A National Researcher Focuses on Paid Leave.

Out of 186 countries, 96 percent provide some pay to women who are on maternity leave.  81 countries provide paid leave to fathers. The United States lags far behind.

Our focus today is how paid leave affects many things including families and business, and women's earning potential.
Maya Rossin-Slater is an Associate Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research (SIEPR), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University, and her BA in Economics and Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley. Rossin-Slater’s research includes topics such as paid leave, health care, public and labor economics. She focuses on issues in maternal and child well-being, family structure and behavior, health disparities, and public policies affecting disadvantaged populations in the United States and other developed countries. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award and has published articles in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Her paid leave research includes California, And New York and a bit of Rhode Island.

We talk about the family health and well-being benefits that paid leave offers, and how it can help with mother and infant mortality rates. She says the leave is not long enough in the United States so there is very small positive or no effect on women's labor work trajectories. We also touch on how paid leave can help low income or otherwise disadvantaged families. She also said that COVID changed attitudes of employers towards paid leave.

CT Paid Leave began giving benefits in January of 2022. Since then, we have had a total of 134, 384 claims, and of those that were approved as of June 26 we have had a total of 83, 564 workers get benefits for their own serious health issues or that of a loved one. As of June first we have given out more than 375 million dollars in benefits. 

for more information on research by Maya Rossin-Slater: maya rossin slater - Google Scholar

For benefits or to open a claim for CT paid leave: CT Paid Leave Authority (PFMLA)| Home | Official Site


For more podcast episodes: (2) The Paid Leave Podcast - YouTube

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Transcript

Nancy Barrow: 0:01

Hello Connecticut, and welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. The title basically says it all. I'm Nancy Barrow, and I will be delving into this new state program and how it can help you and your family. This podcast will give you information you should know about Connecticut Paid Leave and maybe just a little bit more. Connecticut Paid Leave brings peace of mind to your home, family and workplace. Welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast.

Maya Rossin: 0:30

The topic today is paid leave and how it affects businesses, small businesses, and women on pregnancy and bonding leave and their earning potential. Maya Rossin Slater is an associate professor of health policy at Stanford University, School of Medicine. She's a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Institute of labor economics. She got her PhD in Economics from Columbia University. Her BA in economics and statistics from the University of California at Berkeley, and her research includes topics like paid leave and health care and public and labor economics. She focuses on issues in maternal and child well being and family structure and behavior health disparities and public policies affecting disadvantaged populations in the United States and actually in other developed countries. She is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award, and has published articles in a variety of peer reviewed journals like the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Her paid leave research includes California, New York, a little bit of Rhode Island, and we'll find out if there are any other states that she is looking at. Welcome to the podcast, Maya.a Thank you so much for having me.

Nancy Barrow: 1:51

Oh my gosh, it's such an honor to have you here with us. I'm so thrilled that you're on this podcast with me. I wanted to give you some interesting stats, since you're a stats person about Connecticut paid leave. And cumulatively, since we opened for claims applications in December of 2021 we started giving benefits in January of 2022, and we've had a total of 134,384 claims. And of those that were approved as of June 26 of this month, or this year, we have had a total of 83,564 workers get benefits, which is really cool. And as of June 1, we've given $375 million in those benefits.

Maya Rossin: 2:36

I think you know, Connecticut is a fairly small state. Most of my experience in terms of research comes from California, rather large. So, you know, it's hard to compare the numbers, you know, across the states, but in terms of take up, like as a share of population, who's eligible, it sounds like Connecticut is doing great, and in part, perhaps that's because you all are really good at getting the word out, one of the challenges with a lot of state paid family leave policies is that, especially in the first few years, take up of leave tends to be low because people just don't know about it. Like in California, I think 10 years after California's program went into effect in 2004 they did a survey of California voters, and something like only about a third of them even had heard of the program. Wow. So I think awareness and just like how to navigate the system, tends to be, you know, pretty low in many places. So it sounds like Connecticut is doing great.

Nancy Barrow: 3:36

Yeah I think there's 3.6 million people in Connecticut, so I think it's a pretty good number who have actually utilized the program.

Maya Rossin: 3:43

Yeah, absolutely.

Nancy Barrow: 3:44

Well, let's talk about how you started your research and why you decided to focus on paid leave. What was the motivating factor for you in doing this collaborative research?

