Passive-Aggressive Intervention: The Impact of Mandated Paid Parental Leave on Childcare Labor

Gender inequality is one of the few fundamentally persistent inequalities within society, especially in the United States. This thesis will use a Marxist-feminist approach to explore the impact of the United States’ capitalist market economy on gender-specific public and private life structures. Specifically, how inequality is exacerbated as women transition to motherhood. This paper hypothesizes that a mandated paid parental leave would alleviate some of this ‘second burden’ by encompassing fathers in its eligibility. We formulate a difference-in- difference model to estimate the causal effects of two current states who mandate paid parental leave and evaluate the average treatment effect when compared to the untreated group. Since the results do not provide support for the hypothesis, we present possible explanations for the limitations of the model and the data