Parental Leaves and Poor Women: Paying the Price for Time Off

This Article presents a critique of unpaid parental leaves and the parental leave legislation recently passed by Congress.1 Eight states have already enacted parental leave statutes of various kinds.\u27 For the sake of simplicity and uniformity, however, this Article focuses on the proposed federal legislation3 and its anticipated effects on unemployed and underemployed women.4 Specifically, this Article argues that the debate about parental leave 5 has ignored the possibility that the cost of this mandated benefit is likely to be borne by poor, low-skill working women6 who will find that their job opportunities narrow as employers try to shift some of the costs of the benefit to employee