Maya Rossin: 3:54

You know, back in grad school, I was generally, I was studying economics, but I was really interested in topics related to families and kids. You know, I worked a lot with, like infant health data and maternal health data, and I recognize that, you know, we have quite a bit of research, you know, looking at, for example, the impacts of smoking during pregnancy on infant health and sort of things like that, but we kind of knew a lot less, you know, especially at that time, which is now more than a decade ago about policies affecting families in which parents work, and how that affects infant and child well being. So that sort of the first, my first foray into this world of leave was through the Family Medical Leave Act. So that's the only piece of federal legislation that the United States has on leave, and it's an unpaid leave policy provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave to eligible workers. Only about 60% of the US workforce are eligible for the FMLA, but it's been around since 1993 so my first study. Was looking at the impact of the introduction of the Family Medical Leave Act on infant health. And the thing that I found that was sort of really striking to me is that the FMLA did lead to improvements in infant health, for example, in terms of improvements in birth weight and lower infant mortality rates. But these benefits only accrued to relatively advantaged families, right? So kids and families where mothers were married and, you know, college educated or higher, and that makes a lot of sense. You know, with an unpaid leave policy, you got to be able to afford to take, you know, 12 weeks of unpaid leave. And also, these more advantaged families were more likely to be eligible for the policy in the first place. So that really got me thinking about what what else can we learn about paid leave? And California was the first state to introduce paid family leave back in 2004 so I teamed up with Jane wolf Vogel, who's a professor at the School of Social Work at Columbia, which is where I was in grad school. And, you know, she's been working on family leave for many decades now, mostly on FMLA. And we decided to kind of start working on California paid family leave and the rest of history. We've been working on it since.

Nancy Barrow: 6:18

You know a lot of your articles have like four people in them. How do you find those people and who's responsible for what?

Maya Rossin: 6:25

Yeah, so that's a really good question. So again, I'm an economist by training. And econ, we tend to do sort of alphabetical ordering of authorship and equal co authorship. So and in terms of who does what, you know, typically one or two people who are sort of the most junior on the team end up doing the actual data work. So early on, I was the person, you know, doing all the data analysis and so on. And then as I progressed, you know, my students, for example, started working with us and leading the data analysis. But all of us contribute to kind of thinking about the research questions, figuring out what methodology to use, interpreting the results that we're getting, figuring out the data, and then actually writing the articles and disseminating the research. And it's actually a pretty small network of people that work on the topic of paid leave, especially in the US. So since you know, the US is like the only high income country in the world that doesn't have sort of a federal policy related to paid parental leave. So there's quite a bit of research on leave outside of the US, and a network of people working on those topics. But within the US, it's really not that many of us. It's sort of a growing list of people as more and more states are passing these policies, and sort of it's more on the radar. But, you know, we kind of mostly all know each other and are in similar, sort of in circles.

Nancy Barrow: 7:53

It must be nice to see how there is, like a blossoming bunch of states that are now getting into the paid leave playing field. You know, it's, it's growing and growing. Do you think that your research is going to grow as as the states grow?

Maya Rossin: 8:08

Yeah, definitely. It's super exciting. You know, for when you look at sort of the state of the literature on or the evidence on paid leave, like probably 90% of the studies on this are in California, and that's because, for a long time, California was really one of the few states that had the policy, and it's now been around long enough so we can really measure long term effects. But you know, because California was first, you know, the subsequent states that implemented policies, they learned in some ways from California's mistakes, right? So, for example, originally, California's policy did not have actually, still doesn't have job protection within it. Many states have introduced job protection or California's policy was originally only six weeks. It's more recently been expanded, but subsequent states have, you know, made it a longer, longer duration. Different states have also introduced different ways of, sort of setting the wage replacement rate, so all of these things, and you know, it's really critical to sort of understand the details that they call with the policy right, like the devil's in the details. So, yeah, no. Paid leave can look like many different things. In terms of how long it is, who pays for it, who's eligible for it, you know, all of these things, and we need to really figure that out. And we need research to be able to figure that out. And as more and more states do this, and they do it slightly differently from one another, that provides us with sort of a real world laboratory to really understand these issues.

Nancy Barrow: 9:40

What were your findings in states like California and New York? And I know you've done some in Rhode Island as well.

