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The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide paid family leave at the national level for either men or women. In the more than two decades since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to expand family leave benefits nationally. However, in the United States, it is common for innovations in family policies to arise at the state level.

In her timely book, Getting Paid While Taking Time, Megan Sholar explains the development of family leave policies at both the national and state levels in the United States. She provides cogent studies of states that have passed and proposed family leave legislation, and she pays special attention to the ways in which women’s movement actors and other activists (e.g., labor unions) exert pressure on public officials to help influence the policymaking process. In her conclusion, Sholar considers the future of paid family leave policies in the United States and the chances for it ever equaling the benefits in other countries. 

There is a growing movement among corporations to provide family benefits in order to attract and retain women workers. They recognize that these benefits have become a cost of doing business. Many of these benefits, like child care and older care, are aimed at supporting employees' ability to stay on the job. Parental leave policies are an exception, because they involve taking time away from the job.

This timely book provides an inside look at life in a major U.S. corporation, focusing on the impact of workplace culture on the use of parental leave and those who use it. Fried begins by describing why parental leave is critical to making parenting the job of both parents in two-parent families. She examines the varied experiences of different levels of workers in how parental leave policy is used.

The author tells a rich and textured tale of day-to-day life in the skyscraper offices of a large corporation. How people dress, what their offices look like, which cafeteria they eat in, how the supervisors and supervised talk -- all these things are part of the fabric of corporate culture that Fried describes.

Most of us live in work cultures that value overtime. Fried argues that, as a "time policy" parental leave clashes with the powerful norm that corporate employees must work long and hard. Taking time for parenting -- a job that is devalued in our culture -- may be perceived as "taking time away" from the company, and, in particular, from the company's productivity.