Ivanka, the first daughter and senior adviser to President Trump, backed Trump’s proposal for the 2018 budget and highlighted that the importance of a paid family leave that is contained within the proposal. The budget proposal by Trump includes six weeks of paid leave for families, after they have given birth or adopted a child.
In an op-ed penned by Trump herself, she wrote, “The policy outlined in the administration’s recent budget proposal emphasizes the need for mothers and fathers to have access to paid leave to encourage both parents to share parenting responsibilities and to strive toward minimizing hiring biases.”
“Providing a national guaranteed paid-leave program — with a reasonable time limit and benefit cap — isn’t an entitlement, it’s an investment in America’s working families,” Trump wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. She indicated that such programs are not reaching “the poorest, most vulnerable workers in our society …” and that, the “government benefits should not be a substitute for private-sector investment,” as implementing paid-leave on a national scale shall participation from the “private sector companies and state governments.”
“To this end, we are working with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to design a paid-leave policy that provides a targeted benefit to help the people who need it the most and are least likely to receive it from their employer, without discouraging larger companies from developing more generous policies,” she writes.
She further argued that implanting such policies shall lead to “healthier children and parents in more tightly bonded families, greater financial stability and stronger attachment to the labor force are among the most important” and would promote the participation of women in the work force. “Women’s increased participation in the workforce in recent decades has been an important driver of middle-class incomes; in fact, research by the Council of Economic Advisers suggests that the vast majority of middle-income growth since 1970 is the result of increased female labor-force participation and education,” she writes.
The White House also emphasized on the idea contained in Trump’s op-ed n Wall Street Journal. An excerpt of Trump op-ed from WSJ, was posted on the White House website. Further emphasis was made by the White House stating on their website that “a 2012 study found that women who took paid family leave were more likely to be working a year after their child’s birth than those who didn’t take leave, and that women who took leave and returned to work were 39% less likely to report receiving public assistance than those who didn’t. Additionally, making it easier for new parents to return to work after the arrival of a new baby is a critical part of solving the persistent gender and minority pay gap that exists in part because of prolonged periods away from the workforce and challenges with re-entry.”