FMLA may be weak, but it does help women advance in the workforce

Despite its limitations, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 had a positive effect on women’s advancement in the workplace in the years immediately following its passage, especially at companies with preexisting family-friendly organizational policies.

That’s according to the paper “Points of Departure: Family Leave Policy and Women’s Representation in Management in U.S. Workplaces,” co-authored by MIT Sloan professor Erin Kelly, who is co-director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.

The FMLA grants U.S. employees at larger organizations the right to take unpaid leave for family or medical reasons, including for the birth, adoption, or placement of a child.

However, the act is often criticized as limited: The FMLA guarantees just 12 weeks of leave and applies to only a subset of employees — those with at least a yearlong tenure and 1,250 hours of service at a site where at least 50 employees work within a 75-mile radius. The United States is an outlier in this regard as the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development without a national paid maternity leave policy.

As of 2023, the law had been used nearly 463 million times; 20.8% of those instances could be attributed to workers taking leave to care for a child, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families.

Kelly authored the paper with Eunmi Mun from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Shawna Vican from the University of Delaware.

To understand the impact of this often-maligned law, the trio analyzed data from 785 private-sector U.S. establishments covered by the FMLA from 1990 until 1997, a period that includes the years just before and after the law’s passage.

They found a steady increase in women’s representation in management positions at these workplaces in the years just after the FMLA was enacted.

Interestingly, the overall increase in women's representation in management positions was most pronounced in organizations that had already been offering 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 was seen at the most generous workplaces: those that offered paid leave before the FMLA was passed.

The researchers consider this a “reinforcement” effect: When public policy is aligned with existing organizational frameworks, it may lead to greater improvements in women’s workplace status — and make women more willing to take advantage of these benefits.

“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.”

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Here are some of the paper’s key findings:

• Women’s overall managerial representation increased by almost 5% from 1993 to 1997 compared with the years just before the FMLA was enacted.
• For white women in particular, representation in managerial jobs increased at workplaces that had already provided leave benefits before the FMLA. (The increases were similar regardless of whether the firm’s policy offered paid or unpaid leave.)
• Black, Hispanic, and Asian women experienced the most pronounced increase in representation in management positions at workplaces that offered paid maternity leave before the FMLA was passed.
• The representation of Black women managers increased by 5% in companies with prior unpaid-leave benefits but by 21% at companies with prior paid-leave policies.

“When the existing organizational policy context supports the most progressive norms around leave-taking, managers may be particularly attuned to the broader normative shift promoted by the FMLA and may more quickly embrace these goals,” the authors write. “Also, women of color may find it easier to make claims [for leave] when organizational policies are clearly aligned with the goals of the FMLA.”

Offsetting criticism

While the FMLA isn’t perfect, it’s better than nothing — with clear benefits for women, especially racially minoritized women. Kelly said that this research could inspire a reconsideration of the FMLA, which is often criticized as inadequate.

“We 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,” she said. “I see this as a chance to rebalance from critique of the FMLA … to also recognize that even this law had positive effects in terms of reducing gender inequalities as well as supporting parents and their children.”

Ultimately, company policies and public policies functioning together create these positive changes. Companies with policies that reinforce the FMLA create better conditions to reduce gender inequality. For organizations that were already more open to family leave — and therefore perhaps more interested in addressing gender inequality — the FMLA “pushed them further, faster, to move more women into management than was the case in companies that had no leave policies already in place,” Kelly said.

“Having both a company policy and a legal right to leave creates the conditions for reducing gender inequalities more,” she said.

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