Maya Rossin: 9:45

In California, we've done a number of studies, mostly focused on the impact of the original introduction of California's paid leave policy on a variety of outcomes for workers and their families. Um, so, for example, we looked at leave take up by both mothers and new fathers. And sort of a critical finding from that work was that the introduction of paid leave really led to a major increase in the use of leave for women who recently had a child, and this impact was really concentrated amongst less advantaged populations. So if you think about it, there's large disparities and access to leave in the US, you know, from from employers, for example, in the use of that leave. And so California's policy really reduced those inequities in a pretty major way. And then the other thing that's sort of under a lot of discussion and debate in the paid leave space is whether paid family leave is good or bad for women's careers. And you can see how there could be opposing views on this, right? So on the one hand, kind of advocates for paid leave might say, well, if a woman would have otherwise quit her job, right, installed her career in the absence of paid leave, then having access to something like paid leave actually promotes career continuity. Promotes, you know, their progression in their career improves their long term labor market trajectories. On the opposite side, some folks might argue, well, if otherwise she would have, like not taken any time off, or very little time off, you know, leave prolongs that, and maybe, you know, makes them want to stay out of the labor force. And there's also this concern, given sort of these big gender disparities in terms of who is likely to use the leave that employers might discriminate against women, and you know, knowing that now they're going to take leave, maybe be less likely to hire them or promote them or something like that. So there's this sort of debate, you know, to be honest, like if you sort of think about the California policy or any of the current US policies, and think about what exists outside of the United States, you kind of quickly realize that a lot of these concerns really don't seem super valid. I mean, there's countries that have, like, year long, more than a year long leave policy. Then what we know from research outside of the US is that really anything under a year in length doesn't seem to have any big damages to women's careers. It's really when we look at like policies that are two, maybe three years in length, right, where women are staying out of the labor force for that length of time, that's when we start to see sort of the negative implications for their careers. So anyway, so when we're looking at the US, we're talking about, like, at most, three months or something like that. And so we found that basically, by and large, these policies in California at least, has had sort of either very small positive or really null effects on women's labor market trajectories, and a lot of the benefit is really concentrated on family health outcomes. So there's work showing, for example, that kids are less likely to be hospitalized for preventable causes once paid leave is in place. There's work showing improvements in breastfeeding and increases in breastfeeding duration once paid leave is in place, and there's work showing improvements in maternal health, especially maternal mental health, once paid leave is in place. And so I think sort of the largest benefit in terms of having a policy like paid family leave, in my mind, is sort of the health and well being of the family, and especially for lower income or otherwise disadvantaged families that might not have access to any other type of leave that the state can now sort of fill that gap in terms of gender equity. You know, I tend to say paid leave is not a silver bullet for solving gender equity issues.

Nancy Barrow: 14:02

I love that, that that terminology, that you said paid family leave is not a silver bullet, right?

Maya Rossin: 14:07

Right? Like I think maybe it helps a bit, maybe, but it's not sort of going to be the the end all and be all of sort of solving gender equity issues in the American labor market and the policy in most states is funded through employee payroll taxes. In some states, employers also contribute, but really in terms of like, the sort of the financial cost, it's pretty minimal for employers, but most of the opponents of paid leave policies around the country tend to be like small business advocates. The Chamber of Commerce, for a long time, had a negative stance on paid leave policies, for example. And the main argument there, it's that, you know, even if employers aren't directly paying for these. Benefits. There's all these potential other kind of indirect costs for businesses, especially small businesses, where, you know, if you can imagine, it's a business of maybe 10 people, somebody goes out on leave for 12 weeks. They have to figure out what to do, right? They still have to run their business. They have to maybe hire replacement, temporary replacement, maybe other workers have to sort of chip in and so, and that could be disruptive, that could affect their productivity, profitability, all of these things. So there's a lot of sort of concern about what happens to businesses. And for many years, we really didn't have good data on what's going on with businesses. So what we decided to do was, before. So we sort of had been hearing that New York was going to implement their policy starting in 2018 so back in 2016 we decided to go in and start surveying small employers, up to 100 employees in size in the state of New York. And then we also did the same in sort of comparison states which included New Jersey and Pennsylvania. So Pennsylvania does not have any paid leave policy, whereas New Jersey has had a paid leave policy since 2009 and we basically surveyed these employers every year, from 2016 through 2020, through fall of 2020, so during covid. And what we then did is what we looked at how the introduction of paid payment leave, which occurred in 2018 in New York, affected these employers responses to questions related to you know, how they navigate employees taking leave or being absent from work? You know, does it affect their productivity? Does it affect employee morale? How do they deal is it hard or easy to deal with these absences and so on? And by and large, what we found is really, there doesn't seem to be any major negative impacts on businesses in New York, if anything, they actually reported that it was somewhat easier to deal with employee absences. Now you might wonder why that is because, obviously the policy would lead to more employee absences, and now there's exist the sleep policy. But my hunch is that what happens is, you know, before paid leave, people still had babies, right? And they started to sort of take time off, or they had, you know, even if they didn't have babies, they had other caregiving needs, right? And and employers, especially small ones, would have to sort of navigate this on a case by case basis each time. And once you introduce a state level policy, it's actually easier, because now there's, like a system in place, and you can, you know, you don't have to pay for it, right? You can sort of send your workers to that system, and it actually makes things smoother and easier. And then finally, the last thing we find is, you know, because we kind of kept the survey going during covid, we were able to look at changes in employer attitudes towards paid leave. We actually just asked them to rate it on like a scale of very opposed to very supportive, from before covid to during covid. And what we actually found is that support for the policy increased during fall of 2020 which you know is consistent with employers realizing, like, how important this policy is, especially in the context of context of something like a pandemic.

