Talk:Parental leave in the United States/Archives/2013

Reviews
As a Rice University student, I created a Wikipedia user name because I am a true believer in the power of knowledge. If information is easily accessible, then individuals everywhere will be able to make more well-informed decisions on matters crucial to both their well-being and the well-being of others. Most recently, I have created this page with the goal of contributing a thoroughly researched and accurate representation of my maternity leave in order to better inform the general public.

Revisions
This article is thoroughly comprehensive in definitions, history, scope, and policies. Some article have timeline graphs, perhaps this one could benefit including some graphic in that manner. My favorite part is the foreign comparison. That really brings a great global focus to an article that otherwise focuses on one country.

I wonder how you chose to do maternity leave specifically, though. Parental leave seems to be where you got this idea, and I think that the current article could really benefit from being retitled parental leave and including some information about paternal care and corresponding policies, or the lack thereof. That could also bring some relevance to the parental care debate in the United States and in the world, discussing how leave and care is gendered (and you can link to my article sex segregation!) This could also be included in the cost section.

My biggest criticism is that the concluding sentences for each paragraph that begin with a conclusive word (consequently, thus, therefore, etc) really seem like your own conclusions synthesized from the research discussed directly before the sentence. Unless these conclusions or results can be cited by the research, you should take them out since original research is not allowed within the Wiki Manuals of Style.

Achresto (talk) 00:32, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I greatly appreciate your thoughtful insights and suggestions. My article is definitely devoid of graphics and I plan to add multiple images for the final contribution, including hopefully a timeline graph if I can find one. Moreover, I intend to remove many of my concluding sentences in order to maintain objectivity. You are correct that, as it currently stands, they seem to synthesize the material without adding any additional information. Thank you so much for your assistance! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mwtwgt (talk • contribs) 05:20, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Peer Review
Hi! Overall, this is a very interesting and informative article. I really like the flow of the entry, where you begin with a brief history, followed by the current policies, before ending with the benefits and costs. I also really like the section on “Foreign comparison.” It’s great that you provided some international perspective into this article that focuses primarily on the United States. I have some comments and suggestions I would like to make to help you improve this article!

One comment I have is that I think the article can be restructured a little. For one, since you started with history, you should probably have a “current state” section as well. In the current state segment, you can then have the policies under it. Also, I realized that while your article is titled maternity leave in the states, many of the benefits and costs you listed under “benefits/cost of united states maternity leave” are not strictly confined to the states, but rather applicable to everywhere. I would suggest you create a new section up at the top, perhaps titled “Background on maternity leave.” This way you can shift all the broad benefits and costs to having or not having maternal leave into this section, so that your “benefits and cost” are United States specific. Additionally, in the overview section, you can also include the definition and some broad background knowledge for maternity leave in there as well.

Also, I wouldn’t use the word “benefit” or “cost” because that is an opinion. A benefit or cost to someone might be the opposite to another. I recommend that using the terms impact / implications might be better. You could change the “benefits and cost” into Impacts/Implications and have three subsections to divide the impacts into direct health impacts, social impacts, and economic impacts. This way, you can write about both the positive and negative influences that the current state of maternity leave has on each subsection. This will make the article more balanced and neutral.

With regards to foreign comparison, I think you should change foreign comparison from a subsection under “current policy” to a section of its own. This is because you can definitely make more than just policy comparisons when you are comparing maternity leave in the states to other regions around the world.

Below is a recommendation of the new structure.

Lead Section

Background on maternity leave
 * [broad description of what it is… e.g Maternity leave is a form of parental leave…]

History

Current State

1.	Policies

2.

Impacts/Implications

Health

1.	Child health and development

2.	Maternal health

Social

1.	Motherhood penalty

2.	Access Equality

Economical

1.	Economic efficiency

Foreign comparison

With regards to the references, I see some formatting issues. For example, there should not be any duplication of references. Although it is listed that you have 35 references, you actually only have about high 10s, low 20s? I would recommend that you follow the the wikipedia citation guidelines here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_templates so that you can properly re-structure your references list. If properly done, your references should auto-align into two rows. Also, it would be nice if you could have more references for your article. The number of academic journals and reports that you are referencing for the length of your article is on the low side.

Finally, you can definitely also add more in text links to other articles.

Hope it helps!

benongyx (talk) 12:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you so much for all of your helpful recommendations and I intend to implement many of them. My article definitely requires restructuring in order to ensure that it flows better. I will move the foreign comparison section to the end while combining the costs and benefits into a single, comprehensive "Impacts" section. I could not agree more that my current framing of "costs" and "benefits" is inherently subjective and that a more objecting phrasing will undoubtedly comply with wikipedia standards. My final contribution will also include more links, sources and better reference formatting like you suggested. Thanks so much again for your assistance!