ESL 5315 002 2016 Academic Writing

Exploring Students’ Perspective towards Parental Leave in Texas Tech University

Fall 2016 ESL 5315-002
Sahar Mihandoust
Professor: Thomas Leverett

Abstract

Parental leave policy is one the less developed policies in the US, but it has been gaining attention during the recent years. We conducted this study to investigate several questions and hypotheses regarding parental leave policies; we targeted Texas Tech students as our convenient sample and collected information from approximately 300 surveys. After analyzing the outcome data from questionnaires, we found that generally Texas Tech students felt the need for mandated parental leave, but females were more in favor of mandated leave in comparison to males. We also found that male Texas Tech students supported paternal leave extension; however, based on their state or country of origin, they had different opinions regarding the length of paternal leave extension and leave equality. Another finding was that females were more in favor of paternal leave and leave equality in comparison to males. Finally, we did not have sufficient data to project a meaningful suggestion about the comparison between parent and non-parent students’ opinion regarding paternal leave extension.

Introduction

The USA is the only country among industrialized countries where parental leave is still an issue. There is poor parental coverage for paid parental leave in United States, but there are some signs that this is about to change. There are a couple of cities that are enacting generous policies for paid parental leave among their own employees, and more cities seem to be adding themselves to that list. In this regard, Michael Kimmel believes that 2016 is going to be the year of parents (Kimmel, 2016).

On the other hand, the tendency to change parental leave policies seems to be in opposition to the American perception of the federal interference with individual companies. Not all the states, and not all the parties in US are in favor of paid parental leave. In recent years, the Democratic Party has been in favor of pushing polices for paid parental leave, in opposition to the Republican Party, which tends to believe there is no need for more federal rules. (Garofalo, 2015)

In this regard, this study was formulated to find out the perception of American students in Texas Tech University regarding the paid parental leave issues and profits. To do so, we as a group of twenty students in English as second language class (ESL 5315-001,002) in fall 2016, decided to conduct a study among approximately three hundred American Texas Tech students to find out about their opinion about the topic of parental leave. Our general interest was to relate the demographic information of Texas Tech students to the way they thought about parental leave. The demographic information in this study included age, sex, nationality, degree, and parenting status. In this regard, several parental leave issues were explored, and these topics included: mandated parental leave, extension of parental leave for both men and women, paid parental leave, and parental leave politics. This paper specifically studied the way Texan male and female students in Texas Tech felt about mandated leave, paternal leave extension, and parental leave extension. This paper suggested that Texan Texas Tech students would generally approve of parental leave but will not feel the urge for mandated parental leave. This study also hypothesized that the female students would be more in favor of mandated leave in comparison to male students. Another hypothesis was that male students would be less likely to feel the need for extended paternal leave; on the other hand, female students would be in favor of paternal leave and its extension more than male students. Finally, this study suggested that students with children will be in favor of parental leave extension in comparison to students without children.

Literature review

The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among developed countries. This might be due to poor parental leave policies, which require the early return of the mother to the workplace. There were several examples of heartbreaking incidents, which led to infant mortality in the news in the past few years. The reason for these deaths, which occurred in daycares, was that these children were put in daycares at a very young age, since their mother needed to return to work. Two mothers who faced infant mortality due to short maternal leave made a petition and gained 135,000 signatures; this petition was to extend paid parental leave (May, 2016). Although infant mortality rates raise sympathy towards mothers who lost their infants, still there are people who think enforcing mandated parental leave to companies is unnecessary.

According to Garofalo (2015), Republicans are known to value family virtues and therefore they are expected to show support for parental leave. Surprisingly the opposite is happening and due to their favor for less government control on businesses, they have not been as active as the Democratic Party on parental leave issues (Garofalo, 2015).

Texas is the most Republican state (Foran, 2016), and therefore it can be suggested that people in Texas are in favor of family virtues, and also they support businesses independence from federal law enforcement. So the first hypothesis states that Texan Texas Tech students will be in favor of parental leave, and will support its extension generally; however, they would not support enforcing businesses for providing mandated leave.

