Moms First and McKinsey team up to increase usage of paid parental leave

July 18, 2025 Reshma Saujani has been working for over a decade on economic empowerment for women and girls. As the founder of Girls Who Code, she's helped millions of young girls connect to careers in technology. Her work in this field, combined with her experience as a mother herself, revealed another critical issue facing women-the lack of paid leave after having a child.

This led her to found Moms First, a nonprofit dedicated to economic issues facing moms and families, like affordable childcare and paid family leave.

"One in four women go back to work within two weeks of having a baby, and 55 percent of parents of young children are in debt because of the cost of childcare," says Reshma. "We know that paid leave to bond with a new baby creates transformative economic security for families."

"What gets measured gets managed"

While there is no federal paid parental leave program in the US, 13 states do offer it. Since eligibility and ways to access the programs vary, Moms First launched a pilot benefit adoption tool, PaidLeave.ai, built with early support from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

The site succeeded in raising awareness, spiking national Google searches for paid leave 25 percent after the launch. And while a cutting-edge navigation tool was important, Moms First saw a problem: There was state-level data on how many new parents were taking leave, but not on how many weren't.

"How could we measure the progress of the AI tool if we didn't know how many parents were eligible but not taking leave?" says Deborah Singer, chief marketing officer at Moms First. "What gets measured gets managed. If we don't know where we are in terms of parents' uptake, we can't be effective in increasing it."

Data on the eligibility pool wasn't easy to find. "We thought we'd just ask states for it, but we quickly learned it's much more complex," says Reshma. To find this missing data, Moms First turned to McKinsey, building on a relationship Reshma had with the firm through Girls Who Code. "We said to McKinsey, 'Help us understand what benefits are being left on the table.'"

Working pro bono, a McKinsey team partnered with Moms First to study the three states with the longest-running programs and therefore the most volume of data: California, New Jersey, and New York.

They looked at data from states on who was taking leave and for how long and cross-referenced it with data from the American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The team parsed out adults who had a child against multiple eligibility criteria, such as income, number of continuous weeks worked, and, in one state, number of continuous weeks at the same employer. It then married that to household data to determine which of the two parents was taking leave.

"We needed to take an analytically intensive approach to identify who was eligible for paid parental leave-which meant untangling the complexity of the policy in each state," says Ramaya Parthasarathy, a McKinsey partner who led the study, along with partner Linda Liu and Maggie D'Arcy.

Looking at the numbers-and beyond

The study revealed just how important finding that denominator was: Only two out of five eligible parents used any state paid parental leave in 2022, about six million total weeks not taken, amounting to $6,000 to $10,000 per parent who did not use the leave. This could cover a full year of future childcare services for many families, with annual childcare costs ranging roughly from $6,552 to $15,600 across the US.

But one finding stood out to the team: Because men have greater labor force participation, they are 25 percent more likely to be eligible for leave; however, claims data shows they are 25 percent less likely to use it.

One of the main drivers of low uptake for parents was low awareness, with 60 percent of parents who did not take leave saying they were unaware it was an option, especially in low-income and Latino communities, which have lower utilization rates than other demographics. Other factors included the complexity of navigating the benefits system and cultural stigma.

"Stigma was particularly relevant for men, because the culture tells them that paid leave is optional for them, especially if their partner is taking it," says Reshma. "But this research showed us that men do want to take leave once they know it's available and that they benefit in terms of a deeper connection with their child and improved mental health and well-being."

Building a community, and a movement

In March, Reshma and the Moms First team launched the report with McKinsey support at the Institute for Gender Parity at Columbia University, where speakers included New York Governor Kathy Hochul. The team also presented to lawmakers in New Jersey and New York, as well as to a convening of major family, childcare, and gender equity organizations.

"There's been a lot of excitement from other groups invested in this to have this data guiding their efforts," says Deborah.

Recognizing that state agencies don't always have the capacity to run awareness campaigns, Moms First is currently running social media campaigns to meet parents where they are and drive them to the PaidLeave.ai site to learn about the benefits available to them.

"What we're building is not just stronger families through increasing uptake of parental leave," says Reshma, "but a community of people who will have the knowledge and experience to form a movement to realize paid parental leave for all."