Paid Parental Leave, by the Numbers

Yesterday, on his fourth day on the job, California Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out a sweeping budget proposal for the state that was, as predicted, a marked break with the famous frugality of his predecessor, Jerry Brown.

Newsom called for ramping up spending on education, health care and homelessness, as well as paying down the debt.

And, as my colleagues Claire Cain Miller and Jim Tankersley first reported last week, the new governor aims to boost paid parental leave to the longest in the nation: six months.

The United States remains the only industrialized country not to offer paid leave to parents, and such a policy has been a tough nut to crack at the federal level, because, well, no one can figure out where to get the money. The California proposal, right now, has the same problem.

Still, it’s an idea worth exploring. So I asked Claire to share some of the most interesting statistics she came across in her reporting. Here’s more about parental leave, by the numbers.

Year that California became the first state to offer paid parental leave: 2002

Number of years before another state did it: Six

Number of states that offer it today: Six and Washington, D.C.

Length of California’s family leave as it exists: Six weeks

Length of the longest state family leave program (in Washington): 12 weeks

Number of prime-age workers economists say America would add to the labor force with family policies like paid leave: 5 million

Average total paid leave available to mothers among OECD countries in 2016: 55 weeks

Share of Americans who get paid parental leave from their employers: 16 percent

Share of Americans who support paid parental leave: 80 percent

Number of paid leave bills that have passed Congress: 0

Concrete plans to pay for California’s expanded leave program: 0

But Newsom said he planned to start a task force to figure out a way to phase in the expansion

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.