Despite suggesting lack of general support for mandated leave in Texas Tech, the second hypothesis suggests female students will be more in favor of mandated parental leave in comparison to males, since they can more relate to child birth responsibilities in the family- oriented state of Texas.

During recent years paid parental leave has been a hot issue among companies. Some companies, such as Netflix, Google and Etsy, have established generous extensions to paid parental leave. In the case of Netflix, employees can take up to one year paid parental leave. But the most interesting point yet is the gender neutral parental leave programs; these programs lead to an equal hiring field for men and women (McGregor, 2016).

According to Mayer (2016), although companies have started to enhance policies for male employees to take their time off; men generally are reluctant to take their parental leave, or even when they take it, they do not use it completely. The result of a survey shows, 36% of men would not take parental leave, since they thought taking the leave could be seen as a sign of lack of commitment. According to Bluethmann, macho cultures mock fathers who take paternity leave and assume that the domestic sphere belongs only to women (Bluethmann, 2016). A literature review suggests that generally men tend to not take their parental leave, because of workplace pressure and traditional gender roles; this puts more pressure on women both at home and in the workplace (Mayer, 2016).

Texas is ranked amongst the worst states in case of equality for women; according to Jessica Bryant, this inequality mostly represents men’s perspective towards women-men equality (Bryant, 2016). Texan men seem to be less supportive of men-women equality, so the third hypothesis is that Texan Texas Tech male students will be less likely to feel the need for extending paternal leave, and they will not approve of paternal and maternal equality; on the other hand, non-Texan American students and internationals may be in more favor of paternal leave extension and will be more supportive of paternal and maternal equality.

According to Wojcicki (2014) and Dearborn (2016), parental leave is highly influencing women and their careers. There is a huge pressure on new or expectant mothers to not take the full advantage of their time off, and to come back early from leave. Refusing to do so may lead mothers to be cut off from projects, promotions and raises (Dearborn, 2016).

When women are faced with insufficient maternity leave, they choose to quit their jobs, or tend to return to work early. Both these alternatives have negative impacts; the first one leads to lowering family income and the second one has drastic effects on infants, which was discussed earlier. Based on Wojcicki, one fourth of women return to their jobs within the first 10 days of their childbirth (Wojcicki, 2014). Notwithstanding the change of company policies for parental leave, the leave rates are still low, and in 2016, 23 percent of women have taken only two weeks of their leave (Starner, 2016).

The literature review suggests that women are burdened more by pressure, both in the family and in the workplace at the beginning of motherhood. However, if flexible neutral parental leave receives more consideration, fathers would be more integrated after childbirth; this is also reported (Bellstrom, 2016) to have a positive effect on mothers’ health. Paternal leave seems to balance the pressure on women both in parenthood and the work environment.

So this study suggests that women generally would want men to have extended parental leave; this is regardless of the leave being paid or unpaid. So the fourth hypothesis suggests that female students in Texas Tech will be in more favor of paternal leave than male students themselves, since male students think parental leave is more related to women than men.

Finally, the fifth hypothesis states that students with children will be more in favor of extension of parental leave, since they have experienced the actual terms and responsibilities which come with being a parent.

Methods:

We formulated our study to investigate the perception of American students in Texas Tech University towards three topics: social media, parental leave, and Black Lives Matter. To do so, we as a group of twenty students in English as second language class (ESL 5315-001, 002) in fall 2016, decided to conduct a study among approximately three hundred American Texas Tech students to find out about their opinion about these three topics. We made a questionnaire with three sections, after several revisions, and we made an agreement about questionnaire distribution. According to this agreement, each student in class was assigned to randomly choose six American male students and six American female students to fill in the questionnaire. ESL students needed to fill in one survey themselves, and could gather as many surveys as they wanted after they completed their 13 initial questionnaires. A pool of equal ratio between male to female was considered for this study to picture the male to female ratio in Texas Tech students’ population, and to equally generate both genders’ perceptions towards these three topics.

