The opinion is that women can’t wait for gender equality

The Snowmass: An Overview of the Benefits and Misuse of Parental Leave for New Families in the Presence of Mass Work Cuts

TheSkimm was co-founded by Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. CNN has more opinion on it.

Many employees in tech feel that their companies switched to a lifestyle of child care, mental health support, and paid time off after they sold their job. For new parents, generous leave was part of the draw. Many had assumed that their parental leave came with some legal protection, and were distraught to learn they were caught up in mass job cuts. Being on parental leave does not make you safe from mass layoffs unrelated to your leave.

Why Business Leaders Shouldn’t Be Equal: The Last Five Years of Family-Friendly Benefits for New Mothers and New Workers

Here’s the reality women are facing: The system is not just broken – it was never built to make us equal. No step is too small when it comes to getting ahead of the game. We can’t watch the continued Inequality as women and business leaders. We’re calling on business leaders to act in the following ways:

Information is a must for women to have a seat at the table because of the way we save and invest. It is possible for women to control their money and feel confident when building wealth from a foundation of knowledge.

Business leaders should provide women with the resources that support their long-term goals like 401(k)s, stock options and equity in the companies they are helping to build as well as financial education programs to help them make smart saving, investing and retirement decisions. That might include workshops around setting financial goals or services that make it easier to track spending and saving habits.

We implemented a paid leave policy at theSkimm long before we had any expectant parents on the team. It offers 18 weeks of paid family leave (including for adoption, surrogacy and fostering) for all new parents, as well as emotional, mental and financial resources. Danielle has been one of the team members to use it. Policies like paid family leave allow businesses to show they support their employees, which in turn helps with retention.

Some new fathers are adjusting to life without a job. The accounts of laid off workers while on maternity leave or even while delivering a baby have been flooding the profiles of professional networking sites. That comes with a mental health toll — as so many laid-off workers across different backgrounds have experienced, including those who are immigrants with visas tied to employment.

Human resources experts called the last five years the golden age of corporate benefits because companies scaled up family-friendly benefits for some workers. 54 percent of large companies were covered invitro fertilization in 2022 compared with 36 percent in 2015, and 19 percent of companies were covered egg freezing in comparison with 6 percent in 2015.