Parental Leave in the Media

Although paternity leave is largely discussed from a legislative or political platform, social media has offered an additional platform for spreading awareness and driving corporate change. I looked at the two top social media platforms companies use: Twitter and Facebook. Let’s begin with the former. I have not used Twitter until this WGST 106 course, so I did not know what to expect upon searching for discussions centered around parental leave. Nevertheless, I began my search with the rather simple term “parental leave”. What I found were whole accounts dedicated to raising awareness of paid parental leave benefits, both from a corporate management and employee perspective. Accounts such as PledgeParentalLeave revealed companies that offer the best leave policies, which I believe is an effective way to influence where followers seek job opportunities. The account also posts scholarly articles and statistical analyses that quantify the benefits of taking leave. They took advantage of the hashtag feature, creating a trend of #PledgePL and #parentalleave. The hashtag “#PledgePL” drew my attention, as it was in every post.

 I then decided to explore other accounts that had posted tweets using this hashtag. To my surprise it opened the door to a plethora of accounts emphasizing activism for parental leave! For example, the Trollback Company tweeted that they were “taking the pledge” by providing family support for employees, both pregnant and non-pregnant parents. Doberman via tweet recognized themselves as a “creative industry [that] comes together to improve paid parental leave” Verydat also boasted about being a founding partner of the #PledgePL movement. As I kept scrolling, I noticed countless additional companies pledge their commitment to reforming parental leave, which included USTWO Studios, Smart Design, IDEO, and Swift Collective to name a few. There was also a post displaying a page of companies that offer “meaningful” parent leave benefits, grouping them under #pledgepeople. It is interesting to see how such a simple hashtag can bring about a whole movement and pressure corporations to reform their parental leave policies. 

I also took a look at posts related to specifically paternity leave, hoping to gauge how men viewed parental leave on Twitter. It appears that the argument for Paternity leaveis that men want more time to bond with their children. One take on this issue that caught my attention, was a the following tweet: “how come none of this “men’s rights” p***babies ever had any thoughts on the fact that there’s no paternity leave by law in the U.S., so I had to go back to work 2 days after my son was born to provide for him? You gonna fix that for me by complaining about women?” I was a little confused by this statement. By “complaining about women” did he mean avocation efforts (that sounds like “complaining”) to improve women’s rights in parental leave? Or was he referring to threatened men, self-labeled as men’s rights advocates, who are complaining that women get more leave than them? A comment that followed agreed with the tweet, adding “I guess it’s easier to complain about women over doing stuff”. I am assuming complaining about women is not synonymous with advocating for their rights. Moving on from this tweet, I kept noticing this common theme among dad’s advocating for more paternity leave. Almost all made the argument that they wanted more time to bond with their children. This aligns with a previous article I read stating the statistics that men increasingly want parental leave, but don’t feel they can take it for financial reasons.   

I then moved to the latter media platform: Facebook. Unlike Twitter, I’ve had prior experience with this outlet. However, I rarely use it and I’ve never considered facebook to be a platform for advocacy. When I searched up parental leave, I was actually surprised to see posts that my friends had shared in regards to this issue! These posts were shared articles or youtube clips addressing leave as a gendered issue. I also observed posts linking to articles on how leave benefits business, legislation around parental leave in Finland, and reformations in New Zealand. I also realized that there are entire facebook pages dedicated to reforming leave in corporations through social networks. For example, the Leave Network posts research and policies, includes 60 experts and analyzes the issue from over 40 countries. The ASDA Home Office Parental Leave is another example that creates an online community for parents to talk, get advice, and push for change. Lastly, I observed that facebook is used to form events like the Legal Rights for Working Parents event. This brings parents together via a social network.