How The Family and Medical Leave Act Helped Women’s Careers

The Research: 

Do policies that make it easier for employees to juggle work and family needs increase the ability of women to advance in organizations? New research from Eunmi Mun, Shawna Vican, and Erin L. Kelly suggests that was indeed the case with the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in the U.S. The FMLA, a law enacted in 1993, affords many U.S. employees at larger organizations the right to take unpaid leave for family or medical reasons, including the birth of a child. 

In an article recently published in the journal Social Forces, Mun, Vican, and Kelly analyzed data from 785 private-sector U.S. establishments covered by the FMLA; they focused on data from 1990 to 1997—the years just before and after the law’s passage. Mun is an Associate Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Vican is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware; and Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Co-Director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER).

The researchers found a steady increase in women's representation in management positions at these workplaces in the years just after the FMLA’s passage, but not in the years just before the law was enacted. Interestingly, the overall increase in women's representation in management positions was most pronounced in organizations that already offered paid or unpaid maternity leave before the FMLA was passed.  Moreover, for Black, Hispanic, and Asian women, the most pronounced increase in representation in management positions took place at the most generous workplaces—those that already offered paid maternity leave before the FMLA was passed.

Why might the FMLA have had a greater effect on women’s representation in management at workplaces that already offered maternity leave? The researchers hypothesize that the impact of public policies like the FMLA varies depending on the organizational context, specifically what the scholars call the “point of departure”—that is, the existing company policies and norms regarding family leave prior to the legislative change. While it is plausible that a firm’s leave policies and a leave law might act as substitutes for each other, the findings suggest that a “reinforcement” effect, where a public policy aligned with existing organizational policies and goals may lead to greater improvements in women's workplace status. “At organizations with a history of promoting more family-supportive policies, managers may be ready to embrace the new norms promoted by the leave law and further facilitate women’s career advancement,” the authors write. “Also, in such workplaces, women workers may find it easier to make claims for leave benefits and other resources. Through these reinforcement mechanisms, women’s status in these organizations may improve more quickly after a leave mandate is passed.” 

Professor Kelly Explains This Study's Significance 

Kelly writes: 

“This paper takes me back to my older line of research on family policies in the U.S. It is well known that the U.S. is comparatively stingy in terms of work-family policies and, indeed, is one of only a handful of countries in the world and the only OECD country without paid maternity leave. There are some U.S. states that offer paid family leaves to mothers and fathers, but the 1993 federal law, the Family and Medical Leave Act, promises only unpaid leaves to eligible employees (and only about 56% of employees are eligible for that protection). We investigate the effects of this supposedly weak law and pay attention to which types of employers and which groups of women were most affected. 

This study examines the impact of this limited federal law, focusing on whether the FMLA helped or hurt women’s careers and shifted gender inequality, specifically the share of managers who are women, in U.S. companies. The FMLA may have led more women to stay employed after they had children and more broadly shifted assumptions about how women’s work lives would unfold. But the impact of the FMLA on gender inequality is an open question. In fact, advocates usually decry that the U.S. is a laggard with regards to family leaves and express frustration with the FMLA. They worry that mothers’ careers will be interrupted and the push to gender equality will be stalled because short, unpaid leaves may not meet new mothers’ needs, and so many women may still leave their jobs as they start families. On the other hand, requirements to offer leave may tempt employers to avoid women of childbearing age (even if such considerations are illegal under sex discrimination law). So there is another worry that a mandate such as the FMLA or a paid leave law would actually hurt women’s careers and perhaps reduce the chances that women, or at least young women who might become mothers, will be put in managerial positions. 

This analysis provides novel insights into what we call the diffuse effects of a new law. Other studies of the FMLA have focused on what happens to women taking family leaves or compared new mothers who are covered by the law with those who aren’t. We take a broader look at the patterns of gender inequality within firms and find that this comparatively weak law nonetheless significantly increases the share of women in management, with even clearer effects for women of color’s representation in managerial roles. I see this as a chance to rebalance from critique of the FMLA, which is inadequate and needs reform, to also recognize that even this law had positive effects in terms of reducing gender inequalities as well as supporting parents and their children.

We might assume that a generous company policy can take care of employees, so there is no added value to having a public policy (in this case, the FMLA) passed for the employees who work for firms that already have leave policies in place. This is the hypothesis of substitution, that what matters is the presence of either an organizational or a public leave policy. But what we find instead is that women moved more quickly into management positions when the FMLA was in place and the firm had already adopted a leave policy, and particularly a paid leave policy. 

This suggests reinforcing effects: Having both a company policy and a legal right to leave creates the conditions for reducing gender inequalities more. We don’t have the data in this study to say exactly what the mechanisms or processes are, but this finding is consistent with the idea that both managers and women respond to the new expectations, the normative shift, laid out in the law. In companies that had already shown themselves to be more open to family leaves and perhaps more interested in addressing gender inequality, the new law pushed them further, faster, to move more women in management than was the case in companies that had no leave policies already in place.

Looking beyond this analysis of the FMLA, this paper emphasizes that there are no blank slates in real organizations. New laws and changes in public policy are going to be interpreted in the context of the firm’s existing policies, practices, and cultures. We should not ignore that in our analyses of the effects of employment laws and other regulations. Instead, Eunmi, Shawna, and I demonstrate that analyses should consider these ‘points of departure’ and do more nuanced analyses of how firms respond to the new legal context depending on what was already in place. I see this study as an example of how we can integrate policy evaluations and organizational research in smarter, more interesting ways.”