Does Employer-Paid, Job-Protected Maternity Leave Help or Hurt Female IT Workers? Evidence from Millions of Job Applications

Paid maternity leave is considered an important pathway to increasing women’s participation in information technology (IT), as it helps address work-family balance concerns, which are pronounced in the field due to long hours, travel, and the need to keep up with technology. Many governments require that employers pay for maternity leave. Using microlevel data on millions of applications from an online job portal, our study examines whether a policy change in India that expanded employer-paid, job-protected maternity leave for companies with 10 or more employees from short-term (12 weeks) to medium-term (26 weeks) changes companies’ likelihood of considering female applicants for IT jobs. Specifically, postlegislation, we expect that less profitable companies may penalize women in the hiring process because employers must bear the costs associated with providing maternity benefits; we find that women were ∼22% less likely to be invited for an interview, postlegislation, at companies with low profitability. Moreover, at such companies, we do not observe a postlegislation change in applications by women. These results identify an important source of leakage in the pipeline for female IT workers. Additionally, our study suggests that legislation which mandates that maternity leave be paid for by employers (50% of economies that guarantee maternity leave of 14 weeks or longer require that employers fully or partially pay for maternity leave) should be accompanied by the introduction and enforcement of associated laws and guardrails—for example, parental leave and antidiscriminatory laws—to ensure that the spirit of the maternity leave legislation is upheld.

This paper was accepted by Anindya Ghose, information systems.

Funding: Financial support from the National Science Foundation [Award 2151311] and Bright Data [in-kind contributions] is gratefully acknowledged.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.00380.