Life, Liberty, and the Lack of Paid Parental Leave: An Analysis of Media Framing of Parental Leave in the United States

Because the United States is the only developed country without mandatory paid maternity leave, I felt called to study unpaid maternity leave in the U.S. for my research in the Political Science Honors Program. The study, “Life, Liberty, and the Lack of Paid Parental Leave,” is an analysis of media framing of parental leave in the United States. In the study, I conducted a content analysis of over 200 news articles of the New York Times, and also created an Institutional Review Board-approved survey distributed to introductory political science classes. In the content analysis, I found that maternity leave is both an episodic and thematic news issue, has less negative coverage than most news issues, and evolved from a merely mentioned issue to an economic issue over time. This research also showed that female and male authors do not frame maternity leave differently; in fact, women frame maternity leave more negatively than men do. In the survey experiment, I found that women were more favorable than men towards maternity leave in across all conditions, but it appears that the frames in the survey did not have a large effect on the whole sample, or by sex

Life, Liberty, and the Lack of Paid Parental Leave: Media Framing of Parental Leave in the United States

In this study, I examine how the media frame parental leave in the United States. To do so, I conducted a content analysis of over 200 news articles from the New York Times, and also created a survey distributed to introductory political science classes. In the content analysis, I find that parental leave is both an episodic and thematic news issue, has less negative coverage than most news issues, and evolved from a merely mentioned issue to an economic issue over time. This research also shows that female and male authors do not frame parental leave differently; in fact, women frame parental leave more negatively than men do. In the survey experiment, I conclude that women are more favorable than men towards parental leave, but it appears that the frames in the survey did not have a large effect on attitudes toward parental leave policies, either for women or men