Economic, Security, Mobility and Equity
This brief explores the costs and benefits of alternative sick days policies applied at the national level: San Francisco’s Paid Sick Leave Ordinance, the Vermont Act, and the proposed federal Healthy Families Act.
DOWNLOAD REPORT This brief explores the distributional impact [...]
This brief finds a significant relationship between the use of paid leave and greater employment stability among first-time mothers.
This brief explores the reasons and likelihood that working mothers take leave under the FMLA.
DOWNLOAD REPORT This report compiles existing data on [...]
DOWNLOAD REPORT This report presents findings from a [...]
This report investigates women’s experiences in large, low-wage, growing, female-dominated occupations, comparing demographic data and indicators of economic security between 1994 and 2014, and projecting growth rates to 2024.
With the large majority of U.S. mothers in the labor force and a steady decline in the real earnings of all workers over recent decades, families are increasingly relying on mothers’ earnings for economic stability. In the United States, half of all households with children under 18 have a breadwinner mother, who is either a single mother who heads a household, irrespective of earnings, or a married mother who provides at least 40 percent of the couple’s joint earnings.
Persistent earnings inequality for working women translates into lower lifetime pay for women, less income for families, and higher rates of poverty across the United States. In each state in the country, women experience lower earnings and higher poverty rates than men.
Utilizing data from the 2014 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), this briefing paper estimates the proportion of public and private sector workers ages 18 and older with access to paid sick days, and their use of paid sick days, by race and ethnicity, immigration status, occupation, earnings, job level (supervisor/nonsupervisory status), and other demographic and occupational characteristics.
