Abstract: Why do some countries mandate a long maternity leave, while
others mandate only a short one? In a standard mandated benefits
model mandated maternity leave makes hiring women more costly,
and therefore reduces women’s employment and real wages. We incorporate
into the standard model society’s tolerance of gender based
discrimination, showing that the optimal length of maternity leave
depends on it. The less tolerant society is of gender based discrimination
the longer the maternity leave it will mandate. Relying on recent
research in psychology and linguistics according to which patterns in
languages offer a window into their speakers’ dispositions, we collected
new data on the number of gender differentiated personal pronouns
across languages, to capture societies’ attitudes towards gender based
discrimination. We first confirm, using within country language variation,
that our linguistic measure is indeed correlated with attitudes
towards gender based discrimination. Then, using cross-country data
on length of maternity leave, while controlling for political, economic
and demographic parameters, we find a strong correlation between
our language based measure of attitudes and the length of maternity
leave.