“These decisions are usually made country by country and not across borders,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the program director of employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Human resource management, such as benefit policies and pay levels, is very influenced by national legislation, labor markets and the union structures in different countries.”

Previously, Kering’s various brands set their own policies, in compliance with local regulations. That means its 5,000-plus employees in the U.S., where federal law mandates only 12 weeks unpaid time off for new parents, were offered either no compensated time off or a combination of paid and unpaid leave. Meanwhile, Kering’s Italian contingent — about 7,000 people — was given 22 weeks of maternity leave and three to four days of paternity leave with at least 80 percent of the salary paid out.

That approach is not atypical in luxury, an industry focused on attracting women (80 percent of Kering’s consumers are women). Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, or LVMH, which owns fashion houses like Dior, Givenchy and Marc Jacobs, has different policies in different places, as does Prada Group, an umbrella organization for Prada, Miu Miu, Church’s and more, as well as Phillips-Van Heusen, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, among others.

But Kering’s move has placed it among a growing list of multinational companies, including Nestlé, L’Oreal and Spotify, that have set minimum parental-leave standards across all geographic zones where their employees work in the last few years. LVMH is set to follow in Kering’s footsteps this spring with a program called “Coeur Social,” which will include a global parental-leave policy.

A report by the Center for American Progress argued that companies are taking these actions to balance out discrepancies in benefits across regions, in particular the unequal leave policies between the U.S. and most other nations (research focusing on members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a few other nations found that the U.S. was the only one that didn’t mandate paid parental leave).