I was curious about this claim, because I was not sure what the intended causal mechanism would be:
Taking parental leave shorter than 1 month does not mitigate productivity losses, but parental leave longer than 1 month and less than 12 months correlated with an 11%–17% productivity[2] improvement
But when I look at the chart in the citation it makes it look like <1 month leave does typically have positive impacts?
I’d also guess it’s confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.
I see a small, non-statistically significant reduction for non-US women for <1 mo. But I’m not sure if any of the results for non-US women are statistically significant, and less than a month to six months all look fairly similar for the US sample.
Thanks for writing this.
I was curious about this claim, because I was not sure what the intended causal mechanism would be:
But when I look at the chart in the citation it makes it look like <1 month leave does typically have positive impacts?
I’d also guess it’s confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.
I see a small, non-statistically significant reduction for non-US women for <1 mo. But I’m not sure if any of the results for non-US women are statistically significant, and less than a month to six months all look fairly similar for the US sample.
Good catch; thank you very much. I misinterpreted the findings—an embarrassing mistake on my part. I’ve updated the post to address this.