Story highlights Vanessa Brown Calder: Trump paid leave proposals sound good but will hurt women

Deregulating industry will provide women with more professional choices, she says

Vanessa Brown Calder is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, where she focuses on social welfare, housing and urban policy. The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) The White House released its full budget last week, and one of President Donald Trump's campaign promises materialized along with it: paid family leave. The details of the program remain hazy, but what we do know is that states would be required to design and finance six weeks of paid parental leave for workers. It would cover mothers and fathers.

Vanessa Brown Calder

This surely sounds like a boon to working women, who (on average) do more child rearing and housework than working men do. To those who object to some of the budget cuts to social programs, the administration's policy on family leave may even seem heartwarmingly egalitarian.

Unfortunately, a review of states and countries with government-mandated paid leave programs indicates they harm young women, whether they're available to fathers or not. This is because parental leave policies are associated with an increase in leave-taking and childbearing , which leads to lost labor or increased health care costs for companies. As a result, employers may assume women will cost more to employ than before the policy, and company decisions to hire, promote, train or pay women less can reflect that, at women's expense.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Government can create a buyer's market for labor through a variety of deregulatory initiatives. For instance, reforming occupational licensing laws , which prevent women from working in certain occupations, and relaxing zoning regulations, which increase low-income women's commute times , will make it easier for mothers to participate in the labor force on their terms. Meanwhile, eliminating the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance, which ties women to jobs with abysmal maternity benefits, will enable women to take jobs that line up better with their personal needs. Finally, deregulation of inane child care regulations, such as Washington, D.C.'s new requirement that child care workers obtain college degrees, will make work economically practical.

Lawmakers should also look closely at an alternative that Congress is considering: the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2017 . The bill allows interested employees of either gender to bank overtime hours and use them as time off later as government employees and some unionized workers already do. Remarkably, private companies are prevented from compensating employees this way under the Fair Labor Standards Act . Because women highly value flexibility at work , the ability to reach this type of working agreement is more essential than ever.

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