Meet the C-level leaders who championed more paid leave at Neiman Marcus

What happens when two passionate C-level leaders advocate for more generous paid parental leave?

You get an industry-leading policy shift that not only supports employees - but also strengthens business outcomes.

During their tenure at Neiman Marcus, Chief People Officer Eric Severson and Chief Customer & Retail Officer Stefanie Ward played key roles in shaping the company’s paid parental leave policy, which was updated in 2022.

The new policy made all associates eligible for 16 weeks of paid leave upon welcoming a child, with up to 24 weeks of paid leave for birthing parents.

In this episode, we’re joined by Eric and Stefanie, who take us behind the scenes on what it took to make this policy happen at a major retailer.

Eric breaks down the financial and operational hurdles of paid leave policies - and how he spent years trying (and failing!) before finally getting it right at Neiman Marcus.

Stefanie shares her story about planning for parental leave while stepping into a C-suite role and how that experience motivated her to push for better policies for all employees.

They also address some of the biggest questions around paid leave:

• How do companies justify the cost of paid leave? 
• What do leaders get wrong when trying to make the business case for expanding policies? 
• And what role do individual employees play in pushing for change?

Whether you’re an HR leader looking to drive policy change or an employee advocate wondering how to make an impact, this conversation is a wealth of knowledge about how to prove the ROI of paid leave and convince leadership that it’s good for business.

Allison: Eric and Stefanie, thank you so much for joining me here today.

Stefanie: Hi Allison.

Eric: Allison, thanks so much for having us.

Allison: Okay, we don't normally have a 2-guest episode. And so I'm actually thinking of starting this off in a little different way and asking you both to introduce yourselves and maybe share a little bit of context around your experience with parental leave. 

Because I know when we first spoke, we had this big idea of how we can bring two individuals together that have experience working together, but have different experiences with parental leave. So I'd love for you to introduce yourself. I'll start with you, Eric, to kick us off.

Eric: Thanks, Alison. So I'm Eric Severson. I'm an executive coach and consultant, but previously was a chief HR officer for several companies, most recently Neiman Marcus Group, where Stefanie and I worked together. And prior to that at Davida and Gap Incorporated. 

My relationship with parental leave goes back about two decades or so. And it's really rooted in trying to solve problems related to retention, engagement and employer branding. When I was at GAP, one of the unique experiences I've had is that I've worked at three female dominated companies in a row where women made up anywhere from 60-80% of the workforce.

And one important dynamic of that is that leave and especially the ability to have paid leave is important to people of all genders, but there's particular importance obviously to women. And so it was very clear to me early on in my tenure at GAP that unless we could address the issue of how to allow the people who made up the majority of our workforce to be able to stay in that workforce, afford to stay in that workforce, protected time to stay in the workforce. We were not going to be as competitive as we needed to be in talent.

So I worked on it for many years and was unsuccessful for many years at figuring out, trying many different things, how to get companies to pay for paid leave and we can talk later in the podcast about what some of the challenges are and how you get at them.

But I think at Neiman Marcus Group, we succeeded and the benefits of that were polemicists and most importantly, it was one of the key contributors to that incredibly high level of stability we achieved in our workforce that enabled us to drive very successful financial and operating outcomes.

Allison: Perfect intro. I have so many follow up questions, but I want you, Stefanie, to also introduce yourself as sort of this other layer that we've brought into this conversation.

Stefanie: Sure, happy to and so excited to be here with you, Allison, and represent this really important topic that I've been so passionate about personally and professionally. So most recently, I was the chief integrated retail and customer officer with Neiman Marcus brand under Neiman Marcus Group. So I had a role that really was in charge of all of our stores, our frontline employees, over 6,000 employees, as well as our omnichannel experience across stores and digital. So I had a great blend of both corporate team members as well as frontline field workers. 

Prior to that, I was with Sephora and Louis Vuitton, so spend a good part of my time with LVMH, also in kind of different capacities and roles that served around whether it be strategy or field, but really different geography regions as well, including Canada, which we can talk a little bit about my experience with having managing Canadian parental policy and leaves, which is a very different landscape than what we have here in the U.S.

And way back when I started investment banking, so went from a really you know, male-dominated, would say very non-family-friendly in certain ways kind of environment to then, like Eric said, very much in organizations that were predominantly female, particularly frontline workers that really were at the percentages of close to 70%.

