Did you know that the United States is the only industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee its citizens paid family leave? In fact, only 13% of private-industry employees had access to paid family leave (PFL) through their employer according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This means that about 87 percent of private sector employees in the US may be unable to take time off work if they fall seriously ill, to care for ill family members, or to bond with their newborn child.

So, how does the tech industry stack up compared to other industries when it comes to paid family leave? Much better it appears. For example, tech companies such as Reddit, Amazon, Microsoft, Pinterest, Adobe, IBM, Netflix, Etsy, and Google all provide at least 12 weeks of paid parental leave for employees, in addition to other related perks. Earlier this year, the nonprofit, Paid Leave for the United States (PL+US) released an employer scorecard ranking the paid family leave policies at the largest US employers.

PL+US took a comprehensive look at paid family leave policies for parental leave (birthing and non-birthing parent), childbirth recovery, primary/secondary caregivers, family caregivers, and personal medical leave. Three of the top ten companies on their list are tech companies: IBM, Microsoft, and Apple.



We decided to survey our community of tech employees to find out if they are satisfied with their company’s paid family leave policies. We asked our users to answer this one simple question:

Are you satisfied with your company’s paid family leave policy?

Those who responded could answer with ‘YES,’ ‘NO,’ or ‘I don’t know.’ The survey ran from Feb 9- 15, 2019 and was answered by 7,109 users of the Blind app.

Here’s what we found out:

49.26% of tech employees are satisfied with their company’s paid family leave policy.

29.43% are not satisfied.

21.31% are not sure.

We then broke down results by companies with at least 100 unique employee responses.

Salesforce came out on top, with 81.48% of employees responding that they are satisfied with the company’s paid family leave policy.

Rounding out the top five most satisfied are VMware employees with 73.72%, Uber employees with 72.06%, Adobe employees with 71.57%, and Facebook employees with 69.8%.

Microsoft finished just out of the top five, but well above the overall survey average with 68.94% of employees satisfied with the company’s paid leave policy.

Although IBM did not make the cutoff of 100 employee responses to be included in the chart of responses broken down by company, it is worth noting that 53 IBM employees did respond, with 62.3% saying they are satisfied with their company’s paid family leave policy.

Among companies with at least 100 unique responses to the survey, Amazon employees were the least satisfied, with only 27.23% responding that they are satisfied with their company’s paid family leave policy.

Rounding out the five least satisfied are Cisco with 41.75%, Apple with 43.2%, Intel with 49.39%, and Oracle with 50.71%.

More leave-related discussion on Blind

Are you satisfied with your company’s paid leave policies? Tweet us @teamblindapp and let us know!

About Blind

At Blind we’re on a mission to bring transparency to the workplace. Transparency results in voice and voice results in change, often for the better. That’s why we created Blind, an anonymous social network for the workplace. Our user base includes over 49,000 employees from Microsoft, 35,500 from Amazon, 13,500 from Google, 10,500 from Facebook, 9,500 from Uber, 8,000 from Apple, 6,000 from LinkedIn, and 5,000 from Salesforce, just to name a few. With such a large user base of tech professionals, it makes it easy to quickly poll these employees about important and popular topics, such as this.