Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

San Francisco’s recently adopted Paid Parental Leave Ordinance (PPLO) is the most far-reaching law in the country, ensuring six weeks of fully paid leave for new parents employed in the City's private sector. The Ordinance, which took effect for employers with more than 50 employees in early 2017, builds on California’s Paid Family Leave program, which replaces income up to 55% of wages, by requiring covered employers to replace the remaining 45%. Using a four-part mixed methods evaluation, we examine the impact of the ordinance, particularly on lower income workers who are most likely to benefit from full wage replacement while on leave.

Paid parental leave is commonplace in other high income countries, and substantial research has already documented the beneficial effects of leave-taking. Many parents in the U.S. currently take leave with partial or no pay, aided by minimal job protection laws and a patchwork of policies that provide partial pay for some parents. We evaluate the implementation of the PPLO; awareness among mothers and employers; employer attitudes, compliance, costs, and benefits; increased leave-taking by mothers and fathers and the benefits thereof; and remaining barriers to increased leave-taking (particularly among low-income families).

 Our four-part evaluation involves: econometric analysis of administrative data from the California Employment Development Department (EDD) on parental leave-taking; implementation evaluation with key informant interviews assessing policy implementation successes and barriers; in-depth qualitative interviews of representative covered employers, followed by a structured survey of several hundred randomly surveyed covered employers; and pre-post survey of randomly sampled women in San Francisco and surrounding counties, over-sampling low-income women, to assess changes in leave-taking and remaining barriers to leave-taking, knowledge of leave-taking rules and ease/difficulty of leave-taking, postpartum health care, and maternal and infant health outcomes. We will present early results from the evaluation.