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Working Mother's 100 best companies
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Working Mother Magazine has released its annual list of the 100 best companies. Although the name is "working mother," the magazine's focus in this ranking is not gendered. As the magazine's blurb states:
We’ve hit the working-mother lode this year with our 100 Best Companies. From flextime and telecommuting to backup child care and parental leave, these winners are expanding the concept of family-friendly benefits to make sure they cover adoptive parents, fathers and grandparents as well as working mothers - even as the economy stumbles. “It is particularly important to continue enhancing benefits precisely when families are getting squeezed the hardest,” says James Rishwain, firm chair at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, one of this year’s Top 10 companies. We couldn’t agree more.
I couldn't agree more, either, and I particularly support the fact that the magazine appears to recognize that gendering parenting responsibilities and limiting legitimate parenting relationships to biology or direct parentage hurts women and men both.
The Family and Medical Leave Act, which allows up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to covered employees for the birth or adoption of a child (among other things) recognized that providing leave only to mothers was a barrier to equality. Congress found that:
... due to the nature of the roles of men and women in our society, the primary responsibility for family caretaking often falls on women, and such responsibility affects the working lives of women more than it affects the working lives of men; and . . . employment standards that apply to one gender only have serious potential for encouraging employers to discriminate against employees and applicants for employment who are of that gender.
Therefore one of the purposes of the act is to
minimize the potential for employment discrimination on the basis of sex by ensuring generally that leave is available ... on a gender-neutral basis; and ... to promote the goal of equal employment opportunity for women and men.
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