Thinking Anthropologically
In the following section our team has incorporated individual ideas as to how gender plays a role in family and parental leave in the United States.
While the FMLA allows qualifying employees to take unpaid, job-secured leave, it does not protect them from discrimination upon returning to the workplace. The Pew Research Center suggests that more parental leave may contribute to a larger gendered pay gap. To learn more about how the Pew Research Center measured the gender pay gap, visit here, and to learn more about closing the gender pay gap in the United States, visit the OECD.
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Gender is a social construct that intersects with other relations of power. |
Gender plays are large role in the movement for paid family leave in the United States. For example, one major debate is whether mothers and fathers should receive the same amount of time off after the birth or adoption of a child. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, paternity leave is much more limited compared to maternity leave. Additionally, with an increasing number of stay-at-home fathers and recent transformations in parental gender roles within the LGBTQIA community, it’s unfair to say which parent should receive more time off. This is a perfect example of how gender manifests as a relation of power. In traditional American culture, we have differentiated the idea of male versus female so much that many people believe a person’s gender should be indicative of their role as a parent or caregiver. Women are almost punished for having a child because they are not given the time they should be allotted with their new child and are expected to be able to go to work quickly afterward. Women are at the mercy of the company’s maternity leave policies. Even if a mother figure goes back to work after their leave they are than also dealing with the guilt of leaving their child making them feel that they should stay home with their child rather then focus on their career. The western cultural construct of binary gender roles has forced parents to play out the roles of mom and dad, in which mom is the primary caregiver and dad is the breadwinner. When places of employment provide unequal amounts of time off based on gender roles, they are only reinforcing the social ideals of the gender binary and stereotyped gendered roles.
Whether or not you see it, there is a relation between gender and power. Maternity and family leave is a low priority in the United States and the laws we have to "cover it", do have are the bare minimum. This is because the people in power associate children and family issues as being the women's problem to deal with and her priority. If they believed a woman is just as important in the workplace as men, they would have created better, more inclusive laws to protect woman and families. This could be interpreted as them saying women belong at home anyways and that is why they have not placed any laws to protect their jobs or keep them financially stable while they take leave. They are also saying that the men in these relationships are supposed to stay working instead of helping their wives because they should be the breadwinners of the household and bringing the money in. The inequality of power has put strains on every member of the family |