We, as a group of international students in ESL class, targeted different locations in Texas Tech University and asked different samples of students to fill in the questionnaire. We used convenient sampling due to our limited time and budget, so our random sample is not representative by department or major, or by socioeconomic status. After distributing the surveys, we realized, the Learning Resources Center in Health Sciences, the Chemistry building, Southwest Collection Library, Texas Tech University Library, the Student Union Building, and the Mechanical Engineering department were the some of the main locations targeted for distributing the questionnaires.

The questionnaire we used for this survey included three sections (see Appendix); we put social media questions in the beginning to encourage the young audience to participate in our survey; parental leave was the second section of the survey, and finally the last part was the controversial topic of Black Lives Matter. The questions were either multiple choice, or left a part for participants’ comments. Multiple choice questions seemed to be the proper type of questioning since we needed to conduct our study in a limited time. Our final version of the survey included forty questions. After collecting the questionnaires, every student was responsible to input their data into Google Sheets for analyzing. Finally, the data was analyzed using the available tools in Google Sheets.

Results:

This section elaborates the results of our questionnaire and explores the validity of our primary hypotheses and assumptions. Our five hypotheses were explored and challenged with the available data from questionnaires for providing meaningful results and conclusions.

Our first hypothesis suggested that Texan Texas Tech students would be in favor of parental leave, and would support its extension generally; however, they would not support requiring businesses for providing mandated leave.

Surprisingly, after gathering and analyzing the data from Texas Tech students’ questionnaires, we realized that Texas Tech students generally agreed with mandated leave and supported forcing businesses to provide mandated leave. This was in opposition to our general belief about young Texans and their way of thinking about businesses and government independence.

Our data in graph 1 shows that more than half (56%) of the participants agreed with parental leave being mandated by the government; nearly one fifth (21.5%) of the students did not want parental leave to be mandated by the government and another one fourth (22.5%) had no idea about this matter.

Our second hypothesis suggested that female students would be more in favor of mandated parental leave in comparison to males, and our logic was that females related more to childbirth responsibilities in comparison to males in the family-oriented state of Texas. In this case our data supported our hypothesis; we found that female students in Texas Tech were more in favor of mandated parental leave in comparison to male students (graph 2). The data extracted from the questionnaire suggests that more than half of female students (62.5%) thought mandated parental leave was necessary, but only less than half of the male students agreed with mandated parental leave (graph 3). At the same time the number of male students who disagreed or had no idea about this policy was higher than that of female students.

Our third hypothesis was that male Texan Texas Tech students would be less likely to feel the need for extending paternal leave and they would also not approve of paternal or maternal equality; on the other hand, non-Texan American students and internationals may be in more favor of paternal leave extension and would be more supportive of paternal and maternal equality.

Surprisingly, the results found on this section of data showed that regardless of the country or state of origin, male students in Texas Tech felt that paternal leave needed to be extended; however, students’ opinion about the length of this extension differed based on the country or state they were from.

Non-Texan American students voted for paternal and maternal leave equality more than Texan and international students (graphs 4, 5, 6). In other words, although all the male students felt the need for extending paternal leave, non-Texan American students had stronger feelings about paternal leave and thought that paternal leave should be equal to maternal leave. Opposing to what we thought, male international students were less in favor of paternal and maternal extension equality.

Our fourth hypothesis suggested that female students in Texas Tech would be more in favor of paternal leave than male students themselves, and our logic for that assumption was that male students would think parental leave was more related to women than men.

Our analyzed data demonstrated an interesting relationship between gender and opinion about paternal leave extension; our data showed that in opposition to what was proposed, male students in Texas Tech were equally in favor of paternal leave extension; however, female students were more in favor of length equality in maternal and paternal leave extension.

