Maternal and Parental Leave

Treat Pregnancy Leave the Same as Other Kinds of Disability Leave

Issue
One common mistake academic employers make is to provide pregnancy disability leave on terms that are less generous than those available for other kinds of medical leave.[1] For example, in one law school, female faculty members were forced to choose between getting a course release and getting paid disability leave for delivery. At other institutions, female faculty members are told that they must find people to teach their courses before they take maternity leave. Both practices are illegal under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act—unless professors who take medical leave for other reasons, for example a heart attack, are required to find their own replacements, or to trade off other faculty benefits in order to take leave—which is unlikely to happen. The easy remedy is to apply the same terms and conditions to pregnancy leave as are applied for other medical leaves.

Design Parental Leave Policies Based on Caretaking Status, Not Sex

Issue
While pregnancy disability leave can be limited to women, parental caregiving leave cannot; to do so would be sex discrimination. The key in designing parental caregiving leave is to link the leave with the relevant activity—being a caregiver—instead of linking it to biological sex.
 
A common alternative is to offer parental leave to anyone who has had or adopted a child. This model often gives rise to fears and rumors that male professors are using the parental leave to do extra research, while female professors are using the leave for caregiving. To avoid this scenario, an effective solution is to require professors who claim the leave to certify that they are spending a certain set amount of time each week as the sole caregiver. This type of certification is common in human resource contexts.

Provision: Sole Caregiver for 20 hours a week
Stanford University has adopted a Reduced Teaching and Clinical Duties policy that allows faculty to remain on full salary with reduced teaching duties. To avoid abuse of the policy, faculty members are only eligible if they are the sole caregiver for at least 20 hours during the workweek between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m., Monday through Friday.[2]
 
Similarly, Harvard Law School has adopted a policy that provides paid leave to any faculty member who is "the sole caretaker of his or her newborn or newly adopted child at least 20 hours per week, from Monday through Friday, between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m." The applicant for the leave must assert that he or she will be the "sole caregiver" for the requisite period.[3]

Provide Central Funding for Leave

Issue
Some small departments and colleges on a campus may be hesitant to institute flexibility policies for faculty due to the high costs associated with replacing faculty. The departmental gatekeepers may also be hesitant to encourage faculty in their department to use leave time for the same reason. One important point is that replacement costs may be modest if courses ordinarily taught by full-time professors on parental leave are taught by adjuncts. Ideally, dedicated centralized funding should cover the cost of hiring replacement teachers.

Central Funding for Replacement Teaching
When ladder-ranked faculty in the University of California system qualify for full or partial leave (Active Service-Modified Duties or ASMD),  the UC Office of the President has requested that campuses centrally fund the cost of hiring replacement teachers. Most of the UC campuses now do so.[4] After tracking the program for several years, the Interim Provost reported that the money used for replacing the faculty represents a small portion of their budget.[5]

Offer a Stop-the-Clock Option

Issue
“Biological and tenure clocks have the unfortunate tendency to tick loudly, clearly, and at the same time.”[6] Tenure-clock-stop policies allow tenure-track faculty members to take a temporary pause from their tenure track, usually after the birth or adoption of a child. “Stop-the-clock” policies at some universities also include other family care, such as elder care. In these cases, a centralized decision-maker such as a dean, should determine whether the level of care is high enough for eligibility. At the end of the stop-the-clock period, the tenure clock resumes with the same number of years left to tenure review as when the clock paused and there should be no penalty for extra time taken to arrive at tenure review.[7] Some faculty who might benefit from stopping the clock are reluctant to do so—or do so with fear—because they are concerned about the associated stigma.[8]

Stop the Tenure Clock for New Parents
At the University of Minnesota, faculty members may stop the tenure clock for one year for each childbirth, adoption, or foster care placement. They may also stop the clock twice to respond to family members with serious health conditions.[9]
 
The University of Chicago allows faculty members a one-year extension of the tenure clock for the birth/adoption of each child – with no limit on the number of times the policy may be used. For family care-giving responsibilities, a faculty member can request a one-time term extension on their tenure clock.[10]

Broader Application of Stop the Clock Policies
At Duke University, a maximum of three years of tenure clock relief is extended for a number of reasons beyond birth or adoption of a child including personal illness; illness of a parent, partner or child; a house fire or other catastrophic residential property losses; or heavy administrative duties. The stop the clock policies apply to men and women. The university reports that both sexes take advantage of them and that no stigma for taking advantage of the policies is tolerated.  For non-tenure track members, the same provisions for stopping the tenure clock may be applied to extending their appointments.[11]

Design “Opt-Out” Instead of “Opt-In” Policies

Issue
Stop-the-clock and other policies such as family leave that rely on faculty to "opt in" to the policies rather than opt out of them often leave faculty members in the uncomfortable position of negotiating with chairs about whether they will take leave. A 2002 national survey of over 4,000 faculty members revealed that 33% of faculty who were parents—mothers and fathers—did not ask for parental leave, and just less than 20% did not ask to stop the tenure clock, even though they thought they would have benefited from doing so.[12]

Designing policies as opt-out rather than opt-in sends the message that the institution expects faculty to use the policies that are made available to them. As noted above, opt out policies also avoid situations in which faculty feel uncomfortable asking their chairs for permission to use the policies.  

One-Time Automatic Tenure Clock Extension
Vanderbilt University has a parental leave policy that provides for an automatic one-year extension of the tenure clock when a faculty member gives birth or adopts a child.[13]

Automatic Tenure Clock Extension Policy for Each Child
Both Princeton University and the University of Chicago automatically extend the tenure clock of tenure track Assistant Professors for one year at each birth or adoption of a new child.[14]