And really for me personally, you know, I've always kind of watched people in my career. Had kids a little bit later in life, closer to my 40s. And my second one came when I was 42. And really, you know, for me, prior to having my own kids, I just saw women like, hey, if you get three months, that's lucky. That's amazing. Maybe get three month with decent pay, even if it's partial pay. That's awesome. They kind of, you know, have their babies and then come back to work. 

And it's just a three month and not until I had children of my own and went through the entire experience, did I realize three months is not a lot of time. And also in thinking about again, and the role where you are responsible every day, I really thought of myself and my role is I'm here to serve the larger workforce population and thinking about sitting up in a C-suite and having access to different resources.

I also have a privilege and a privilege that many of our frontline workers don't. And just felt that there needed to be more advocacy around what that looked and felt like because of my personal experience. My personal needs for three months was even enough for me in my first go around when I leave. 

Thankfully with the support of Eric and the larger part of our leadership team, I was able to enjoy a much longer leave on my second one. Also knew what I needed and what to ask for. But it really also went back to…I was like, now I understand why certain countries like Canada, when I had to manage parental leaves of, six, nine months, up to a year. I didn't realize what that meant, but it all kind of came full circle when I went through the experience myself and just how important it is, not only for the mother and the family ecosystem altogether, but for all parents. 

And just having that equal opportunity to have any parent, whether regardless of the construct of bringing a child into your family or someone into your home, same sex, different sex couples, adoption surrogacy. There's a lot that happens in that time and that's so precious and you never get back.

So really excited to be part of the picture to help advocate for it, but also to then, as you said, kind of drive the legacy forward on what I think all leaders should be able to and should be championing for their team members in service of what Eric said, which is a really positive outcome on retention and therefore results.

Allison: Amazing. A big part of why I wanted both of you on this episode is I thought, I spoke to each of you individually before, and I thought this is such a cool story where you can see both sides of parental leave, meaning there's the policy side and how that is the absolute necessary first step is making sure that we have paid leave within our companies and that it supports all employees.

And then also the employee experience side, which I know Stefanie, you and I talked a lot about that. So those are sort of the two things that I want to dive into today. And I'm going to start with Eric. You were at other companies and especially I will say the retail industry more broadly is known for being behind the tech industry and professional services, for example. And it's hard because you have these huge, huge populations, lots and lots of employees to think about that actually the frontline workers have very different day-to-day roles than a corporate employee.

And so how you support the business when different types of people go out on leave in different roles is very difficult for a company to think through. Maybe let's start from what you alluded to, you had a lot of challenges and then ultimately were successful at Neiman Marcus.

Why were you successful? Maybe share a little bit more about some of those things that didn't work and then what ultimately was the thing, and I know there's never one thing, that allowed you to get that past at Neiman Marcus.

‍Eric: The one issue that I don't think is investigated often enough that surrounds paid parental leave is financial. And one of the reasons why tech and professional services pretty uniformly offers paid parental leave and most of retail or much of it does not is that with an hourly workforce, whether it's retail or manufacturing or hospitality, you generally have to replace a hundred percent of the hours when someone's out on any kind of leave of absence. So it's a significant incremental cost to the P and L that you have to solve for.

Whereas in say your professional workforce, and that's not only in professional services, but even in retail and the corporate office, when someone goes on leave, you don't necessarily have to replace their job. Will give the responsibilities to someone else. And the reason I bring this up is to say if you can't solve for the financial issue, you can't solve for leave. And so you can advocate all you want for it being the right thing to do, which it is. It's absurd that you don't have paid leave in the United States, which it is. But it's not going to help you solve the business problem with a large hourly workforce. So that is one of the things I worked on for many years. 

And I would say a couple of things that's really important. One, if you, as the advocate for the policy who may be the chief people officer, like I was, don't have either the financial acumen or the actual analysts to do the ROI and cost benefit analysis, then you need to get them. You need a partner and finance who's on your side is going to help you show how you can pay for this in opportunity cost realization or turnover cost reduction and do the real math with you. 

Secondly, you need a P&L leader to be on your side. And in the case at Neiman's, Stefanie was one of those P&L leaders. You need people who are running the business to stand with you, with your executive team and say, I'm willing to take on this financial risk. Here's how we'll offset it. This is why we actually need to do this.

I think lastly, you just need to have the ability to show how it aligns with your brand and what you do. And I think as a leadership team at Neiman's, we looked at the financials, we did all the cost analysis, we did a very accurate projection of what it was going to cost to extend this to all of our folks. And we held hands and agreed that it was not only the right thing to do, and that was important. Consistent with our values as a company that was founded by a woman, 118 years ago. Also, that it was worth doing, operationally and financially, and it was. And I think when you look at our performance over time, everything from retention time to hire on people, KPIs, and down to earnings per employee, all of those improved after we put this in place. 