Data in graphs 7-8 showed that 37.7% of male students thought that paternal leave should be extended, but only 16% of them believed that the extension length should be equal to maternity leave; on the other hand, 27.1% of female students thought that paternal leave should be extended and 38.2% of female students thought that paternal leave should be equal to maternity leave. We can conclude that although male students were in favor of paternal leave, still, female students had stronger opinions about the necessity for paternal leave and its extension.

Finally, the fifth hypothesis stated that students with children would be more in favor of extension of paternal leave, since they had experienced the actual terms and responsibilities which come with being a parent.

Due to limited number of students and staff with children we were not able to infer a meaningful relationship between parenthood and opinion about parental leave. Generally, we did not think that students with no children would be so considerate about the paternal leave issues, but to our surprise, students with no children were highly supportive of paternal leave extension, and there was a high ratio of students who thought paternal and maternal leave should be equal.

All the figures and percentages (graph 9-10), which compare the opinion of students with or without children about paternal leave were somewhat similar, but as stated before, due to uneven number of samples in these two groups, we were unable to test our final hypothesis or make a meaningful conclusion.

Discussion:

In this section we will interpret and discuss the significance and importance of our findings; we will also try to justify our new findings with potential reasons. Our first general belief was that young Texans would not be in favor of mandated leave and would not validate forcing businesses to provide mandated leave; however, Texas Tech students highly agreed with mandated leave and supported forcing businesses to provide mandated leave. We can assume that the general idea about young Texans and their way of thinking about government and business independence has changed over time, or simply does not apply to the mandated leave issue. This surprising perspective among Texas Tech students can be caused due to our sample range, since the sample we targeted mostly included a younger population (generation Y). The viewpoint change among young Texas Tech students is important, since if this change of perspective becomes a more popular thought in the future, legislators need to reconsider policies related to mandated leave.

Secondly, we suggested that female students would be more in favor of mandated parental leave in comparison to males, and the data supported our suggestion. As we expected, in the family-oriented state of Texas, females were more concerned about family issues and related more to childbirth responsibilities in comparison to males; that could be one reason why they were more in favor of mandated parental leave.

Thirdly, we assumed that male Texan Texas Tech students would not feel the need for paternal extension; however, we found out that the majority of male students thought that paternal leave needed to be extended; this general idea was regardless of the male student’s country or state of origin. Our data also found that non-Texan American students and Texan Texas Tech students were more in favor of paternal and maternal equality in comparison to international students. This finding was interesting on multiple levels; firstly, it showed that although Texan Texas Tech students were in favor of paternal leave extension, the percentage which thought that the paternal leave needed to be equal to maternal leave was less than that of the rest of American male students. This demonstrates that Texan Texas Tech students were still more biased towards gender equality and were shadowed with the macho culture in the conservative state of Texas. The second interesting assumption was that since international male students were the last group who thought paternal and maternal leave needed to be equal in comparison to the two other groups (Texan/Non-Texan Americans), we can infer that American culture values equality more than other international cultures. An alternative explanation could suggest that American students were more honest filling in the questionnaires, whilst, international students chose to mirror a better and a more hard-worker version of themselves.

Fourthly we found that although male and female students in Texas Tech supported extending paternal leave somewhat equally, female students were more in favor of equality in paternal and maternal leave length. In other words, although to our surprise, male students were in favor of paternal leave extension, most of them still did not think that the leave needed to be equal to maternal leave. This could be a sign that women were more in favor of equality than men, even if the benefit of equality was for their opposite sex. One other explanation would be that what women considered as a benefit for themselves and for their family, was not considered as beneficial from their male partners’ view; we can explain that generally, women are more positively affected by the longer paternal leave, so they value longer paternal leave, their husband’s time, and presence in the beginning of the motherhood. On the contrary men are somewhat uncomfortable with staying so much at home, and would rather be at work. This can be one of the reasons why men did not want the equality in paternal and maternal leave as much as women did. Another interpretation from a different perspective could suggest that, although men in Texas Tech liked to benefit from extended paternal leave, they did not want to lose their superiority in the family; in other words, they did not want to be considered equal to women. This is an important outcome, since it is providing a guide for desirable paternal leave extension length from both female and male participants’ perspective; this guide would work as a helpful tool for legislators in case they want to change policies regarding paternal leave and its extension.

