The United States in Comparative Perspective: Maternity and Parental Leave and Child Care Benefits Trends in Liberal Welfare States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article tracks recent developments in maternity and parental leave benefits provision and early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies across five liberal welfare states, in order to highlight the variation between the United States and some of its closest comparators (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom) on policies designed to promote work-life balance and maternal labor market participation. The Article demonstrates that, while there is a great deal of fragmentation in liberal welfare states' maternity and parental leave and ECEC policies and programs, the United States stands out as an outlier in its failure to provide national paid parental leave. While governments in all liberal welfare states increasingly encourage economic self-sufficiency and adult labor market participation, other liberal welfare states display less resistance than the United States to the idea that motherhood should trigger benefits entitlements. This idea still induces strong resistance within the United States. The Article also examines reasons for the United States' continued outlier status.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".