Credit rating agency Moody’s expanded its global parental leave program earlier this month to offer new parents a minimum of 16 weeks paid leave, says Francisco Martinez-Garcia, chief inclusion officer at Moody’s. The organization joins a growing list of employers that have extended paid parental leave benefits to at least 16 weeks over the past decade. Such efforts come as more companies employ a global workforce and encounter vastly different paid parental leave laws worldwide. Meanwhile, experts say that changing employee expectations of work/life balance drive employers to embrace more generous leave benefits.
Moody’s joined companies such as Thomson Reuters and JPMorgan, which expanded their leave benefits to 16 weeks last year. According to Fairygodboss.com, more than 180 companies in the U.S. now offer at least 16 weeks of paid leave to new mothers and, in some cases, fathers.
Moody’s 16-week paid parental leave program is equally available to all 14,000 employees in the more than 40 countries where the organization operates and applies to the birth, adoption or surrogacy of a child.
Although the benefit includes at least 16 weeks of paid leave, it can be longer based on regulatory requirements for some of Moody’s operating countries. For example, in Spain, where Moody’s has an office, the national government requires 16 weeks of paternity for men; in Poland, it is 20 weeks, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Across the globe, the average paid parental leave is 29 weeks for women and 16 weeks for men, according to a New York Times report. The U.S., however, has yet to set a mandate for such leave.
Before establishing its 16-week global parental leave policy, Moody’s parental leave differed according to the jurisdiction where employees worked; in the U.S., men and women were eligible for 10 weeks of leave.
“It varies quite drastically in each market,” Martinez-Garcia says. “One of the things that we wanted to bring with our new policy was a level of consistency so that everyone around the world gets a similar type of benefit, regardless of the statutory requirement in their country.”
Martinez-Garcia recently sat down with Human Resource Executive for a video interview to share why and how the company designed a 16-week parental leave policy and the benefits that Moody’s HR team expects to reap from this change.
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