Talk:Parental leave/Archives/2013

New contribution on US maternity leave

As part of a class assignment, I plan to create a new Wikipedia entry entitled Maternity leave (United States) to more thoroughly explore maternity leave policy within the United States specifically. I feel that it is absolutely imperative for individuals to have access to a comprehensive account of American maternity leave policy. American citizens are tremendously influenced by maternity leave and therefore deserve a detailed and accurate discussion of the policy. For instance, the provision of maternity leave is indelibly intertwined with numerous social issues including child development and gender equality. Moreover, the United States specifically deserves global attention for its unique approach to maternity leave that significantly diverges from other developed nations. Thus, the United States maternity leave policy deserves special attention and elucidation.

Unfortunately though, there is not currently a page adequately explaining American policy. This particular page provides only a cursory description of maternity leave legislation. In my new entry, I intend to expand upon this article's brief discussion of American policy by further delving into the history of maternity leave in the United States, current legislation on the issue, and the costs and benefits of such legislative policies on its citizens. My tentative outline is as follows:

1) Lead section

2) History in the United States

3) Current policy

3.1 Federal legislation

3.2 State legislation (certain states have expanded upon federal guidelines)

3.3 Foreign comparison (compare to policies in other developed countries)

4) Costs of United States maternity leave

4.1 Economic inefficiency (costs imposed on companies, absence from workplace, etc.)

4.2 Inequality (perpetuates inequalities since only certain groups have access)

5) Benefits of United States maternity leave

5.1 Child development (health, educational and behavior effects on children)

5.2 Gender equality (women’s employment & division of domestic labor)

6) See also

7) References

8) External links

My entry will serve as a valuable information outlet for all aspects of American maternity leave policy. Given the gravity of this issue, I welcome all suggestions and advice about how to create a more effective article. Specifically, I encourage feedback on my organizational structure along with any source recommendations that you may have. Moreover, if you know of any other existing articles directly relating to my proposed entry, please let me know.

Mwtwgt (talk) 20:28, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

UK specific data (Paternity Leave especially) seems out of date?

Based of the information found here: https://www.gov.uk/paternity-pay-leave/overview

and here https://www.gov.uk/maternity-pay-leave/overview

It seems that the UK data seems somewhat out of date, Maternity leave seems to have been shortened and Paternity leave seems to have been equalised. I am not too confident however and would ask someone else to look into it, someone better at looking at this kind of stuff?

OJSlaughter (talk) 22:02, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Poor graphs

The graphs detract from the clarity of the article. The following improvements are obvious at a glance:

• Please ensure that all country names are visible on the Y-axis. In the graph for Europe, the country names are missing from half the bars.
• Using stacked bars you could distinguish between 90-100% paid leave, fixed paid leave, leave sharable with the father, etc.
• The benefits by country histogram is not particularly meaningful, and its caption, implying that 20 weeks is the norm is grossly misleading. A more informative histogram would be weighted by population. According to the article, India gives 12 weeks of paid leave and China gives 90 days, or 12.8 weeks; the USA gives 0. A large number small countries giving benefits for longer has little effect on the benefit enjoyed by the average person.
• Americas and Europe each have a graph by country. The graph provided for the African section is the aforementioned histogram for the world, and no chart is provided for Asia. The majority of the world's population lives on these two continents; this is a significant omission. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.124.197.203 (talk) 15:38, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

I'd suggest removing the "histogram" by the introduction unless someone feels it's worth creating a new one from up-to-date information. It doesn't add much to the article and isn't up to a reasonable standard. For a start, it's not actually a histogram. Most importantly, though, the x-axis labels ({0, >0, 10–20, 20–50, >30}) are very poor, leading to the graph being virtually meaningless. Not knowing the data set used to create it (or even whether the data in the article's tables are accurate enough to provide a suitable set to use), I wouldn't even feel confident simply reformatting the graph to a proper histogram and correcting the x-axis labels to something like {0, 1–10, 11–20, 21–50, >50}. Mr fanshaw (talk) 14:42, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

This bar chart has the most inconsistent x-axis I've ever seen. Remove it or fix it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.190.87.212 (talk) 00:09, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Rice University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2013 Q1 term. Further details are available on the course page.

The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 17:27, 2 January 2023 (UTC)