New Favorite Tumblr: Having It Some

The new Tumblr Having It Some aims to be an online repository for companies’ parental and family leave policies.

Started by feminist writers Sarah Seltzer and Meredith Clark, they’re particularly interested in the policies of media and nonprofit organizations that work on women’s, gender, and family-based issues. One would hope these organizations would put their feminist ideals into practice. (And I’m already dreading learning just how wrong that hope is sure to be.) But you can submit your workplace’s policy from other industries too. (Do it!)

Crowdsourcing projects like this — and similar ones like Who Pays Writers? — serve a few different functions. The information is useful to individual job-seekers so they don’t have to ask about it during the application process, and making it publicly available hopefully puts greater pressure on companies to improve their policies — to better attract employees and/or live up to their ideals.

But as Rebecca Traister wrote recently, the lack of family-friendly work policies in the US won’t be solved by individual companies changing their policies to compete for talent — since it is the elite employers who are most likely to do so voluntary.

The policies collected in Having It Some will probably be quite varied — from generous to shockingly dismal — and making that transparent is important. Keep in mind, though, that there’s really not that much variety in the US economy as a whole: 88 percent of women simply do not get a single day of paid maternity leave at all. And to change that, we need a federal mandatory policy.