Nancy Barrow: 18:35

What do you think the reasons are that we don't have a national paid leave policy yet?

Maya Rossin: 18:40

Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's the million dollar question. You know, I've been doing this work now for, you know, since like, 2010 or something like that. And, you know, people have been asking me that question during that whole time. Um, you know, and I think there's more momentum now with all the different states passing these policies. I mean, I think initially my response would have been something like, well, there people are just really concerned about small businesses and the costs and so on. Now we have, you know, to some extent, better evidence, not just from, you know, our team, but other teams as well, that it doesn't seem to be that big of a deal, but I think that's almost just like a, you know, it's politics in some sense, right? Like there's just like a general ideological opposition to the government imposing something on employers. And so I think that's a fairly uniquely American thing, and, you know, and so that's that maybe is the roadblock. I mean, we have seen that both, you know, Democratic and Republican candidates have introduced various paid parental leave proposals, you know, that are different in various sort of parameters, that at least they're on the radar. And that didn't used to be the case across. The political spectrum. The thing that's more challenging these days is actually caregiving leave, or sort of leave for other reasons. I was on like a working group organized by a couple of different think tanks in DC that had a mix of researchers and policy people and advocates and so on. And we were sort of tasked with producing, like this report, first about parental leave, and second, about caregiving leave, and then like to give our recommendations. And it was quite interesting, because we had people kind of on different sides of the political spectrum involved in this, and there was, like it was pretty easy to get consensus on a paid parental leave policy, and we wrote our report. And then the second one, the caregiving, we could not reach consensus, and we ended up, like, writing report that, like, we were not able to reach consensus on a single recommendation. You know, people have very strong reservations about caregiving specifically, and it tends to be related to two things. One is, like, there's just this general sense, like, we don't know enough about it, like, who uses it, how much it would cost, and so on. That's changing a bit, like, there's more and more research on that now, so hopefully that will change in the coming years. And secondly, I think people are more concerned with, like, fraud related to caregiving, leave, all right, it's pretty easy to sort of detect whether someone had a baby. It's harder to figure out, like, whether somebody has a family member who truly needs care, and like, who that family member is, and who's giving the care, and all of these things. So it becomes, sort of, there's these general concerns about, like, people abusing the system. You know, I haven't seen those concerns being born out of any data that I've seen, but I think that's the reservation. So really, I think it's harder now to move the needle on kind of the other parts of family leave than it is on parental leave.

Nancy Barrow: 21:53

It's very interesting about caregiving, because ours is even expanded more in the language of what a family is. So we do by affinity. So it can be a cousin, or it could be a co worker that you're really close to, you know, or godson or something so, or a neighbor, you know, whoever is like family to you.

Maya Rossin: 22:12

Yeah, that's very unusual. Actually. I think, I think states have struggled in terms of how to define, like, what family means, and you have to live with that person, and so on and so. And I think that's where a lot of also, like the concern is in terms of the opposition.

Nancy Barrow: 22:28

What can we learn from other countries and other states about how paid family leave might affect the workers, labor market outcomes?

