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Title: Employment Continuity Among New Mothers
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Klerman, Jacob Alex
Leibowitz, Arleen A.
Employment Continuity Among New Mothers
NLS Discussion Paper 95-22, Washington DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 1994.
Also: http://stats.bls.gov/ore/abstract/nl/nl940020.htm
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: U.S. Department of Labor
Keyword(s): Childbearing; Employment, Part-Time; Fertility; Firm Size; Job Status; Job Tenure; Job Training; Leave, Family or Maternity/Paternity; Pregnancy and Pregnancy Outcomes

Recently both state and federal governments have enacted maternity leave legislation. The key provision of that legislation is that after a leave (of a limited duration), the recent mother is guaranteed the right to return to her pre-leave employer at the same or equivalent position. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper correlates work status after childbirth with work status before pregnancy. Almost all women (nearly 90 percent) who work full-time both before and after childbirth continue to work at the same employer. Thus maternity leave legislation is unlikely to have a major effect on employment continuity. However, compared to all demographically similar women, new mothers do have an excess probability of leaving their jobs. Finally, most maternity leave legislation limits its protections to full-time workers with sufficient job tenure sufficiently large firms. Using the NLSY, the paper estimates that the federal Family Leave Act covers only about a third of all working new mothers. The restriction to full-time workers is relatively unimportant because few part-time workers would satisfy the tenure and firm-size requirements.
Bibliography Citation
Klerman, Jacob Alex and Arleen A. Leibowitz. "Employment Continuity Among New Mothers." NLS Discussion Paper 95-22, Washington DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 1994.