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JPMorgan will give all new parents in the US 16 weeks of paid leave from January 1, 2023.
That’s a departure from current policy, which gives 16 weeks paid leave to the primary caregiver and six weeks to the secondary caregiver.
In 2019, the bank paid a record $5 million to settle a parental leave discrimination lawsuit.
Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase will now be giving 16 weeks of leave to all new parents in the US — regardless of whether the employees are the primary caregivers of a child, according to an internal memo seen by Insider.
The Thursday announcement came three years after JPMorgan paid out $5 million to settle a parental leave discrimination lawsuit against the bank — the largest recorded settlement a US parental leave discrimination lawsuit had ever seen, per Bloomberg.
The new parental leave policy giving 16 weeks of leave to either parent, will come into effect on January 1, 2023. The bank’s current policy gives 16 weeks of paid leave to the primary caregiver and six weeks of leave to the secondary caregiver.
JPMorgan last increased paid leave for the secondary parental caregiver — from two to six weeks — in mid-2018. That’s a year after Derek Rotondo, a fraud investigator at the bank filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the bank discriminated against fathers. When Rotondo tried to apply for the 16-week paid parental leave back in 2017, his application was dismissed by JPMorgan’s human resources department on grounds that he was not the primary caregiver, according to his legal filings.
“Per our policy, birth mothers are what we consider as the primary caregivers,” Rotondo was told by HR staff in writing before being granted only two weeks of paid leave as a non-primary caregiver.
The lawsuit ended in a $5 million settlement from JPMorgan, which was shared among roughly 5,000 fathers in the company who were affected by the policy, per The New York Times.
Cynthia Thomas Calvert, a senior adviser at the Center for WorkLife Law, told The New York Times in 2019 that while leave policies that distinguished primary and secondary caregivers were typically “an attempt by some employers to do the right thing and to not view caregiving in the roles of motherhood and fatherhood,” they normally result in an opposite effect than intended.
JPMorgan declined to comment.