The move toward more generous parental leave is not only benefiting mothers and fathers taking time off after the birth of a child, parental leave is increasingly being extended to adoptive parents as well.
It has been almost a year since Facebook, for instance, announced a new leave policy that would allow any employee four months of paid time off after the adoption of a child. Other major companies have enacted similar policies. Netflix offers paid parental leave for a birth or adoption for an entire year to its salaried employees.
Providing paid leave to adoptive parents obviously applies to both straight and same-sex couples, but its introduction at many workplaces coincided with the push for more LGBT-friendly benefits.
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It is still only a minority of employers who provide adoptive leave, according to the 2016 "Global Parental Leave" report by Mercer. Twenty-nine percent of employers surveyed around the world reported such a benefit, compared to 33 percent of companies in the Americas.
In the United States, however, 52 percent of employers offer adoption benefits, according to a 2013 study by Aon Hewitt. That is up from a measly 12 percent in 1990.
Unpaid adoptive parental leave is protected by federal law, just like traditional maternity leave. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 mandates that employers with more than 50 employees allow their workers 12 weeks of unpaid time off in the event of an adoption or birth of a child.
Adoption benefits are nothing new, but they will become more common for a number of reasons in the coming years, including a greater number of same-sex couples adopting children and cultural pressure on companies to be more accommodating of working parents.
Three years ago the Dave Thomas Foundation, a charity named for the founder of Wendy's, who was himself adopted, released a list of the most adoption-friendly workplaces in the United States. Unsurprisingly, it ranked Wendy's number one, but other notable companies making the list included Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Citizens Financial Group and Hanes.
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