Meredith Slopen, one of Stone Center’s current postdoctoral scholars, has a Ph.D. in social work and more than a decade of experience working for New York City’s health department.
On January 31, Stone Center postdoctoral scholar Meredith Slopen testified before a New York joint legislative committee about a proposal to expand the state’s paid family leave policy, which provides job-secure paid leave to eligible workers to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill family member, or assist loved ones with military deployment. By lowering the threshold for eligibility for paid leave to four consecutive weeks of work from the current minimum of 26, and introducing a progressive scale for weekly benefits, the state would vastly increase the benefits to low-income workers and society, she said. In fact, as Slopen showed, drawing on research she conducted with the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, where she is a research affiliate, for every $1,000 spent on paid leave for mothers caring for newborns, society would gain more than $20,000 in return — thanks to benefits to the infant’s and mother’s health, and to increases in the child’s future earnings.
Presenting her findings and explaining their implications to legislators who have the power to produce change is part of what led Slopen to pursue a career in policy research. “I wanted to do work that informs the policies that impact our communities,” she says. “Conducting and sharing research with the people who are looking for information to guide their decision-making — that’s what I want to do.”
Slopen’s interest in paid family leave policies dates back to her time at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where she worked as a researcher for 11 years before beginning her doctorate. After working on projects related to tuberculosis control, early childhood development, and reproductive health, the connection between health and people’s social experiences became clear. Improving birth outcomes solely through clinical measures in the U.S. has proved daunting for decades. She became interested in nonmedical interventions, and received a grant from the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau to study paid family leave in New York. With that grant, she and her co-researchers surveyed 1,000 women in New York City who had given birth within the past year to understand their work and leave behaviors in the year leading up to the passage of the New York State Paid Family Leave Act.
That project was her first that focused specifically on work and leave policies. When she started her Ph.D. program at Columbia, she built upon her interest in the workplace as a site of intervention to reduce inequality. “People spend one-third of their time at work: what happens there matters for people’s health and economic security,” Slopen says. “In the United States, most work-family policies are left up to employers, which compounds structural inequality.” Her dissertation built on her experience doing research on paid parental leave. “Paid family leave related to a birth is largely seen, in the U.S., as the 12 weeks following the birth,” Slopen says. “But when you go back to work, you get sick, your kid still gets sick, has tons of appointments, and needs to stay home. I started to think about sick leave as a much smaller, less intensive intervention that might have a real impact on the employment and health of workers and the outcomes for their children on an ongoing basis.”
Her research on sick leave became the basis of her dissertation work. Last year, she published a study on the impact of state-level paid sick leave policies on women’s health. “Collectively, the work that I’ve been doing starts to tell a story of why employers and policymakers should be invested in and certainly not opposed to providing adequate sick leave,” Slopen says. Since beginning this work, she notes, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a time when “we really saw an elevation of sick leave as a policy that we need, in order to support community health.”
Slopen was born in Windsor, Ontario, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, where she majored in Peace and Conflict Studies. She went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in social work from Columbia. “I wanted to do more community-oriented needs assessments and understand how our policies impact people in their day-to-day lives,” she says. “Social workers prioritize a holistic understanding of people and communities, and it brings a different orientation to my work.”
In her most recent work, Slopen is exploring ways that workplace polices can reduce inequality throughout the life course, extending her work to consider policies to support older workers and those encountering health shocks and disability. “In the U.S. and internationally, we’re seeing a push to increase the retirement age,” she says. “What policies do we need to support people as they continue to work? We have to anticipate that their spouses will become ill, that they will have to take care of their parents, that they may need to take time away for their own health.” Currently she is analyzing policies such as flexible work, the right to part-time work or hybrid schedules, and job sharing in addition to leave policies.
By the end of June, New York State will decide whether to expand its paid leave policy. If it does, it will join other states that have implemented a progressive wage replacement approach to make leave more accessible for low-wage workers. “While New York’s paid leave policy was the most generous in the U.S. when it was passed in 2016, more recent policies have taken this approach to increase accessibility and eligibility,” Slopen says. She is hopeful that the measure will pass in this session; if it doesn’t, she expects similar bills to be introduced. “There is a lot of research demonstrating the value of paid leave for working families,” she says. “It’s time for policymakers to act.”
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