A 2011 C.E. reform that doubled Chile’s postnatal leave from 12 to 24 weeks produced a sustained employment boost for eligible mothers — with no measurable wage penalty attached. A study tracking fourteen years of labor market data found that formal employment among qualifying mothers rose by roughly 15 to 16 percent in the three years after leave ended, offering some of the clearest evidence yet that well-designed maternity policy can strengthen women’s economic footing rather than weaken it.
At a glance
- Maternity leave extension: Chile expanded postnatal leave from 84 to 168 days in October 2011 C.E., alongside five days of paid paternity leave for fathers.
- Employment gains: Eligible mothers saw formal employment rise approximately 15–16 percent in the first three years after returning to work, with no significant wage penalties detected.
- Childcare access: The employment boost was strongest in municipalities where affordable childcare was scarce, suggesting the reform helped mothers who had the fewest alternatives.
What the research found
The study, published in the Journal of Development Economics and authored by economist Francisca Rojas-Ampuero, used two complementary methods. A regression discontinuity design compared mothers whose children were born just before or just after the reform’s eligibility cutoff. A difference-in-differences model then tracked labor market outcomes across seven years.
The cutoff itself created a natural experiment. Mothers of children born on or after July 25, 2011 C.E., qualified for the full extended leave. Those whose children were born before May 2, 2011 C.E., did not. That clean divide allowed Rojas-Ampuero to isolate the reform’s effects from broader economic trends.
The employment gains were real and meaningful for the first three years. After that, the effect faded — not because it reversed, but because ineligible mothers gradually caught up. The reform gave eligible women a head start, not a permanent advantage.
A patchwork replaced by a clear entitlement
One of the study’s most telling findings involves sick leave. Before the reform, many Chilean mothers who wanted more time at home were already extending their absence — but through a fragmented set of workarounds: sick-child leave, mental health leave, or leave for pregnancy-related illness. After the reform took effect, eligible mothers sharply reduced their use of these alternatives.
That detail matters. It means the old system wasn’t actually preventing extended absences. It was just making mothers work harder to arrange them. The reform replaced a bureaucratic obstacle course with a single, legitimate right — and in doing so, reduced stress without meaningfully increasing total time away from work.
Who benefited most
Rojas-Ampuero found no significant differences in outcomes by marital status, age at birth, education level, or pre-birth wages. The one variable that consistently mattered was job tenure. Women with less than ten months of formal employment in the year before giving birth gained more than those with stable work histories.
The effect was also strongest where childcare was hardest to find. For mothers with thin labor market footing and few affordable care options nearby, extended leave helped them stay in formal employment rather than exit it entirely. This points to something important about policy design: the same intervention can produce different results depending on the economic infrastructure — or lack of it — surrounding it.
Maternity leave research in wealthier countries with robust childcare systems tends to find modest or even null effects on long-term employment. Chile’s results diverge from that pattern, and the explanation appears structural. Limited childcare availability, weaker job protection, and higher labor market informality change the calculation for mothers deciding whether to return to formal work. Extended leave, in that environment, can be a genuine lifeline.
Designed for the conditions that actually exist
Chilean policymakers built this reform explicitly to address low maternal employment among lower-income mothers and to compensate for a thin childcare infrastructure. The data, at least for the three years where evidence is clearest, suggests it worked as intended.
The reform’s reach wasn’t unlimited. The study only covers women already in the formal sector before childbirth — a group that is better positioned than most to begin with. Whether similar effects would emerge among informal or lower-income workers remains an open question. Chile’s informal labor market is significant, and the mothers most likely to benefit from stronger protections are often the least likely to be enrolled in the social security system that made eligibility possible.
Still, the findings add to a growing body of evidence that parental leave reform can be a lever for women’s economic empowerment — not a drag on it — when designed with real labor market conditions in mind. Rojas-Ampuero’s fourteen-year dataset is unusually long for this kind of research, and the consistency of the employment gains over the first three years gives the finding real weight.
For countries weighing similar reforms, especially those with limited childcare infrastructure and high informality, Chile’s experience offers a rare, evidence-backed model that connects family policy to labor market outcomes in concrete terms.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Optimist Daily
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- U.K. cancer death rates are down to their lowest level on record
- Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on Chile
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