Maternity Leave Not So Great For Women After All? You idiots.

I highly dislike inflammatory article titles like "Maternity Leave Not So Great For Women After All" when the entire point of the article is to talk about maternity leave in the broad context and offer potential solutions.  Maternity leave is linked to better health for both mothers and infants and leads to women being happier. It turns out that countries that have generous maternity leave policies also have fewer women in executive roles in the workforce despite their returning to work in higher numbers compared to countries without paid leave.  That negative effect seems to be mitigated in countries where women and men have similar parental leave time, so doesn't it seem like equal parental leave for both parents is the solution?

Well, if all people saw was the headline (which, let's be honest, in the age of Twitter is reasonable to assume), clearly the problem is maternity leave.  Here are my take-aways from reading between the lines:

1. Americans don't expect fathers to want to or need to be around their children when they are infants and don't value the connection time as important. Could American readers find the idea of parental leave time distasteful?

2. The US isn't comfortable with the idea of women in positions of control, but we still like to SOUND like we are, and we'll look for any excuse to make it harder to make the case for maternity leave.

3.  America works too hard, and we have a higher rate of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other costly chronic illnesses that are directly linked to oxidative stress, and value work and working more than our families and health.  We will look for any excuse to make the case for being the only developed nation in the world without a parental leave policy let alone vacation time.

I have a real problem with people misinterpreting data for the sake of getting hits on their website.  But the article is worth a read despite its title.