And I'm not here to say that that's the only change we made that put it into place. It was a collection of various decisions that really strengthen and enhance our employer brand and hold good people who produced potential results for us. So I think those are some things I discovered through trial and error and making mistakes are necessary if this matters to you.

Allison: And so for Neiman Marcus, because I love everything that you've said around the business case piece. I think that is so critical. I also think that we came out of this period over the past few years where companies did make a lot of decisions because it was the right thing to do, because the economy was great and it was really hard to find any talent and everyone else was doing these things. And we're not really living in that era right now. And so it's even more important to have a strong business case to continue to support parental leave policies.

For Neiman Marcus, what specifically was the thing that you cared about the most in that financial plan where you could say, will improve these metrics? Was there one that was more important than something else?

Eric: Retention. So we had significant retention problems in 2019 when I started. And while there were numerous reasons for it, one of them was the lack of family friendliness in the company environment. When you combined it with other factors that had to do with pay and other things became very significant. I will not forget that

Even two weeks before I started, I joined a town hall, global town hall with all of the employees in the company. And there was a Q &A section. And one of our employees used the time to ask me, what are you going to do about the fact that we don't have any paid leave? And I never forgot it.

And so I think it's a good illustration and it did inform part of my advocacy. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time and had wanted it in every place I've been. It is important for individual employees to push leaders, including publicly. Like it has, it matters. It has an influence. And there was an employee on my team, one of my people's services directors to whom it was also very important. And she also pushed me.

hard. Like, why can't we do it right now? And I was very much about timing at the right time when the business leaders are ready for it. And the financials are the right place, which is true. And she pushed me and pushed me and pushed me and I did take the additional plunge with our CEO to say, I think we can figure out how to do this after one of my conversations with her.

Allison: And you're raising an interesting point because it's not just about making a business case. I think for people, especially at that chief people officer level, you've got a million and one things that you're thinking about that you could be building a business case around. And so there's this first piece of deciding what problems to then build the business case for. And so what's interesting about what you just said is it does matter for employees to push company leadership on this.

‍Eric: That's right.

‍Allison: And then you've also mentioned that it does matter for non-HR leaders to be sort of on the same team saying, yeah, this also matters to my business. And so maybe that's a nice segway into Stefanie.

When you joined Neiman Marcus, had Eric already increased the policy? Walk me through how that worked and how you were able to even lend your voice or lend your voice to this mission to help change the policy.

Stefanie: Yeah, so I actually joined Neiman Marcus Group before Eric arrived. And so we had gone through just different things, and I was in the C-suite. So I had a role that was coming new, actually not even in charge of our field employees at that point in time was really to build our omnichannel strategy. 

But I came into the company very openly speaking to any of the leaders I met that, one, I am here to build a family. I'm on that journey right now. I was also managing fertility journeys and challenges. And I was like, okay, check the box. This company has good fertility coverage. Great. 

And then I went to ask, can you tell me a little bit about your parental leave? And to Eric's point, it was not really there. was like industry average, which is not good, right? It's like relative to everything else, it was fine, but it's not what, and again, this is coming from Sephora, which had really great lead policies, particularly in the state of California, as well as coming from Louis Vuitton in Canada, where I then experienced what an elongated parental leave could look like and how much of the employees came back different and felt different when they rejoined the workforce. 

And so I put it on the table and said, you know, I really need to make sure that I can have X amount of time. But again, I was in a place of privilege. I was in a place of privilege based on coming into the company in a senior level position, not C-level at the time, but was able to put that on the table. 

And then fast forward to when I had my first child in January 2020, I came back to work around I think, three or three and a half months, I was able to take an extra two weeks just based on that flexibility conversation that had anchored on when I first joined the company. It really dawned on me that, you know, this is something. 

And then at that point, Eric was part of the company. We also were going through COVID. Everyone was going through a lot of change, whether you were a parent already, first time, second time, third time, in the process of building a family. And to Eric's point, there's so much that already was kind of swelling around the voices around the table.

And while frankly, Eric and I personally never had that conversation, I was knocking on my C-suite leader's door every day about it. Every day I was pregnant, then every day after I came back and said, we have to change this. And he was representing that voice in that group leadership team because he had a senior leader on his team who was really advocating for that. So it really kind of, it takes those personal anecdotes and moments to pause and not just raise the awareness of it, but really just talk through what that experience is.

