Meghan Trainor Made Me Do This!: A Maven Family Leave Challenge
About this project
Introduction
The biggest worry for most businesses is losing money. Less money coming into businesses means less money to shareholders and that is never a good sign for anybody. It was upon this trepidation I would build this entire project. In order to come up with “an impactful visual”, I needed an impactful topic. What topic is more impactful for most executives than losing revenue?
However, rather than stay at the shallow end of the conversation, I decided to push the envelope from the other end by not addressing resource managers but the resource itself. Workers who know their worth often demand more thereby forcibly shifting managerial tactics so that even if they must yield, they do not lose.
Thus the hypothesis for this study became two-pronged:
Industries that hire more women have better leave allocations and pay better.
This would allow the reader to have an overall picture of the conditions that they were working under and, hopefully, it would start conversations about how to improve conditions in all workplaces.
The above is discussed in the fictional article imagined for this diagram "#Muva: Parental Policies on a Post-Pandemic Planet". Keeping this as the foremost idea, inspired the design of the diagram.
Methodology
The data for this project was sourced from the ‘Data Playground’ on the Maven Analytics website as a response to their #MavenFamilyChallenge.
The table provided bore six columns detailing registered names of businesses, the industry they operate in, Paid Maternal Leave numbered in weeks, Unpaid Maternal Leave numbered in weeks, Paid Paternal Leave numbered in weeks and Unpaid Paternal Leave numbered in weeks.
A fifth column was created for “Category” where Industries were merged into whole categories (eg. The industry “Business Services: Human Resources” would fall under the category “Business Services”). This was done for ease of analysis. Approximately 185 industries were narrowed to 50 categories of business. A sixth column was added to divide the business categories into “collar” classifications (i.e. white-collar, blue-collar etc).
Where there was no information available under each of the Paid and Unpaid Leave columns (denoted by “N/A”), the count was changed to “0” as Excel would simply not regard the entry giving us inaccurate averages. The average of each overall category of business was then found and rounded to the nearest whole number.
Further research was conducted to find the average hourly rate (overall) for these categories and the percentage of women hired (overall) in these industries. I wanted to examine if there was a correlation between how much an employee was paid, the number of women that worked in the industry and the number of weeks of leave allocated. These numbers were taken from a number of sources:- The U.S Bureau of Labour Statistics, recruiting websites Indeed, Payscale, Zippia and Glassdoor as well as Data USA.
As alluded to prior, Microsoft Excel was used as the data analysis software and formulae such as AVERAGE and SUM were utilized as data analysis tools.
Analysis
Fifty categories of business were analysed, and the following keynote statistics were found:
1.The total average number of all types of leave granted across all business categories is 18 weeks – 12 allocated for maternity leave and 6 granted for paternity leave. The total average hourly wage is $22.53. According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, women make up approximately 46.6% of the US workforce. This was used as the average for this study as opposed to the actual average of the fifty business categories (45%).
42% of business categories whose majority of workers identify as women have leave allocations that are “Below Average” and a pay rating that is “Below Average”. This polarizes the 29% of business categories whose majority of workers identify as men and have “Below Average” leave allocations while enjoying “Above Average” pay rates.
In white collar industries, 42% of business categories whose majority of workers identify as women have leave allocations that is “Below Average” a pay rating that is “Below Average” while 40% of business categories whose majority of workers identify as men actually enjoy “Above Average” leave allocations and “Above Average” pay rates.
In blue collar industries, there was no division of weights with respect to pay rates: Business categories who hire more women have “Above Average” leave allocations but “Below Average” pay rate. Business categories who hire more men have “Below Average” leave allocations and “Below Average” pay rates.
In grey collar industries, 60% of business categories whose majority of workers identify as women have “Below Average” leave allocations and “Below Average” pay rates. Where these same businesses hire more men, 50% of them offer “Below Average” leave allocations and “Above Average” pay rates.
Discussion
The Family and Medical Leave Act mandates that companies with more than 50 employees must allocate 12 weeks of unpaid leave for new parents. This study discovered an average of just 6 weeks of unpaid maternity leave and approximately no leave (0.39 weeks) for fathers. Even beyond this study, the current picture of leave is below average; insufficient given that the first few days of a child’s life is very important to the bonding process.
Across the classifications, business categories that hired more women all paid below average rates. And with the exception of blue-collar industries, business categories that hired more women offered below average rates of pay. This refutes the hypothesis set for this project that industries that hire more women inherently pay better rates.
According to an article on CBS News entitled “It now costs $310,000 to raise a child: "Something has to give"” written in 2022, stated the cost of raising a child from birth to the age of seventeen was US$310,000. Without adequate resources to support new parents, they may struggle to balance their lives and factions of their existence may suffer greatly.
Suggestion
Parental policies in the business world do not fit current social standards and realities. Companies must consult with their employees to come up with more realistic allocations that will allow for employers to adequately rest, bond with their children and return to work ready for productivity.
Additional project images
