The impact of family leave legislation, whether state or federal, is felt well beyond the direct benefit an individual worker receives. Parental leave and similar policies hold potential to reduce workplace bias and stigma faced by all women and men with caregiving responsibilities. Shelley Correll of Stanford University explained recently at Harvard Business School's "Gender and Work Research Symposium" how a family-friendly law can signal a broad social consensus about citizens' rights to do both parenting and paid work. She explained that when such laws exist, bosses and co-workers reduce their negative judgments about people taking maternity, paternity, or other caregiving leaves-of-absence. Those judgments, in turn, influence positively managers' assessments of and decisions about leave-taking employees--for example, whether they later deserve raises or promotions.

Correll described how the process works, citing her empirical research on workplace bias and the motherhood pay penalty:

In this experiment, participants learned that a firm was covered either by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or by the Occupational Safety and Health Act (the control condition). They then rated several highly skilled employees who purportedly worked at a firm described as being covered by one of these two laws (FMLA or control). In the control condition, with no family-friendly law in place, mothers who had taken family leave were judged as less competent, less committed to their jobs, less promotable, and were offered smaller raises than childless women. Fathers who took leave were offered smaller raises than their childless counterparts, but they did not experience the other disadvantages that leave-taking mothers experienced.

Even a limited family-friendly law cuts parenthood wage penalties, Correll showed. A law signals to businesses a society's recognition that female and male employees alike have the right to be evaluated based on the results of their work performance only--not their status as a mother or father. Hence, paid family leave laws nudge managers toward fair and impartial treatment of employees, especially caregivers. This type of organizational culture usually boosts employee morale and loyalty, creating a beneficial cycle of productivity gains and improved profitability for organizations and greater job security for employees.

Laws like paid family leave can reduce subtle and perhaps even unconscious discrimination in the workplace by signaling an expected, unbiased code of behavior for all organizational participants. Family-friendly policies such as Rhode Island's new law prompt a broader positive result than their specific legal requirement targets. Caregivers receive a direct benefit from family leave programs: time off. But all employees reap the indirect benefit of a fairer workplace.