Finally, due to the limitations of the study we were unable to suggest whether the students with children would be more in favor of paternal leave in comparison to the students without children or not. We did not have enough participants with children in our study, so it can be suggested that for a future study we can consider a larger spectrum for our sample size. Another solution would be to ask the participants to see if they had any children and assign half of the sample size to participants with children; that way we could include the needed sample number for the participants with children without changing the sample size.

Conclusion:

Our purpose in this study was to understand how Texas Tech students thought about multiple parental leave issues. We had some presumptions based on the literature review and we made a survey to test our hypotheses. After analyzing the results from our survey, we found several contradictions among general belief about Texan Texas Tech students and the way these students actually thought. We found that Texas Tech students generally agreed with mandated leave and supported forcing businesses to provide mandated leave; however, we found that females were in more favor of mandated leave in comparison to males. We also found that in opposition to what we assumed, the majority of male students approved paternal leave extension; this general approval was regardless of the male student’s country or state of origin. Additionally, we found that non-Texan American students and Texan Texas Tech students were more in favor of equality in paternal and maternal leave length when compared to international students. One other finding was that although male and female students in Texas Tech supported extending paternal leave somewhat equally, female students approved equality in paternal and maternal leave length more than male students. Finally, since we had limited data on parent students, we were unable to make a meaningful interpretation based on our data on whether the students with children were more in favor of paternal leave in comparison to the students without children or not. Future studies with a more even group of participant on parent and nonparent students are needed to explore the effect of parenthood on biased vision towards parental leave extension.

Bibliography:

Bellstrom, K. (2016, March 15). Etsy is the latest company to offer gender-neutral parental leave. Fortune. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from http://fortune.com/2016/03/15/etsy-parental-leave-policy/

Bluethmann, J. (2016, September 8). Dads and paternity leave: Why they should take it. Metroparent daily. Retrieved on October 4, 2016 from http://www.metroparent.com/daily/parenting/parenting-issues-tips/dads-and-paternity-leave-why-they-should-take-it

Bryant, J. (2016, August 26). The best and worst states for women’s equality. Dallas Business Journal. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2016/08/26/the-best-and-worst-states-for-women-s-equality.html

Dearborn, J. (2016, April 27). Offering paid parental leave is just the start. USA Today. Retrieved October 4, 2016, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2016/04/19/offering-paid-parental-leave-just-start-column/83237980/

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Kimmel, M. (2016, January 11). Why the U.S. will finally do something about paid parental leave this year. Fast Company. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://www.fastcompany.com/3055288/the-future-of-work/why-paid-parental-leave-will-expand-in-2016

May, A. (2016, August 30). Moms whose infants died in day care petition for 6 months parental leave. USA Today. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/08/30/moms-whose-infants-died-day-care-petition-6-months-parental-leave/89582828/

Mayer, K. (2016, September 15). Views: Parental leave part of a bigger picture. EBN. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from http://www.benefitnews.com/opinion/parental-leave-part-of-a-bigger-picture

McGregor, J. (2016, September 13). This new paid leave policy may be the smartest perk for families yet. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-deloitte-paid-leave-policy-20160913-story.html

Starner, T. (2016, August 16). US paid maternity leave policy continues to lag. HRDIVE. Retrieved on September 27, 2016 from http://www.hrdive.com/news/us-paid-maternity-leave-policy-continues-to-lag/424482/

Wojcicki, S. (2014, December 16). Paid maternity leave is good for business. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from http://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-wojcicki-paid-maternity-leave-is-good-for-business-1418773756

Appendix:
http://esl53150022016academicwriting.blogspot.com/2016/12/survey.html

Graph 1