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You are listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.

I'm Nicole Torres.

I'm Amy Bernstein.

The US is the only industrialized country

that doesn't guarantee new mothers paid time off.

Whether you get parental leave and how much time you get is totally up to the company.

You're lucky if you get six weeks, maybe eight.

And as a result, we women often end up using our political capital to advocate for paid leave

for ourselves or our companies, women by woman and company by company over and over again.

So paid-brand to leave is very important.

It's important for the health and well-being of new babies and their parents.

For instance, women are more likely to go back to work and they're less likely to be depressed later in life.

In this episode, we'll talk about how to manage parental leave,

yours or someone else's, no matter how much time you have off.

So the most common question I get is how is this all going to work?

But first, we wanted to know what our lives might be like

if women in the US had access to longer paid leaves.

...