Maternity-Leave Job Quitting By Less-Educated Mothers: What Is the Role of State-Level Safety Net and Maternity Leave Policies?

Background and Purpose: Despite evidence of positive effects of maternity leave on maternal mental health, breast-feeding, and child immunizations, low-income women in the U.S. are disproportionately ineligible for public and private sector maternity-leave programs. Means-tested safety net programs bridge this gap by providing resources to support economically disadvantaged mothers. The use of such programs as a means of taking maternity leave presents a conundrum to those concerned with the role of the safety net in promoting health and well-being among mothers and children: In the absence of alternative maternity leave resources, means-tested assistance may be the optimal path for supporting mothers and their children. Yet, means-tested assistance to support a maternity leave may have unintended consequences, such as increased or hastened job quitting and delayed employment reentry. No studies to date have investigated the relationship between the safety net and maternity-leave job quitting. This gap in knowledge is important given the potential near and long-term impact of job quitting on economic mobility and family resources.

Methods: This paper examines the effects of state rules for major safety net programs, including Medicaid, WIC, and TANF, and maternity leave programs, including Temporary Disability Insurance and Paid Family Leave, on the probability and timing of job quitting before and after a birth among less-educated women.  We use the fertility modules of three panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to construct a sample of first births that spans from 2001 to 2008. We use a difference-in-differences (DD) analytic approach to leverage differences in TANF, Medicaid and WIC program rules between states and across time while controlling for a diverse set of individual, family, and state characteristics that might influence mothers’ employment decisions around a birth.  We examine three outcomes: 1) quit job during pregnancy, 2) among those with a job quit during pregnancy, the timing of the job quit; and 3) quit job post-birth, hypothesizing that more generous safety net programs paired with less generous maternity leave policies may lead to a higher probability of job quitting as a form of maternity leave.

Results: Preliminary results find that less-educated mothers are more likely to take maternity-leave by quitting a job before or following a birth relative to their higher-educated counterparts.

Conclusion and Implications: Our findings have implications for policy and practices related to infant and maternal health, employment and earnings among low-income women, and the role of the safety net in supporting vulnerable families.