Suzy Nicoletti might live on the other side of the world now but she was born in Twitter town.



The Sydney-based head of online sales for Twitter’s Australian division hails from San Francisco, California – also home to the company’s global headquarters.

Perhaps that explains in part why Nicoletti is so enthusiastic about Twitter’s plan to introduce a generous new paid parental leave scheme globally.

By the lacklustre paid parental leave standards of the US, it is quite the offering: 20 weeks at full pay for full-time employees, completely gender-neutral and open to those who become parents by birth, surrogacy or adoption, which means no more in-built assumptions about the parent-to-be.

Nicoletti, who took 12 weeks away from work under a previous Twitter parental leave scheme geared more towards mothers, said opening up the policy to men made it even more female-friendly.

Gender-neutral parental leave is on the rise globally as companies seek to end the practice of assuming women are the primary caregivers to children and thus need to take more time off than men – a presumption linked to the gender pay gap.

According to Nicoletti, a drive to promote more female employees was a key motivator for introducing the policy.

“We wanted to lead by example and it plays into our diversity goal of making sure we have a minimum percentage of women in leadership roles,” she says.

The company target is for female employees to fill 25% of leadership roles, which would mark a marginal rise from mid-2014, when Twitter revealed that 21% of the company’s leadership positions were occupied by women.

Despite being based in the US – which is, according to the ILO, one of only two countries without mandated paid parental leave – Twitter is the latest American tech company to strengthen parental leave arrangements. It follows similar moves by Etsy and Facebook as the industry tries to attract millennials to its ranks.

Twitter has committed to implement the new scheme for US-based workers on 1 May, before expanding it to include all of the company’s full-time workers from 1 July.

Twitter employs 50 staff in Australia but the company did not reveal the breakdown of full-time to part-time staff, only the former of whom are eligible for paid parental leave.

According to Nicoletti, Twitter’s Australian arm exceeded the company’s female leadership target before the new paid parental leave policy was even enacted.

She observes that her adopted country appears to be a particularly family-friendly place to work.

“Being American and coming out here, there is definitely in Australia a huge understanding of the need to have a good amount of time for family bonding, which is one thing I’ve loved about being in this country,” she said.

It is a reality symptomatic of Australia’s differing approach to paid parental leave compared with the US and of the unexpected details Twitter might have to consider as it rolls out worldwide a policy gestated in the US.

Dr Marian Baird, director of the Women and Work Research Group at the University of Sydney, said Twitter’s new policy was generous by Australian standards but not revolutionary.

“It is relatively recent that US-based companies started paying for parental leave and, in the main, they don’t offer paid parental leave to the same degree as Australian companies,” she said.

“In private company schemes, [gender-neutral paid parental leave] is commonplace for either parent – it is much more the norm than explicit maternity or paternity schemes.”

Baird expresses concern that the 20-week length of Twitter’s paid parental leave scheme could see company employees disqualified from Australia’s government-funded scheme.

Australia offers 18-weeks of paid parental leave at the equivalent of the minimum wage and although this was initially introduced by the Gillard government in 2011 as a payment to complement employer contributions, the incumbent Turnbull government is planning to introduce a policy that stops parents from claiming paid parental leave from both employers and the government, provided the employer’s contribution is more generous.

The changes are due to be enacted on 1 July – the same date as the deadline for Twitter’s policy to have arrived in Australia – although the government has conceded it may have to wait until after the upcoming federal election because the policy has failed to secure sufficient support in the Senate.

Baird says employers in Australia are competing to offer the strongest parental leave schemes as a point of difference to attract top talent. Some are thinking creatively about how best to devote resources to this area within the context of the proposed new rules, such as reallocating the money to subsidised childcare or renaming paid parental leave schemes as “return-to-work bonuses”, although the latter idea already looks to have been nipped on the bud.

“The government caught wind of that idea and changed the wording of the legislation to include legislation that achieves the same thing,” Baird said.

Twitter Australia declined to comment on the government’s plans.

Baird notes Australia is also instructive to US-based companies as a country in which many organisations and the government offer gender-neutral parental leave, yet the outcomes still break along traditional gender lines.

“Even in these [gender-neutral] schemes, most of the people using them tend to be mothers rather than fathers, which is cultural rather than to do with the scheme itself,” she said.

For the Twitter Australia sales manager, Angus Keene, however, cultural expectations won’t stop him taking advantage of the new policy if he and his partner decide to add to their two children.

“If we were to have a third child, this is an incredible opportunity for me to play a bigger role and have more flexibility to take the full 20 weeks to bond with my children,” he said.

“It’s a new initiative, so as we roll it out across the business, there will be a lot of education across the Australian team and [in the other] countries – what this means for both males and females.

“I’m super excited both for me personally and for the team.”