Maya Rossin: 22:34

Yeah, I think we can learn a lot of things from other countries. There's really great research coming out, for example, out of Norway, where they looked at the original introduction of Norway's paid maternity leave policy, which happened in like 1977 so way ahead of, way ahead of the US, and at the time, was just four months of a four month long paid maternity leave policy in Norway, and there have been a number of studies kind of tracing out the impacts of this on kids, on moms and so on, and just finding overwhelming benefits for these families so improvements in various markers of maternal health, you know, decades later, as well as for the kids themselves, improvements in their educational attainment and their long term earnings potential and all this concentrated amongst kind of relatively economically disadvantaged families. So paid maternity leave has had these. We can learn from these other countries that it has these, you know, pretty big benefits. The other thing is that, you know, increasingly, like, because paid maternity leave is sort of like old news in most of these places, there have been a lot of discussion about, like, how to get fathers more engaged in terms of taking leave. And so I think there's a lot of interesting lessons that we could learn from there. I mean, one interesting distinction, distinction between the policies in many other countries as compared to what we have here in the different states is that their leave is often allocated, like on a per child basis, and then it, you know, for a long time, you know, let's say you have the 12 or the 14 months or whatever, and parents can just split it however they want. So you know, if the child has two parents, let's say, sort of in a heterosexual case, you have the mother and the father, they can share it however they want. And what they saw on the data is that mothers were using like 99.9% of the leave. And so there is this big push to get fathers more involved. And so a number of countries outside the US have implemented what are called Daddy months, or daddy quotas, which is basically like earmarked leave, where, essentially, you know, out of this big bulk of leave, you know, 123, months are earmarked to each parent. So basically, if the father. Father doesn't use his, you know, allotted number of months, then the family just loses that time. So they can't just transfer it to the mother. And what they've learned is that these tend to be quite effective at increasing leave use amongst fathers. So, you know, they're doing what they intended to do. But, you know, again, it doesn't seem to be like this is the silver bullet for solving gender equity problems, and in that way, actually, the US is doing better in the sense that our policies are the individual, like worker level or the individual parent level. So we don't have any restrictions in terms of, like, whether the parents can take it jointly or sequentially, or, you know, however they want. And I think that's a good thing. I think allowing families to have the option to be on leave together, especially in the early postpartum period, can be really valuable, in particular for maternal health.

Nancy Barrow: 25:56

That's so good. That's That's wonderful. Here in Connecticut, for bonding leave, 12,900 women applied, and 9637 men applied for bonding leave. That's pretty equitable. Yeah, pretty equitable. The interesting thing that I found was that women took an average of 5.9 weeks out of 12, and men took an average of six and a half weeks out of 12. Isn't that interesting?

Maya Rossin: 26:22

So is that because they're the women are also using temporary disability.

Nancy Barrow: 26:28

They they also use, since we've combined pregnancy and bonding, they can take time before as well.

Maya Rossin: 26:35

That is not included in the five and a half number.

Nancy Barrow: 26:39

No.

Maya Rossin: 26:41

But that is surprising. I mean, that's a big difference and a big change from what we saw in California, you know, maybe a decade ago.

Nancy Barrow: 26:49

What about the benefit of health security for lower income or minority families or or people who work a few part time jobs? Did you find anything interesting about that? Did paid leave really help them?

Maya Rossin: 27:03

Yeah, I mean, I think we know, like from our earlier research, that the increases in take up of leave have been concentrated amongst sort of lower income, less advantaged families. You know, the eligibility criteria in California, at least, but I think this is the case for most other states, are pretty minimal. So you have to have, like, earned $300 in earnings over the last, like 12 months. So it's very, very minimal. So it really is accessible to many families. I think that the the big issue, though, the big barrier, is whether or not there's job protection. So job protection means like, you're, you're, you know, not able to be like, let go of your job when you return from your leave. And in California, the paid leave policy didn't have job protection attached to it. And I've been working with an organization here in California called legal aid for work, which is a legal nonprofit that essentially helps low income workers like navigate a variety of employer like job related issues. And one of those is paid leave. And like, one of the concerns that they hear is that people are just like people in, you know, hourly jobs, retail things like restaurant industry, are just like, afraid to lose their jobs. And then the other concern that they hear is that the wage replacement rate is too low. So like, especially in the initial iteration of the policy, the wage replacement rate was set at 55% of prior earnings, which, you know, is quite low when your earnings are low. So people can't, necessarily, you know, take advantage of the policy when they don't have their full earnings. So those are the barriers. So I think resolving those barriers, by which I mean including job protection in the policy and, you know, having some kind of like progressive scale in terms of the replacement rate, where lower income workers get more of their wages replaced during the leave, can do a lot to make sure that sort of these benefits and the security actually transmit to these families.

Nancy Barrow: 29:23

Yeah, with your other research about mother mortality, what were sort of the core of your findings?

