In honor of our tenth anniversary, we’re celebrating ten important victories over the ten weeks leading up to our Spring Celebration on May 2nd.
Last week we wrote about our Families @ Work Clinic, and the calls we receive from people across the country trying to navigate the complex patchwork of laws surrounding pregnancy, parenting, and caring for family while holding down a job. We love our hotline work, but as a small organization, we have limited capacity to offer personal assistance to everyone in need. Within a few years of launching our clinic we realized that we needed a bigger platform in order to extend our reach to a broader audience.
In 2013, ABB published Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the Workplace, the first-of-its-kind guide for expecting and new parents about their workplace rights, to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
“Any mother-to-be who buys What to Expect When You’re Expecting should pick up a copy of Babygate to go with it. It offers indispensable advice to allow working parents to stay on the job and is a blueprint for change in the coming work–family revolution.”— Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University professor and author of Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
“With real-life stories from working moms and dads, a state by state guide to the law, and even sample letters for employers, ‘Babygate’ aims to educate and empower working parents so that they can benefit from the law’s protections and understand and prepare for its shortfalls.”—Maria Shriver, in an interview with Babygate co-author and ABB Co-President, Dina Bakst
In 2014, we launched our Babygate website to break down pregnancy and parenting laws state-by-state in an easy-to-use, searchable format. Featured on the self-help website Lifehacker, the Babygate website provides a one-stop hair systems for men online shop for workers around the country. One visitor to the site from Illinois wrote:
“Just the fact that you have this organization and even just publishing the book gives women and men so much more power, and that’s a feminist issue, and that’s a reproductive justice issue….You’re helping so many women and families.”
We are thrilled that in the years since we launched Babygate, we’ve had multiple opportunities to update our online resource as more family-friendly laws are enacted. Stay tuned for even more exciting updates to babygate.abetterbalance.org as new wins for working families keep rolling in!
