A study by researchers at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Portland State University found large racial and ethnic inequities present among those who had access to all kinds of paid leave.
The study — co-authored by campus professor William Dow, and Julia Goodman and Dawn Richardson of Oregon Health and Science University and Portland State University — was conducted using data from the American Time Use Survey. The survey was facilitated by the U.S. Census Bureau, which has conducted a special module in 2011, and between 2017 and 2018, in which they asked questions about paid leave access.
“We focused on the more recent data … we just looked at the questions that they asked: ‘Did your employer allow you to take paid leave if you had a new baby or added a child to your family through fostering or adoption? Did your employer allow you to take paid leave if you had a serious medical condition or if you needed to care for a family member, etc.,’ ” Goodman said.
The researchers then combined these different questions together for their analysis in order to look at which people had access to different kinds of leave, focusing on race and ethnicity.
According to Goodman, the study took into consideration which characteristics might be contributing to the inequities they were uncovering. For example, if subjects worked in the public or private sector, whether or not they were unionized, or differences in household size.
The study, Goodman added, found smaller inequities among unionized workers and also among public sector workers in comparison to the private sector. Moreover, part-time workers across the board were far less likely to have access to paid leave.
“We saw that, in particular, Black and Hispanic workers were far less likely to have access to all leave types. Asian workers were to some extent less likely to have access to these kinds of leaves than white workers,” Goodman said.
Goodman noted that compared to 2011 data, across the board there was increased access to paid leave, but also noted that the inequities still hadn’t changed.
Some policies, proposed by Goodman, that could potentially mend these inequities include a national paid leave policy. In addition, according to Goodman, policies should not exclude public sector workers or people that work at small firms — where people of color tend to be employed — and legislators should also move towards fully paid leave policies in order to protect low-income workers.
While federal policy has lagged, Goodman said progressive state legislatures, such as the legislature in California, have taken steps to create paid leave policies.
“When Biden came into office, and because of COVID, there was so much attention on the lack of paid leave in this country. There was paid family and medical leave included in the Build Back Better Plan, and as you know, that didn’t go anywhere,” Goodman said. “A whole lot of states have not passed family policies yet … but hopefully they will soon.”