When I came back, again, not only was it COVID, first time parent, I didn't have family nearby in Dallas, I brought my baby to every single conference call, we're working long hours to figure out how to turn back our stores and to leverage the omni-channel ecosystem that I had a chance to build. 

And so I had to have a direct conversation with my leader too and say, I'm a bit lost right now. I know I was your strongest player, call it six months ago, but right now I need all the support because I am coming back in a whirlwind of things. And so all of that just led to more of like, you know, this on-ramp off-ramp time, which I know Allison, you said you're kind of curious and in hearing about it is so critical, but for the company to put a stake in the ground and then for my second leave to say, we are behind you. We want to remove that anxiety. We want to remove that potential kind of thought from either a time, financial or even mental health perspective, because we're going to give you that time makes a huge difference.

Allison: And Stefanie, talk more about your second leave because you were promoted while you were pregnant. So I'm curious for you to share more about that experience and how you handled preparing, going on leave. Did you take the full time that you were now suddenly allowed to take?

Stefanie: Yes, it was, it was quite the interesting, you know, kind of force of events because my first  leader when I had my first child, very supportive, we talked through everything. When I was about to announce my pregnancy with my second, I had a new boss. It was like new baby, new boss and a new role. Cause I got named an interim chief retail leader with the prospects of becoming a permanent C-suite leader role.

But to a person who just came into the organization from the outside, didn't have a family of his own, I knew nothing about him. And it took a very open conversation to one, personally, you feel confident about the skills and the track record that I had built to be vying for this role in a more permanent way. But also to be very open and candid and thoughtful of, you know, I have a vision and plan for how I would want to see this team come to life, which we had a chance to restructure. But also knowing that we're on a time clock, because in six months this baby is coming, whether I have any kind of liking to that timeline or not. And so it was a lot to manage at the time, but I think I took a little bit of the experience I had from my first leave. 

And Allison, why I'm so excited for what you and the team can offer is the thoughtful conversation and plans make a huge difference. The beauty about a parental leave is that it's actually a leave that you can plan for. You know, granted, some things can happen along the way. There's always kind of mysteries and health and life and all of that. But you have the time to plan for something. And the opportunity for me to take six months to thoughtfully plan with my new leader, not only what the prospects of my role would be, but also what my team would be was really helpful. But again, you know, I had to take that initiative. He had to be receptive and wanting to hear that build a plan as well.

But we don't have the tools or resources and advocacy around the table, not only for the leave itself, but also the experience before and coming back. Then it does make it more challenging where even the leave itself is not going to solve things like retention and employee engagement and the opportunity for many of our workforce leaders to feel like they have a path forward after having, welcoming a new life into their family.

‍Allison: Yeah. You know, something struck me also that Eric said earlier around when companies look at extending a leave policy, they think about the cost of replacing an hourly worker, whether they're in a warehouse or in a store or whatnot. They don't think about the cost of the corporate employee because they probably won't backfill them. At least that's what I've found in my work, which is actually good for getting a better policy approved because it makes it cheaper to do that, right? But then it also almost creates this later issue of like, when those employees and corporate go through, there is a cost to not planning well, but it's not obvious. And it's almost impossible to know, hey, like how much is it going to cost when this person goes on leave? And I find myself personally conflicted by this because at the exact same time, I so strongly believe in how important a strong paid leave policy is and not just because it's the right thing, but because it is actually really good for business. 

And also if you don't navigate each of those situations intelligently, it can be really, really expensive. And so it's almost like you've brought that to life with that story Stefanie of like, yes, you're so glad that you got this leave, but then how do you actually make sure that it doesn't completely backfire for the company and for you as you're stepping into the biggest role you'd ever had.

I'm curious, Eric, and this is going back a little bit, what were the concerns when you rolled out a longer paid leave policy? Was there pushback and maybe even not necessarily pushback, but concerns or hesitations or things that people thought, oof, we should keep an eye on this thing?

Eric: Sure, if it's OK, Allison, I just wanted to underscore one thing that Stefanie commented on. And that's: had her leader when we first implemented the new policy, not supported it. I am confident it would have been dead in the water because he was accountable for the majority of the company's employees who would be impacted by this policy. And like all P&L leaders, he had attributed to his P&L, any of the corporate costs that were allocated.

And so a lot of people think the decisions on things like leave policy are made somewhere by the CEO and the chief people officer in a vacuum. And my experience is they are not. They're made by all of the leaders who make decisions on behalf of the company. 

