Forget on-campus gyms and laundry services—Silicon Valley is hoping to attract the best employees with a truly family-friendly benefit: paid parental leave.

In recent days, Netflix, Microsoft, and Adobe all said they were significantly upgrading their paid maternity and paternity leave policies. For new and expecting parents, those policies look great.

At Netflix, salaried streaming employees who have a new child can now take a year off. At Microsoft, all new moms and dads will get 12 weeks paid leave, with birth moms qualifying for an additional 8 weeks of paid disability. At Adobe, new parents will qualify for 16 weeks of paid time off, and birth mothers get 10 weeks more of medical leave.

'They're not doing this to be nice. They're hoping to see a return on investment.'

It's a lot of time off, at least by American standards, which make the new policies a pretty big deal. The United States is the only developed country in the world that does not require some kind of paid leave for new mothers. According to the Department of Labor, only 12 percent of private sector workers have access to it. While the Family and Medical Leave Act says companies must offer new mothers 12 weeks of unpaid leave along with job protection, anything more than that depends on the state—and the company.

It’s a different story, like so many things, in Silicon Valley. Tech companies like Facebook and Google already offer expansive benefits to new parents. (Facebook offers four paid months off, while Google gives birth moms 18 paid weeks off with 12 weeks off for new dads and adoptive or surrogate caregivers.) Microsoft and Adobe have publicly said they already offered paid time off to new parents before they decided to offer more.

But the new policies are not just for the good of hard workers. After all, tech companies are competitive—and they’re competing for many of the same potential employees. They're also increasingly concerned about the diversity of their workforces. By offering improved parenting benefits, especially those that help support women (and men), they're hoping to not only catch the attention of their current employees, but attract the best, most diverse talent, too.

“They're not doing this to be nice,” says Bruce Elliott, the manager of compensation and benefits at the Society for Human Resource Management. “They're hoping to see a return on investment."

A More Inclusive Culture

Netflix, Microsoft, and Adobe all say that the expanded new benefits reflect the respective company's culture. Netflix, for example, says its “unlimited” parental leave reflects the company’s longstanding belief that individuals should be free and responsible to determine their own work-life balance.

"As far as the new policy goes, we ask our employees to make the best decisions for Netflix every day," says Netflix spokesperson Anne Marie Squeo. "This frees them to do the same for their expanding families with the company's full support." Netflix’s policy, notably, does not include all of its employees but only its salaried employees from its streaming division, who are likely in high demand for other jobs in the tech sector.

Microsoft, for its part, says it wants to "support employees with benefits that matter most to them." In a blog post announcing the expanded paid parental leave policy, Kathleen Hogan, the executive vice president of human resources, also emphasized that Microsoft wants to build a culture that "embraces diversity and inclusion."

Like Microsoft, Adobe says it sees paid parental leave as a way for the company to foster a better environment for its employees. "We know that better paid leave benefits are critical to our overall growth, to our ability to attract great people, and to keep them in the company," says Adobe senior vice president of human resources Donna Morris. "At the end of the day, we want to diversify and we think this will contribute to, over time, having a more balanced work force from a gender perspective."

She adds that allowing some employees to take time off has added intangible benefits, too. "One of our beliefs is that when someone goes out on leave, it's an incredible opportunity for other people to grow their careers," she says.

For the tech sector overall, better parental leave policies may help attract more diverse candidates, which in turn is good for business. “Broader sector, I think what you're seeing is an identification that this is a gap," Morris adds. "The reality is that most tech companies want to continue to diversify. This is one area that can support not only our female employees, but our male employees, too."

Keep Getting Better

It’s not entirely coincidental, however, that Netflix, Microsoft, and Adobe all announced their new parental leave policies within days of each other.

While Netflix, which announced its new policy first, says that there was “no one impetus” for the timing, Microsoft and Adobe both said that the announcements were timed so expecting parents could best prepare and plan in time for health insurance open-enrollment periods in the fall.

However, while most companies might announce changes to their human resources policies internally, Netflix, Microsoft, and Adobe all had very public announcements in what seems like a clear effort to capture the attention of both the public and potential employees.

“While the overall labor market is still a little soft, it's quite active in Silicon Valley,” Elliott says. And ultimately, he says, other big tech companies may follow as could others beyond the tech industry. "Silicon Valley has always kind of been an incubator as it relates to these kinds of perks. The overall market may not follow, but we certainly see segments learn from the initiatives.”

A Complicated Dynamic

And yet even for the most progressive tech companies, an effective parental leave policy—meaning leave that parents feel comfortable taking without worrying about how they'll be judged professionally—means more than just offering unlimited time off. Critics of unlimited vacation policies have argued that employees may feel anxious to take time off for fear of seeming lazy or uncommitted to work.

MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Lotte Bailyn says employees looking to take time off for parental leave can feel similar anxieties to would-be vacationers if the company's policies aren't backed up by a company's culture.

“I think it's going to be very tough without any guidelines for people to feel free to take it," says Bailyn of Netflix's more open-ended policy. She says setting a specific number of weeks off is better, but even then employees might feel anxious unless the company makes clear it truly supports taking time off.

Silicon Valley in particular tends to promote a work-all-the-time ethic—an attitude it signals with on-campus dining, gyms, and laundry services, all of which telegraph the message that you never need to go home: it's all taken care of. There's just one thing missing: your kids.

"If there aren't norms and standards that evolve, I think it's going to be hard for people,” Bailyn says.

How hard depends how these seemingly forward-looking companies implement their improved parental leave policies—decisions that shape how a company culture views work, family, and work-life balance. Adobe, for its part, says it has tried to create an environment where taking time off is seen as important—and where that tone is set by management. Top level executives are known for taking company-endorsed sabbaticals and encourage employees to do the same. Maternity and paternity leave will be encouraged in the same way, Morris insists.

"We're offering this because we believe it is in the best interest of the employee," she says. "And, ultimately, it's in the best interest of the employer."