Inside Look at Maternity Leave in VC
As my husband and I began preparing to welcome our first child into the world this June, I wondered, what is the standard for maternity leave in the venture capital industry? I started casually asking friends at other funds and quickly realized that no one knew what was standard and the majority of firms had no maternity leave policies in place.
This isn’t surprising given the history of the industry — according to research conducted at Harvard in 2019, only 21% of all investment professionals and approximately 11% of investing partners were women. Additionally, three-quarters of U.S. VC firms did not have a single female partner. Given this data, it makes sense that maternity leave policies are not widely established as policies tend to be created when they become necessary.
Historically at Vitalize, we have always been flexible in allowing each employee to do what is best for them. So being a first-time mom and not knowing what was normal or expected, I took this as an opportunity to conduct thorough research. I wanted to be sure to set a solid precedent for future female employees who might have children, and also do what’s best for me and my family.
So I set out on a mission to gather maternity leave data from as many funds as possible. What I realized in the process is that everyone wanted to see the aggregated results because so many of us lack access to this type of data, yet all of us recognize its importance.
All in all, I gathered data from~60 funds and 24 of those had established or soon-to-be established policies in place. My findings revealed that the average paid maternity leave length is four months. It’s important to note that the length of leave varies by fund size; for smaller funds, three months was more common. See Appendix for the full dataset.
In addition to gathering quantitative data, I also interviewed a set of working moms in VC to qualitatively understand what was important to them. The majority of women pointed to the need for some flexibility upon returning to work. Many women mentioned having difficulty finding childcare or experiencing unexpected issues with childcare upon returning to work (e.g. having to switch nannies or daycares in the first few weeks because it didn’t work out, etc.). Women also mentioned that most babies aren’t yet sleeping through the night, so the sheer exhaustion experienced when returning to work full-time on limited sleep is incredibly challenging.
Personally, I landed on taking three months of paid maternity leave with some flexibility upon returning to work to account for the unexpected situations that will most certainly arise.
Each firm and employee should do what’s best for them, but my hope in sharing this data is that it empowers all of the women in VC who want to have children. There are so many unknowns in our industry; maternity leave should not be one of them!
Lastly, while I chose to focus initially on maternity leave, I believe paternity/family leave is equally important for a myriad of reasons. I plan to conduct additional research on this, so stay tuned for more data.
Appendix: Full Dataset