And that could segue to the question about what are the concerns because I think they're the usual concern. There's obviously just the financial cost. The other concern is about the length of time that people will be out of the business. And actually part of it is precisely this is not so much of a problem at the hourly level. It's more of a professional issue that if someone's out of the business, say for five months, which they might typically be at Neiman's because our policy was 16 weeks of pay leave on top of any disability. So it takes you to 5+ plus months, depending on the case. That the concern is continuity. So how this person is playing a very important role in the business. How is their continuity in the work and the handoffs workload would be a second concern.

And, but I think what's very important to consider is the actual experience. And that's that, that you do need to plan and planning is very important plan ahead so that you can allocate the work appropriately and make sure that there are good handoffs before the leader leaves when possible. Sometimes people leave early, like they do on all leaves when that happens. 

But there's a real upside and that's that one of the best ways that people get experience doing something outside of the scope of their normal job is to fill in when there's a job opening or a leave for someone else. Because often people, there are not enough open job opportunities for someone. And even if there are often, if you haven't done that exact job before, often your employer is reluctant to give you to put you to rotate you around. And it's also a little dangerous. What if you rotate into a job you've never done and you can't do it? Then what happens? Do you leave the company? Sometimes that happens. So I always have seen covering for leaves as a perfect opportunity for the company to test people, to stretch them, to give them growth opportunities. And often you can parse the job up. 

Often, for example, if I have a people's services business leader who manages, let's say three or four business groups, and she goes on leave. Then I get a chance to divide it. Maybe I have several people who want experience as a business leader, but they can't take a job as big as hers. So I give one piece to this one, one piece to this one, one piece to this one. And sometimes you find out, they don't like it. They're not good at it. Great. I'm glad I didn't rotate them into the whole job. So I think these are the things that people are advocating for appropriate pay-pleave. 

And to think broadly about the benefits as well as the costs and articulate them to the organization.

Allison: I think that's so well put. Stefanie, I'm curious in hindsight with your second leave, when you took more time, what are things that you did in hindsight really well to set you up for success when you returned?

Stefanie: Yeah, so my second leave, I ended up being able to take close to five months. So it was almost an extra six weeks on what I had in my first leave, which, like I said, made a lot of difference even for my own mental capacity. It was also unique because my first role was still very defined, smaller team, second role inherited, you know, our entire P&L for the retail organization, plus the roles I had played prior to really stitch together omnichannel. 

And fast forward a couple months after I returned, also expanded my role again. So different things and everything. I would say the second time I was able to set expectations for myself and also for my leader in the sense that I was like the first six weeks I am going to go dark because I'm going to be sleepless. I'm not going to know what's happening. I don't know how postpartum is going to hit me the same or differently. And so even just saying like this is going to be my dark time. But then after that, every two weeks I did do a check in and the light check in not in the point where

I was involved in the day to day, but just to keep the relationship going and just to really understand, because my leader was also new himself. So there's a lot of newness with him being still new in the company. My whole leadership team was new. I had handpicked and designed a whole new org literally weeks before I went out on parental leave. And so I had to balance it. had to balance with giving myself the time, allowing myself to do that, and allowing my leaders to step up, and learn in Eric's kind of perspective of this is a time where you, they always say that you're going to learn the most from when you don't get things right and you're going to fail. And that was going to come from me as well as my leadership team. I'm just really figuring out how to gel together. And that was something that, if I think about hindsight, I now know what it tastes when you're at a point where you want to build a new leadership team, probably would spend more, but things that I couldn't foresee at the time, like how they would yell together as a culture.

So I probably would have hired an executive coach for the team earlier on so that somebody could guide them. But what I did do better even in the second was just setting very clear expectations. And that comes from the experience, but also knowing that I had a larger role and responsibility and had the kind of accountability to really be able to look. But again, I couldn't cover every single base in time and had to forgive myself for maybe not having it all perfect.

But telling my team that upfront, I'm not sure how this one's gonna go, but I'm gonna tell you where to involve me, how I want to stay involved, when I want to go dark, and we will figure this out and I will be back in no time stronger for you all.

Allison: Did you find the light check-ins while you were on leave to be something that increased or decreased your anxiety?

‍Stefanie: For me personally, it decreased the anxiety because again in that moment in time and again, you know every scenario is gonna feel a little different but back to your call out like I was so excited to get this new role, you know, my biggest role my first C-suite role for a multi-billion dollar P&L to really be able to get to this place was amazing.