Maya Rossin: 29:30

Some of my other work is centered on understanding inequities in infant and maternal health. And most recently, we also looked again at California. A lot of my data California, and what we did was we essentially provided some of the first evidence on how infant maternal health is affect, sort of evolves across the income distribution. One in California and as well as by race and ethnicity. And what we found in particular for sort of our most extreme adverse outcomes, and that is infant mortality and maternal mortality, is that there's these huge, huge inequities of these outcomes, so mothers in the bottom of the income distribution, let's say the bottom five 10% of the income distribution are three times more likely to die in the first year of life than mothers in the top of the income distribution. The infant mortality gap is about double, right? So children at the bottom of the income distribution are two times more likely to die in the first year of life than children on the top of the income distribution. What's even more distressing is that this gap is totally amplified by race, where we basically see that income is not at all protective for black mothers in particular, right? So essentially, the black maternal and infant mortality rates at the top of the income distribution. So we're talking about the top five, 10% of the State of California have similar mortality rates as white families at the very bottom of the income distribution, in many cases, higher mortality rates. So there's these just huge inequities in these really, really, you know, terrible outcomes. And, you know, I think, really underscores the need to think holistically about how we can help these families, the fact that these racial gaps exist, you know, even at the very top of the income distribution really suggests that it's not just purely a story about income, and really have to think carefully and systemically at sort of issues related to structural racism. And the other thing that I think is important to highlight is that a lot of deaths, both infants and maternal happen outside of the healthcare system, meaning, like, outside of the hospital, outside of, like, the immediate postpartum period, when we often think about these things, and this is where, like, what happens in the home, and the policies that we have to support families in their postpartum period, when they're at home, when they sort of left the hospital. And are, you know, they're trying to figure out how to take care of their new child is really important, and paid leave is really at the center of that. And so, you know, understanding like the role paid leave might play in improving both maternal and infant health as we go forward, and in particular, what it might be able to do to potentially lower these inequities both the income and race ethnicity, is really critical.

Nancy Barrow: 32:56

I just think it's important work and that people really should read it. It's very interesting research work.

Maya Rossin: 33:01

Thank you.

Nancy Barrow: 33:01

What is the research that you're working on now?

Maya Rossin: 33:03

I'm working on a couple of different things I'm happy to share about that are in various buckets related to families, I guess, in the US. So I have a set of projects actually looking at the impacts of gun violence in school shootings, in particular, on kids again, a fairly uniquely American phenomenon. I have another project where back in the Paid Family Leave space, but now we're really thinking critically about caregivers who are not new parents. So looking at households in which, say, one spouse experiences some kind of health shock, and what happens to the other spouses, economic as well as mental health outcomes when they have access to paid leave. And then finally, this is in very early stages, but I'm pretty excited about it, because I think it's so topical right now in the US landscape, I'm looking at the impact of access to reproductive health care instead of the decade leading up to the Dobbs decision that took place last year. And we're trying to understand how access to facilities that can provide abortion care affect low income Young Women's both mental and physical health. And so, you know, while we can't predict exactly what's going to happen in the future as access becomes lower as well as more inequitable in the in the United States and the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, we can at least learn from the recent past in terms of understanding, you know, where what we can do, whom we might need to help more as access becomes lower.

Nancy Barrow: 34:49

Yeah that's critical. Will you be doing more research around paid leave?

Maya Rossin: 34:54

Yeah, I mean, I always have a affinity for paid leave, you know, I think, as you suggested, as more and more states are passing policies, I think it's important to sort of keep, keep working on them, keep researching them. So I'm looking forward to kind of updating some of the early work that we've done, you know, looking at California's original implementation, 2004 and trying to understand the impacts of the more recent policies, including Connecticut, on families as well as employers and and, like I said, I think expanding our understanding of these policies to folks that need leave for reasons other than having a new child is also really critical and really where, like, the policy debate is currently centered.

Nancy Barrow: 35:44

Yeah, very interesting about caregiver leave. And also just to remind you, we put up our paid leave program on time and under budget, just so you know, it can be done!

Maya Rossin: 35:54

That is awesome. Connecticut is leading the way.

Nancy Barrow: 35:59

Thank you so much for joining me on The Paid Leave Podcast. It was such a pleasure to have you on and keep doing that research, and let's hope for a national program soon.

Maya Rossin: 36:07

Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Nancy Barrow: 36:09

You are awesome. Thank you so much, Maya Ross and Slater. To apply for benefits, you can go to CT paid leave.org This has been another edition of The Paid Leave Podcast. Please like and subscribe so you'll be notified about new podcasts that become available. Connecticut Paid Leave is a public act with a personal purpose. I'm Nancy Barrow, and thanks for listening.