and childcare benefits given their effectiveness for supporting parents and improving research productivity. The characteristics of these policies can vary (e.g., number of weeks of leave), so organizations should identify the benefits that meet their employees’ needs and organizational goals within the context of their available resources and state-level policies.
Organizations also need to support these policies. Putting a policy on paper is only the start. They need to communicate the availability of paid parental leave and childcare benefits to employees. Then, employees need to be comfortable using them and feel that they will not face backlash for using them. Organizations can further support gender equity by creating dependent care policies that are available to all parents and encourage everyone to use them. Leaders and managers are important in creating and maintaining a culture of supporting parents, which organizations can facilitate via leader training that helps them communicate and encourage their employees to use these policies.
References
Drake Van Egdom is a senior human capital consultant at consulting company ICF. He has a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology and specializes in employee experience, including research on work-family topics, employee well-being, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Drake personally practices OHP principles by enjoying the remote work and schedule flexibility of his job, and reducing stress by going on walks at the local zoo or Mall of America and cooking for his family.