And I needed to understand how I would onboard back in so it actually helped me just kind of put little notes together on how coming back would be. But again, I really had to stay accountable to myself on separating. So it's one of those fine lines where I knew myself well enough to know that I needed some of these check-ins, I wanted to provide that, but I also needed to make sure I stayed true to protecting myself in the time I had with my newborn and with my family at the time.

Allison: We find that, so it's probably the number one piece of feedback we get is that when we encourage people to at least consider some form of communication while they're on leave, that is the number one thing they thank us for. But the hardest part about that is exactly what you said, which is you need to be really true to yourself about why are you staying in touch with work and when and how. And what we've found over the years is that one, it's not right for everyone and two, when it works well, it is exactly how you've described. Light check-ins that prevents you from sort of losing yourself in anxiety, worrying about what may be happening, but then you have to stay away from work. Like it can't be working. It's check-ins for certain things that are making you feel better about what you're doing. So thank you for sharing that. We are almost out of time. 

I wanna end with a little bit of a vague question and you can take this in whichever direction you want. I had two questions around what do you hope your legacy is at Neiman Marcus given all of this work that you've done there.

But the other question I wanted to ask you was why do you think the parental leave topic is so important? And so I'll let you choose which one of those you want to answer, whether it's your legacy or parental leave or both.

Eric: Do you want to go first?

Stefanie: All right, I'll go. Sure. I'll go for, I'll go for a little bit of both. I think the legacy, you know, given that my departure is also kind of fresh in my mind right now, is really just being human. 

You know, one thing I think about becoming a parent is it doesn't matter what title we had, what, what, role I serve in the company and what I brought to the table on my LinkedIn. Going through that process is extremely humbling. And so the legacy is just really modeling that and really being open to talk about that.

You know, and it's not to say that I had to put in every single detail about my upbringing of my kids on the table, but just making it aware that this is part of life and we need to be there for each other to do it. And to have a company that supports that from a structural standpoint, it's just one step of the entire game. There's a longer road and a longer village of what that means after, especially when you come back. so I hope I left a legacy of just putting that out in the open and being a leader that models that because I believe it so much.

In terms of why is this so important? This is one piece of the puzzle. There's a lot going on in this ecosystem of parenting. I can get really philosophical and scientific around also population declines and everything like that. But, you know, there's statistics out there that even, you know, kind of the, you know, call it later millennial generation, you know, and even those who are in privilege or underprivileged, you know, having, thinking about starting a family, no matter what type of family makeup you have, is something that is just hard. The cost of childcare is hard, the cost of education, there's just a lot of that. so having something like a parental leave is just one piece of the puzzle to alleviate some of that stress and the support that goes around it. 

And so I think, you know, just this one topic is part of a larger ecosystem on how do we continue to drive a culture and environment, not just within a corporation, but, you know, as a country in terms of what is that we feel like it's the right thing to do, but also what we want to propagate into the future.

‍Allison: Beautifully put. Eric.

Eric: I think I've long answered the question about what I want written on my tombstone by saying, I want people to say that this guy did something to make work better. And the role that parental leave plays in that is kind of central to one of the things I am most passionate about having an impact on and that's equity. And the concept of equity to me is just

Very simple, it's about level playing field. And in the case of paid parental leave, it's about ensuring that there is not a penalty or a bias that people who choose to be parents have to pay. And in particular for women who carry children. And the role that paid parental leave plays is

to make sure that there is a level playing field that people who have children, which is quite a demanding process, don't have to interrupt their career to do so and don't have to take a backseat and don't have to step out. And one of the things that I found at my employers who didn't have paid parental leave is that the rate of parents, particularly women who did not return from parental leave,

was many, many times higher than at Neiman Marcus Group, where we provided paid leave. And ultimately that's a cement justice. Like I really, what I wish is that the United States had paid leave. But until it does, I think it's employers duty to step up, but even more than duty, if they really look at this the way you'd look at any other investment they would find that having some of your top performers who are your most knowledgeable and capable people remaining in your workforce should be a top priority.

Allison: Well, thank you so much for both of you for joining us today. We try to keep these episodes under 30 minutes and of course we couldn't do it. I really appreciate you bringing this to light because I do think that parental leave more broadly is a very important, dynamic and nuanced topic. And so for me, this was really fun to have both of you bring to light different aspects of the parental leave experience and policy. So thank you so much for your time today because this was really helpful to everyone.

‍Eric: Thanks, Allison. Been an honor.

Stefanie: Thank you, Allison. Appreciate the work you're doing in this space.