Maven Family Leave Challenge

Introduction The United States does not have a federal law mandating paid parental leave for employees, although the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide eligible workers with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year for family and medical reasons, including the birth or adoption of a child.

Some states, however, have implemented their own paid parental leave policies but overall, the United States lags behind other developed countries in terms of parental leave policies. Many other countries offer paid parental leave for several months or more, allowing parents to bond with their newborns or adopted children and easing the financial burden of taking time off from work. Therefore, this project analyzes the US parental leave policy using the dataset made available by MAVEN ANALYTICS for the Family Leave Challenge.

The dataset contains:

• ​ csv table with 1,601 records (one for each company)
• Company name and industry
• P​aid and unpaid weeks off offered for parental leave

Instruction The instruction for the challenge is to create an impactful, one-page visual as a supporting content for an article. Problem Statement What is the average parental leave length? What is the general paternity leave statistics? What is the general Maternity leave statistics?

Data Cleaning The dataset was cleansed using Microsoft Excel. In the process, it was discovered that some companies have no corresponding industry. Instead of considering them as other, I decided to ask questions by conducting research and below are the findings: Rokt: is an ecommerce technology and it was categorized under “Technology: Payment” Ink Communication: is an advertising agency and was categorized as “Advertising” ASML​​: belong to a semi-conductor sector and this was categorized as “Technology: Software” Data cleaning tools on excel such as TRIM, CLEAN etc. was used to ensure the data credibility.

​Things to Note:

• Ordinarily, there is a clear difference between Zero (0) and “N/A” but putting it into context, it become expedient to consider the “N/A” as Zero. Simply put, the zero in this context is the same as not applicable.
• All companies were taken into consideration whether offering paid or unpaid maternity and paternity leave to account for the average parental leave.
• In comparing the paid and unpaid parental leave, zero was excluded in getting the average paid and unpaid maternity and paternity but were filtered using the average parental leave which takes in to consideration all the companies in the dataset.
• For a fair result and representation, industries with 1-3 companies were excluded in the ranking.

Skills/Concept demonstrated: Bookmarking Data Cleaning DAX Modelling Filters Tooltips Shape Image

Visualization​: The report comprises of a single page, visualizing the United States companies parental leave policy. You can interact with the report here[https://github.com/Michaelfawoye/Maven-Family-Leave-Challenge.git]

Insight

• Paid and unpaid maternity leave is the most common amidst the United States industries/companies
• Paid unpaid maternity and total paid and unpaid paternity leave are negatively correlated to each other and reveals that paternity leave growth is at a slower pace
• On the average, approximately 89% of companies prefer leave below 12 weeks be it paid or unpaid, while 10% prefer 12-24 weeks
• Government: County, Philanthropy, Business services are top industries with good parental leave provision
• Of the 1,601 companies, 98% offer paid maternity leave, 16% offer paid paternity leave, 61% offer unpaid maternity leave and 3% offer unpaid paternity leave. These is to further confirm that paternity leave is not in wide practice amidst the United States companies. Recommendation

Recommendation

For a robust analytics, it would be better to have a comparative analysis considering other countries parental leave policy with the effective ones in the United States